This destiny seemed all the more preordained after she started going out with a friend of her brother, Andrew Cooper. Andrew had much to recommend him as a boyfriend. He was good-looking – blue-eyed with a silky mop of dark hair – besides being musical and a talented artist, and romance bloomed. Phyllis’s parents approved of him too: they could see that his culture made him attractive to their daughter and, more importantly, he was safely and respectably employed. As a draughtsman with an engineering firm designing war weapons, Andrew was in a reserved occupation. The Nobles made him welcome for cocoa when he dropped in on his way back from Home Guard duty, or for tea on Sundays.
But despite, or because of, the settled nature of her relationship with Andrew, Phyllis now started to play a game of emotional roulette. How had she found herself living in a boring suburb, rooted in a boring job and all but engaged to her steady boyfriend, when around her the world was on fire? ‘The dramatic events [of the war] served to increase my discontent with the dull part I was playing in them.’ She knew she was flighty, bad and irresponsible but, like a gambler let loose in a casino, she couldn’t stop herself: ‘I was often uneasy about my capricious behaviour but unable to control it.’
It started with James, an intellectual Yorkshireman who worked at the bank. His good looks and dubious reputation both as a pacifist and a womaniser only enhanced his attraction. Pluckie too was besotted. With his misty eyes and searing intelligence he had both girls at his feet. Phyllis made a date with him to go second-hand book-shopping; the cover story failed to convince Andrew, who was openly jealous. But on this occasion her transgression went no further than an intense conversation in his Bloomsbury garret: ‘I hugged my knees in delight at what still seemed to me this daringly unconventional act of being alone with a man in his bed-sitting room.’ But that was all. Nevertheless, her susceptibility to stray bohemians continued to get the better of her.
Next was Don, an artist manqué who had worked at the bank: Phyllis and he had had a brief dalliance back in 1940, after which he had been called up by the RAF and sent for pilot training in Canada. Now, newly debonair and dashing, he reappeared on leave with the coveted wings gleaming on his breast pocket. When he also happened to mention that he had returned from Canada with no fewer than eighteen pairs of silk stockings in his suitcase, Phyllis was bowled over, but had to explain, very reluctantly, that she was about to leave for a week’s holiday in Wales with Andrew. She promised to telephone Don as soon as she got back, fearing that in her absence he would find another taker for the silk stockings. Meanwhile, she and Andrew holidayed chastely with his grandparents in their seafront cottage, and war seemed far away as they trekked the craggy hillsides of Snowdonia and picnicked beside glittering waterfalls. ‘By the end of the week in such surroundings I was almost certain that Andrew was to be my one true love.’
Almost certain. Back in London, she was straight on the phone to Don. Don had given half the stockings to an ex-girlfriend, but spared no expense to wine her, dine her and take her out to theatres. They both knew that life was short in Bomber Command, and neither had any qualms about dropping their commitments to enjoy a heady whirl of pleasures. Youth would pass, the music would die, kisses were there to be snatched. It was all over in a fortnight – but the remaining stockings were hers.
Andrew, however, stayed loyal. By now he was ‘almost a member of the family’. He was virtually regarded by her parents as their future son-in-law, and it became more and more difficult for Phyllis to detach from him. Yet the inevitable culmination of the relationship – marriage – was abhorrent to her. Five years earlier, in the pre-war world, Phyllis’s dilemma might not have been so acute. As with so many young women, the war had thrown opportunities at her that, in 1939, would have seemed out of reach. The uncertainty of war was contagious. What law said that you had to marry a boyfriend because your parents liked him? Who had ordained that one couldn’t have a bit of fun, play around, travel, experiment? The forces of convention grabbed her and held her captive; breathless, she thrashed and writhed for a little liberty, a little space:
I would not give up my freedom to go out with other men friends, such as Don, which must have caused Andrew as much misery as my recurrent attacks of discontent and despondency.
… I suddenly decided to break off from him. In a way, I still believed I loved him, yet I knew I did not want to marry him and nor did I want to go on as before.
Within a few weeks, circumstances were to drive her back. She discovered by chance that Andrew had fallen ill; he was in hospital with suspected tuberculosis. Filled with remorse, she dashed to his bedside, and as soon as he recovered they were lovingly reunited. This time Phyllis dropped any inhibitions she may have clung to. She had long ago rejected the idea that virginity should be preserved until marriage; her future, she was convinced, held brighter dreams than just being a wife. And so the irrevocable step was taken one Sunday afternoon on the floor of his parents’ sitting room while they were out. It was not a romantic setting: the pink and beige patterned carpet on which they embraced was curiously at odds with the brutal form of the iron Morrison shelter that dominated one side of the room. But she had no regrets. On the contrary, it was a coming-of-age, an awakening to the happy discovery of her own passionate nature.
March 8th 1942.
A new page for a new era – At last I’ve gone over the precipice!’
It is certainly true that for many women the war years were dominated by exhaustion, worry, shortages, fear and broken hearts. But the hopelessness and unhappiness of war tend to eclipse the sunny intervals. Phyllis Noble’s newfound physical infatuation with Andrew was of this kind: a series of tender, radiant vignettes that sit brightly beside the familiar monochrome home-front snapshots of food queues and factory lines. Desire had taken hold of them both. Now, whenever they could be together, they looked for privacy, a place to drain and exhaust their urgent appetites. After dusk, parks were good places; since the Blitz, the wrought-iron gates were no longer closed, and they would find a bench there under the majestic elm trees. At weekends the woods, with their undisturbed forests of deep bracken, were a bus ride away. Phyllis’s cousin Nel, who took a warmly broad-minded attitude towards the young lovers, invited them to stay in her primitive cottage in Hertfordshire. There were enchanted nights with the owl hooting outside the bedroom window, candlelight illuminating their amorous exertions as they struggled to tear their clothes off and climb under the eiderdown. And a holiday in the West Country – despite the landlady who conformed to type by firmly allocating them separate bedrooms – offered the magical seclusion of empty moorland and sheltered hedgerows. They took bus rides to the coast and explored the cliff walks. In Dorset it was possible to buy cream cakes; they sat on the Cobb at Lyme Regis and devoured them, looking out to sea. At their lodgings they dined on hearty home-cooked fare, and ration books seemed to belong to a world they had left behind. Before bed they wandered again hand in hand between the high, violet-scented banks, and watched a spring moon rise over the darkening hedgerows.
*
Joan Wyndham’s war was more crème de menthe and amphetamines than moorland hikes and cream teas. She was only nineteen when she qualified as a WAAF filter room plotter, too young and dizzy to have felt the pressure of home responsibilities. But war not only sharpened her appetite for excitement, drink, friends, men and fun, for a convent-educated virgin it offered unimaginable liberty to indulge them. And once she’d been relieved of her onerous chastity and acquired some contraceptive Volpar gels she launched into a free-spirited round of amorous adventures. In September 1942 Joan was posted to Inverness. That meant parting from Zoltan, her Hungarian lover in London, but she had few regrets, and shortly after arriving at the WAAF mess she had the complete low-down on all the available males within a 10-mile radius. There was Bomber Command HQ, and the Cameron Highlanders were the local regiment. Canadians were based in the area, and battleships arrived frequently. Even better, the Norwegian navy was much in evidence
: ‘they’re gorgeous, sexy and very, very funny … they drink like fishes and take over the whole town’. But the hottest attraction, married though he was, was Lord Lovat,* who trained his commandos in the grounds of nearby Beaufort Castle: ‘There is not a girl in our Mess who doesn’t secretly lust after him – including me!’ Great excitement, therefore, when the WAAFs got an invitation from the Royal Engineers to a dance at their mess, which was based at the castle. Unfortunately, his Lordship wasn’t there. However, Joan danced with the next best, Lord Lovat’s cousin Hamish. ‘We got drunk together and I was on top form and happy as hell.’
For Joan, time off duty now meant dates at the castle to join Hamish in his aristocratic Highland activities. She accompanied him in borrowed brogues for shooting expeditions, admiring his ‘jutting, compact Highland bottom’ as he slaughtered the local wildlife and waited for him to make a pass at her. Up hill, down dale and through swamps they stalked deer and capercailzie, tummy-down in the heather: not Joan’s idea of a good time until, flat on their faces in a bog one day, Hamish gasped, ‘God, I want to rush madly to bed with you!’ Hamish now offered a couple of days of bright lights in the big city, so Joan applied for ‘forty-eight’ and travelled to London at the earliest opportunity. With Hamish in his best Savile Row suit and Joan in her favourite little black dress, they hit the Bagatelle for cocktails – ‘Three martinis later we were both floating’ – followed by the Gargoyle for smoochy dancing, and then on to the 400 Club, with bowing waiters proffering brandy. As for sex, nothing was settled until they were in the taxi lurching back to Chelsea, whereupon he kissed her and popped the inevitable question: bed? Joan promptly caved in: ‘I seem to find it awfully difficult to say no to a member of the aristocracy.’ It had something to do with blue blood, she confessed. Sadly, the seduction scene was a disappointment: ‘He was enormously heavy, and it was rather boring and seemed to go on for hours.’ A streak of maudlin Catholicism inhibited poor Hamish from climaxing, and – explaining that he had to get to early Mass the next morning before catching his train – he declined to stay the night.
Onwards and upwards: in January 1943 Joan got news that gorgeous German Gerhardt, her first love, had returned from internment in Australia. They engineered a reunion in London, but this time Gerhardt seemed somehow ‘old and rather grubby’. She rejected his offer of bed, but friendship was restored over a Soho pub crawl, ending at the Café Royal. Being a WAAF didn’t mean putting all the old bohemian days behind her. Back in Inverness she surpassed herself at the St Valentine’s dance with a combination of gin, rum, Algerian wine and Benzedrine. And life in the north of Scotland started to look up greatly with the arrival for refitting of the Norwegian ships, complete with mad, sexy, blue-eyed, blond Viking crew and limitless supplies of Aquavit. Joan fell for the first one to pick her up, Hans, who was six feet tall with ‘the face of an angel’. At the May Day party he also proved to be ‘a wizard dancer’:
Dancing is the thing I like best in life … I danced with a narcissus between my teeth, and I can remember thinking – in the middle of a rumba – that I was so happy that I wanted to cry.
By 8 May she was writing in her diary:
Life is a dream of spring and fine weather, moonlit nights and beautiful young men …
and on the 18th:
I definitely love him.
Finding somewhere to go to bed together was a puzzle, until Joan got hold of WAAF insider information about a little hotel by Loch Ness, ‘where everybody goes for their dirty weekends’. Hans proved sweet, handsome and somewhat inexperienced. They spent a wakeful night of passion; for him, at least, since Joan persisted in finding that the proceedings left her cold, physically if not emotionally. ‘I felt nothing, except for love.’
Nevertheless it soon turned out that compatibility, sexual or otherwise, had nothing to do with it. Hans disapproved of Joan’s habit of writing poetry; he also hated ‘pansies’, painters, and ‘creeps who wear berets’. His idea of a nice normal woman was a cross between a blonde Vikingess ready to hike mountains and sail fjords and his mother, with a hearty meal of reindeer meat and cloudberry jam all ready for her son when he got in from skiing. This led Joan to wonder what could possibly be the attraction of such an uncultured outdoorsy Philistine:
Maybe this love of ours is just some kind of sick aberration only made possible by the war?
Maybe. Early in July Hans and the refurbished ships sailed for the Shetlands; Joan was posted to East Anglia for a refresher course, followed by a few free days in London: time for a riotous binge in the company of notorious beret-wearing bohemians Julian MacLaren Ross, Nina Hamnett, Tambimuttu, Ruthven Todd and Dylan Thomas. But the revels ended prematurely when the air-raid siren went off. The company piled into a taxi, with Joan squashed up against a lust-crazed Dylan; back at Ruthven’s studio Joan was offered a mattress and a cupboard-sized room, where she took the precaution of wedging a chair under the door handle and tried to sleep as the bombs crashed outside. Impossible. Dylan was rattling at the makeshift lock, with cries of ‘I want to fuck you! I want to fuck you!’
‘I had a simply wonderful leave – my heart was broken four times.’ Away from watchful parental eyes, many young women revelled in the opportunity for off-duty romance.
There were ominous thuds as Dylan hurled himself against the panelling. Thump went Dylan! Crump went the bombs! …
At last I heard Ruthven’s voice firmly remonstrating, and finally the sounds of a heavy body being dragged reluctantly away.
I curled myself up under my greatcoat and slept like the dead.
*
Elizabeth Jane Howard was another hugely talented writer who confesses that her war was largely defined by men and sex. ‘I do think people went to bed with each other much more easily,’ she says today, ‘very largely because it might be the last thing they did. It’s probably Nature’s way of preserving the human race.’ Old age has given Jane Howard a kind of queenly assurance, as well as an unembarrassed honesty about her own youthful faults. In her autobiography Slipstream (2002) Jane Howard describes herself as ‘essentially immature … I’d succeeded in nothing …’ She tells how she was turned down by the Wrens (who considered her under-qualified), and describes her unhappy marriage with Peter Scott. But in 1942 Jane became pregnant. As an important naval officer, Scott was allowed to have his wife billeted in a comfortable hotel close to his base, but he was out all day. ‘I was homesick, and I didn’t know what the hell to do with myself.’ Pregnancy exempted her from war work. ‘I read, I ran out of books, and I went for walks … I felt terribly sick. And the only thing to eat at this ghastly hotel was lobster. You try having lobster twice a day for three months when you’re feeling rather queasy.’ That winter she moved back to London. On 2 February 1943 – the day the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad – her daughter was prematurely born during an air raid.
But after a traumatic birth, Jane lacked maternal feelings for baby Nicola, who screamed, wouldn’t feed and only compounded her sense of inadequacy. That summer she fell in love with Wayland Scott, her husband’s brother. ‘The first time he kissed me I discovered what physical desire meant … I was his first love as in a sense he was mine.’ They cemented the guilt by sleeping together, then owning up to Peter. There was a terrible row, and Jane was carted off to stagnate at his naval base in Holyhead. But it was only a matter of time before the vacuum in her life was refilled. Threatened by boredom in Holyhead, she decided to put on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest with the navy, with Philip Lee, a handsome blond officer, playing Algernon to her Gwendoline. One winter afternoon they climbed Holyhead Mountain and made love among the crags. The affair continued after her return to London, where they borrowed a painter friend’s studio for delicious, secret assignations. ‘I don’t think Pete ever knew about it.’
*
Meanwhile, Phyllis Noble still felt uncommitted, despite the physical bond that now held her to her lover. Her insistent sexual desire for Andrew seemed to point
in the direction of commitment. Her parents liked him; her choice of boyfriend, if not her illicit sex life, had their blessing. But the war pushed in the opposite direction. Nursing, perhaps, would give her the chance to ‘do her bit’ while experiencing foreign parts. But in late 1942 the government was drawing ever more women into the conscription net, and, finally, Phyllis heard that she was to be released from the bank. However, conscription took little account of preferences; you had to go where you were needed, and the fear that she might be called up for the dreaded ATS made Phyllis consider, briefly, whether it would be best to avoid the whole thing by just going ahead and getting married. ‘I knew Andrew was willing, and sometimes during our best moments together I thought I might be too. Then I would draw back – for, to me, marriage continued to seem like the end of the road.’ And as the trap she most feared seemed to close on her, Phyllis blundered into yet another reckless relationship.
A good-looking redhead, with confidence bordering on arrogance, Stephen was another young man who had paid court to her at the bank, before disappearing – like Don – for overseas RAF training. That autumn he returned and quickly homed in on Phyllis. His glamour, domineering manner and well-travelled sophistication rendered her helpless, and she soon persuaded herself that it would be unkind not to ‘help him enjoy his leave’. This didn’t mean sleeping with him: ‘Stephen was willing to accept that our relationship must for the time being remain platonic … Andrew remained my lover but had to put up with my temporary desertion each time Stephen appeared on leave.’ Then in March 1943 Phyllis was accepted by the WAAF. She put herself down to train as a meteorological observer. Soon after, Stephen proposed to her and, swept off her feet, she accepted. That night she agonised about what she had done. This was a man she barely knew, had hardly kissed, felt no physical attraction for, and yet she could be pregnant by Andrew. Her family reacted with predictable horror, but Phyllis, now wearing a diamond and garnet cluster on her finger, was too deep in to backtrack. Circumstances came to her rescue, but the cost was high. Stephen’s aircraft crashed. He survived, severely burned, after being pulled from the wreckage. When she visited him in hospital, he honourably suggested releasing her from the engagement, which initially she felt unable to agree to. ‘But … whatever had drawn us together was waning.’ They parted, and she returned the pretty ring, feeling she had learned a damaging lesson. Lovers were one thing, a husband was quite another.
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