Verily Anderson’s memoir of her wartime experiences sits oddly beside the piles of books written by so many of her female contemporaries, with titles like We All Wore Blue, A WAAF in Bomber Command or The Girls Behind the Guns. The servicewomen write about uniforms and drill, camps and operations, romances and mess dances. In Spam Tomorrow, Verily – and she was typical of many thousands – writes about maternity wards and sick infants, orange juice and sweets, about threadworm, tonsillitis, cod-liver oil and the balloon and cracker shortage, and about how the only way to obtain a nursery fireguard was to salvage one from a bomb site. Babies had become her life. Even when a well-meaning friend persuaded her to take an evening out and go dancing at the Bagatelle she found she had lost the appetite for adult dissipations. Reluctantly she put on her best dress, donned false eyelashes and accepted a glass of champagne. It was no good. Her favourite club just seemed tatty, and the clientèle looked shallow and laughable capering around the room. ‘We were … too sapped by the war and work and babies to do more than sit and wilt until the time was decent to go home.’
Under the Volcano
War and work and babies. Verily had a Cockney mother’s help and a husband at home, but she still felt drained and exhausted.
War and men, war and sex, war and relationships. Negotiating a personal life while holding up a gruelling job proved formidable enough – all the more so for the many whose war work took them far from home, at times into the field of battle. In 1942–3 QA Lorna Bradey’s career was to bring her up against some of the toughest challenges she had yet faced. She, and many women like her, endured the worst that battle zones could throw at her, proving the equal of men in stamina and courage.
Lorna’s story, told thirty years after the war had ended, is not exceptional. Her experiences were typical ones for the indomitable nurses who staffed army hospitals in combat zones wherever they were needed, but they offer a vivid case history of the everyday stress, danger and brutally hard work that women like her encountered on active service abroad. At the same time, Lorna’s account reminds us of the rapture, the thrills and the intensity bordering on hysteria that often accompanied the pressures. For Sister Bradey, those were days never to be forgotten.
Almost a year after Alamein, and with the Americans now firmly entrenched in the war, our enemies were beginning to take the defensive position. Early in July 1943 160,000 Allied soldiers landed in Sicily, taking the Italian and German divisions by surprise. From a British perspective, it was too early for a Second Front, and victory on the Italian mainland would re-establish Mediterranean dominance.
By November 1943 Lorna had already been working abroad for two and a half years with no break to return home. Now, as the 8th Army prepared to battle its way up the Italian peninsula, she and eighty of her fellow QAs were shipped from Tripoli in Libya to ‘an unknown destination’. It wasn’t hard to guess where: ‘Sure enough we were dumped at Taranto.’ From there they were taken to the small port of Barletta, further up the Adriatic coast from Bari.
‘I would travel, see everything and have plenty of fun’ had been Lorna’s stated ambition since the start of the war. But the Italian seaside in November was not alluring: it was grey, rain-whipped, mosquito-infested and muddy. The girls’ accommodation, in the form of Nissen huts, had yet to be built, so they were lodged in the unheated town museum, provided with only two primitive toilets for all of them: ‘a nightmare’. A dreadful episode ensued when these toilets became totally blocked, and excreta overflowed down the museum stairs. The hygiene officer was summoned and ordered an eight-seater communal latrine to be constructed in the museum courtyard, with buckets. In the course of her duty Lorna saw suppurating wounds, amputations, burned-away faces, yet of all the experiences she underwent this was among the most traumatic. ‘I never quite got over that – one’s most private function in public. Women have other private functions to attend to monthly and the agony was awful.’
Nevertheless, the girls set out to enjoy themselves. The hospitable local bar-owners, Alvise and his wife Lilli, had access to black-market cheese, coffee and wines; Lorna and a group of nurses were invited back for mountainous bowls of spaghetti and tomato sauce, followed by a succulent roast, and torta, washed down with the local Spumante. Somehow they overcame the language problem and ended up dancing for hours. ‘What fun we had.’
At the Barletta base hospital, casualties were coming in from the Allied advance, which that winter was grindingly slow, the Germans stubbornly giving ground. An estimated 60,000 Allied troops died in the eighteen months of that gruelling campaign. Lorna was seeing the fallout from the vicious and relentless fighting taking place at Salerno, Taranto and Bari. Convoys of wounded were arriving at all times of day and night.
I have … supervised and organised up to 88 operations in one day. The hope, agony and suffering on those faces spurred one on …
It was flat out – time was of the essence and we had no penicillin then. That was shortly to come. The impossible became possible, stretchers lined the corridors outside the theatre – life had to be saved … Very often we’d crawl off in the grey dawn to re-appear for duty the next day.
One pitch-dark night she stumbled while crossing the courtyard back to the huts and fell up to her waist in icy-cold liquid mud. ‘I could not move, just sat there and cried with sheer exhaustion and helplessness … Momentarily I nearly broke. I was as near to hysteria as I’ve ever been.’ An ambulance driver rescued her and took her back. Going to bed took ages. The temperatures were so icy that you had to bundle yourself up in layers of clothes before climbing under the blankets. Then no sooner were you dropping off than the knock on the door would come, and the cry, ‘Convoy!’
You asked no questions – out into the night – hurry, hurry – men are dying.
It was Lorna’s boast that, despite nursing under these conditions, she never neglected a patient.
But she also noted that the hardships were unfairly distributed between men and women. It wasn’t just the toilets, though they were bad enough (and the Medical Corps were billeted comfortably in a hotel). Orderlies didn’t always take kindly to being given instructions by a woman. One in particular consistently reacted to her commands with dumb insolence. It wasn’t until she demonstrated her exceptional cool-headedness, resuscitating a dying patient in transit between theatre and ward, that this man got the message. ‘ “My God,” he said “that was wonderful – I will never question your authority again” and he never did, and became one of my great champions.’
At the other end of the scale was Charles, the senior surgeon, who relentlessly needled and patronised Lorna, bombarding her with crude jokes and insults. Only the support of her fellow staff made this endurable. Mutual respect was temporarily re-established when the two of them shared the agony of the most dangerous surgical operation either had ever witnessed. A German was admitted with a three-inch unexploded shell lying just beneath the outer membrane of his heart. He was alive, but removing the shell might cause it to explode, killing everyone. Despite this, it was decided to go ahead; Lorna would assist alongside the anaesthetist, and a disposal expert would be on hand to defuse the shell. Lorna’s knees shook as she watched Charles make the incision and open the wound; she could see the shell as it had appeared in the X-ray, bulging just below the man’s heart. With meticulous care Charles eased the tissue away to expose it; everyone knew his instruments might detonate it at any moment. He worked away until at last the shell was sufficiently revealed, then drew it deftly out and handed it to Lorna. ‘He placed it on my outstretched hand. What a moment!’ She passed it to the disposal officer, who calmly took it outside and slid it into a bucket of water, to be taken off and defused, two miles away. ‘It was a miracle. The shell had in no way damaged the heart.’ Charles turned to Lorna and said, ‘Thank you, that was wonderful,’ and she acknowledged his skill with newfound awe. Often, later, she would wonder whether the German ever realised that British medics had heroically risked their lives to save
his. Unfortunately it wasn’t long before Charles reverted to the uncouth rudeness that she’d become accustomed to.
In Italy Lorna Bradey’s feelings ricocheted between the near hysteria induced by overwork and poor conditions, and elation at the good times. She was living at a peak of intensity. Henry, a boyfriend from the North African campaign, now showed up at Barletta. Off-duty she’d ride with him in his station wagon to secluded beaches, where they swam and ate picnics under the stars. Cut loose from pressures, these were magical interludes. White-crested breakers pounded the beach as they danced to Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’ on Henry’s old wind-up gramophone. The salt wind tousled his hair; there’d be bacon and eggs frying on a primus.
Neither of us expected it to last for ever … We’d agreed to make no demands on one another, realising there was so much ahead and that we would be separated again and again.
In Henry’s absence Lorna partied with the rest of them, taking the rough with the smooth. ‘The tensions were terrific.’ Once, an RAF officer who’d drunk too much vino tried to rape her. He’d ripped most of her clothes off and got his trousers open before she yelled at him that she would jump from the sixth floor if he went any further. Fortunately, the threat was enough to deter him. In March 1944 Vesuvius erupted. Over Bari the bright morning suddenly darkened as fragments of hot ash fell from the sky. Lorna and her pal Bobby took a week’s leave and hitch-hiked to Sorrento. They saw the volcano smoking ominously across the blue bay, fiery lava still pouring out, mowing down the lemon groves in its path. They visited Pompeii, and Capri – a ‘week of paradise’ – and then it was back to Barletta. Convoys of wounded from the bloodbath at Monte Cassino were arriving every day. The week’s leave was over. Lorna was now so exhausted it was as if she had never been away.
By this time, she and her comrades had become a tightly knit, extraordinarily efficient unit, and Lorna was proud of what they did. But the stress was wearing her down. One day the CO – ‘a charming Irishman’ – summoned her. With great tact and gentleness he questioned her about the demands of her job at Barletta:
Gradually the sluice gates opened and out it all came …
the hard grind, their accommodation, and above all the rudeness of Charles the Senior Surgeon …
I tried to be evasive – said he was a good surgeon etc. … [and] here was someone in authority being kind and understanding – I broke down – all the tensions released …
He was astonished.
The colonel listened carefully. It was obvious that much of what Lorna was telling him was news, but his considered response, when it came, showed that he had been thinking about her needs. She was to be promoted to deputy matron at a 2,000-bed hospital in Andria, 10 miles away. In addition, her unstinting service was to be recognised by an official military accolade detailing her noteworthy conduct: she was to be ‘Mentioned in Despatches’. The honour of this was not lost on Lorna. She had spent long enough with the army to know that normally this was an award conferred on soldiers for gallantry in the field. Why had she been singled out?
Did I really deserve it? What about all the others?
Lorna knew only too well the dedication of her fellow QAs and their stoical endurance.
He gave me a big hug. ‘You represent all of them my dear.’
Worth Fighting For
At last, following the decrypting by Hut 8 at Bletchley of the U-boats’ Enigma in December 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic was starting to go against the Germans. The French Resistance was gathering force. In Russia, Soviet forces were on the offensive, gaining ground around Stalingrad. The RAF were bombarding German cities.
Honoured for her distinguished service, Sister Lorna Bradey was ‘Mentioned in Despatches’.
These dramatic developments had great significance for the war as a whole. But for many back in Britain catastrophes and explosions on distant oceans and in faraway cities were little more than background noise. In the summer of 1943 eighteen-year-old Nina Mabey, for all her newfound political awareness, was more preoccupied by her personal progress than by the prospect of a Second Front. That August she was on a Shropshire farm with her mother, cleaning out the pigsty, when the letter arrived informing her that she had won a scholarship to Somerville College Oxford. She went up to read French in October.
In the autumn of 1943, Oxford slept in a strange and timeless silence.
War had silenced the city’s bells, making the spires seem more than usually dreamy and peaceful. Nina’s life revolved around her academic work – she soon dropped French in favour of Politics, Philosophy and Economics – and abstract yearnings for romance.
Our war barely touched us.
Nina’s entire adolescence had been played out with war as a background; she could barely recall a time when the blackout, rationing and war work had not been part of her everyday life. She helped with expected duties at her college, manning the stirrup-pump team with the rest and fire-watching on the roof of the Bodleian; but reading Wittgenstein, dances, skinny-dipping in the Cherwell, dons, dates and debates all held Nina Mabey in far greater thrall than events in the wider world.
For most women on the home front the war was more about deprivation and anxiety than bombs and battles. Shirley Goodhart wrote almost daily of her impatience for it all to end. Jack, her husband, had been away in India for over a year, and she longed for him daily, feeling ‘miserable and husbandless’. The knowledge that Jack was safe, stationed with the Royal Army Medical Corps in India, helped, but only a bit, especially when she heard from him on leave in Kashmir.
It’s a strange war that sends Jack almost to lead a life of very little work, good food, good pay and good holidays, and leaves me here to work hard and lead a drab wartime existence …
I don’t want to have to sit all day in the office … and I’m suddenly desperately lonely and want my husband.
Britain was no longer in the front line, and the faraway fighting seemed only to intensify the frustration of life on the home front.
Margery Baines (née Berney) had married precipitately in 1940, and after a brief honeymoon her husband was posted abroad. Margery was far too impulsive and ambitious to endure the role of a Penelope, pining and lonely. ‘By nature I was a leader.’ Her high-octane manner secured her a place in an Officer Cadet Training Unit, but by late 1943 the army’s brutality, pomposity and red tape were testing her loyalty to its limits. By then she had not only encountered the usual shocks attendant on army life – lice and fleas, filthy lavatories, stinking dormitories, bluebottle-infested kitchens, all ‘terrifying to a young girl who has been sheltered from the realities of a classless society’ – she had also run up against corrupt authority, inhumanity and victimisation. When her captain took a dislike to her and rejected her for a commission, Margery appealed and got the decision revoked. She was sent off to run a platoon in Aylesbury. But even now she was up against the inflexibility and mindless discipline of her commanding officers. ‘I believed [my girls] would work better if I could wring certain advantages for them out of the rigid system. But I have to confess that most of the time it was failure right down the line.’
In fact, Margery’s time as a Welfare Officer with the ATS would fuel her invincible determination to make something of herself, at the same time as giving her invaluable lessons in overcoming defeat, fighting for the underdog, and giving tireless consideration to those under her command. The battles she would later undertake would not involve guns or explosives, but, after the war, Margery’s assertive spirit and her army experiences would not go to waste.
*
Fears of invasion had receded. Despite continuing air raids, the full-on Blitz seemed like history. Churchill had promised that – though the end was not in sight – it was, inexorably, coming. Slowly but surely the phrase ‘after the war’ began to be used with cautious optimism. ‘People talk about the end of the war as though it were a perfectly matter-of-fact objective on the horizon and not just a nice pipe dream,’ wrote Mollie P
anter-Downes at this time.
Hopes for the future were surfacing, irrepressibly, breaking through the gloom of everyday life.
Up in Kintyre, Naomi Mitchison took a robust attitude to present hardships and directed her powers to improving the lot of local women. Briskly, she set off to talk to the Scottish Education Department about getting adult women back into college after the war. ‘I am full of ideas about it.’ Intelligent women were going to waste; their unexpended energies could be harnessed for the good of the community. Naomi herself was endlessly active on committees and in meetings, working tirelessly to promote causes allied to post-war reconstruction, such as a scheme for Scottish hydro-electricity.
But more usually, imagining a world beyond wartime involved finding ways to make up for all the deprivations. Land girl Kay Mellis’s dreams revolved around new clothes:
If you really wanted a dress, and you didn’t have the coupons … well, I used to think, you know, when the war’s finished I’m going to buy material and I’m going to make myself a new dress.
That was what we saw the future as being. A free life, being able to go into the shops and buy materials and make things, or buy a couple of pairs of shoes.
And my friend Connie – she was a great knitter. She was going to knit for Scotland, and I was going to sew for Scotland.
When they thought about their own role, most women focused on the fulfilment of domestic aspirations. Lovely breakfasts were what Clara Milburn missed: coffee, butter and marmalade, though above all she looked forward to her son Alan’s return. After three years in the FANYs Patience Chadwyck-Healey, exhausted by the lack of privacy, yearned for a rural retreat. ‘I just wanted to grow roses in a little cottage miles away on top of a hill somewhere – utter peace and flowers and relaxation – that was what I thought would be absolutely gorgeous.’
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