Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  I was crying all day, I was in a terrible state. Everything had caught up with me: the raids and everything that I’d been through had knocked me for six. And on the day that war was declared over I was invalided out of the Wrens.And there they all were, dancing in the streets, and there I was looking as though I’d come out of Belsen – black eyes, and so thin. And it took me two years to get over it.

  For many, uncertainty and anxiety about loved ones in the Pacific continued to gnaw. Monica Littleboy had never forgotten George Symington. Memories of the irresistible young man who had first won her love back in 1939 still tugged at her, and she felt an overpowering sadness for him. ‘No one had heard news of him for so long. Was he still alive? There seemed no prospect of an end to the war in the Far East.’ Thelma Ryder didn’t have the heart to celebrate VE-day. ‘The Far East was still on, and I had had no news of Bill since 1942.’ He had been on board HMS Exeter when the Japanese sank her in the Java Sea. Was it fair to expect Thelma to wait for somebody who might never come home? ‘Well, I did find another chap towards the end of the war.’ But in 1945 a telegram at last got through to his family that he had been captured; it included the words ‘Inform Thelma’. Knowing that he still loved her sent the old feelings rushing back: ‘I was over the moon when I heard.’ But now she had an indeterminate wait ahead of her.

  The diarist Shirley Goodhart had been feeling increasingly restless. Jack, her husband, who was stationed in India as a doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps, had written to her in April to say that his service required him to spend a total of three years and eight months in his posting. ‘That means we shall have another 18 months apart.’ The rejoicing around her did nothing to quell Shirley’s mounting depression, but vigorous housework seemed to help. ‘I spent most of the morning scrubbing and polishing and had no time to feel miserable.’ On VE-day she joined forces with Nan, a girlfriend in London. Neither was in the mood for dancing and drinking, so they avoided the West End. Instead they visited another friend, Adrian, who was wounded in hospital, gave him an outing in his wheelchair and enjoyed the kind of palmy relaxed day that they would have taken for granted before the war: ‘[We] sat out of doors enjoying non-hospital, non-canteen food, and warm weather, and each other’s company. We talked lightly, about books, about people, and a little bit about VE-day … On our way home Nan and I decided that we couldn’t have chosen a better way of celebrating.’

  The Right Telegram

  For those whose menfolk had been imprisoned in Germany, however, the long wait was at last over: the time had come for happy arrivals, glad reunions, heralded across the land by telegrams. Those faded slips of paper, franked and signed, with their abbreviated, pasted-on communications are still preserved among treasured letters: HOME SATURDAY STOP MEET ME STOP.

  On VE-day Jack Milburn was in bed running a slight temperature. Clara left him there and mounted her bicycle to fetch bread from the village. The day was spent intermittently listening to the broadcasts from London, including the weather forecast, suspended for the last five and a half years. But it was impossible not to keep thinking of Alan: ‘He will be here soon.’ The Union Jack was hoisted on its pole in her front garden. His room was ready.

  Wednesday 9th May

  A Day of Days!

  This morning at 9.15 the telephone rang and a voice said: ‘I’ve got a very nice telegram for you. You are Milburn, Burleigh, Balsall Common 29?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The voice said: ‘This is the telegram. “Arrived safely. Coming soon. Alan”.’

  Clara was bursting as she called out to her husband, ‘We’ve got the right telegram at last!’ Upstairs she ran, and there, together with their devoted maidservant Kate, the Milburns gave themselves over to pure happiness:

  And then all three of us, Jack in bed, Kate nearby and myself all choky, shed a tear or two. We were living again, after five-and-a-half years!

  Two hours later the telephone rang again. The operator put through a long-distance call:

  ‘Is that Burleigh, Balsall Common?’

  ‘Yes! Is that Alan?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  And then I said: ‘Oh, bless you, my darling.’

  All evening they waited and at last, tired out with the emotions of the day, Clara went to bed – only to be woken by the telephone yet again. The clock showed nearly midnight. Alan had arrived at Leamington station, a drive of nine miles. It was a warm night; she climbed quickly into her clothes, ran down and started up the car; the roads were empty until she reached the town, where crowds were still milling, and she had to sound the horn to clear a way. There in front of the railway station two figures were visible in the lamplight, one in blue, one wearing a khaki beret. For a moment she mistook him, until the man in the khaki beret strode to the car –

  ‘Is it Ma?’

  – and then they were in each other’s arms.

  Mrs Milburn’s wartime diary ends two days later on 12 May. The victory that had brought her son back to her had made her life complete; there was nothing more to say, for her cup was full. After Dunkirk there had been seven weeks of numbing anxiety. Since then, for five years, her daily life had been permeated with an all-consuming uncertainty and a constant longing for his letters. She had drawn on all her stoicism and patriotism to keep her spirits afloat, to endure the absence of everything that made her a mother. Being needed by Alan had made sense of her life. ‘How I have longed to have the little toffee tin of grey trouser buttons out again all these long five years … The long, bad years of war begin to fade a little as Alan’s voice is heard … and the house is once more a real home.’

  With him in it, how happy she was. There was mending to be done.

  Patrick Campbell-Preston and his young wife Frances had been married for just nine months, following a whirlwind engagement, before he too was captured at Dunkirk. By 1945 he was being held in Oflag IV-C (aka Colditz), the high-security prison for officers regarded as escape risks. Frances wrote to him weekly with bulletins of her life at the tiny cottage she had found in Berkshire for herself and their little girl, Mary-Ann. The month before Patrick’s return was ‘gruelling’. Which army would reach Colditz first? What if the Nazis shot everyone in a final mad gesture? Frances was a nervous wreck – ‘every telephone call was torture’ – and she drifted ghostlike round the cottage for days, listening to every radio bulletin. When the news of the liberation of Oflag IV-C came out a couple of weeks before VE-day, Frances let out ‘a bellow like a mad bull’. But a week then passed without further news before the 1 a.m. phone call announcing that Patrick had landed at a military aerodrome near Beaconsfield. Laughing, crying, Frances was unable to believe the truth of his return. But then there he was, thin and weak and more handsome than ever. For two whole days he and Frances caught up. There was five-year-old Mary-Ann, whom he had never laid eyes on, to get to know. And there was a torrent of talk:

  This was the only time Patrick ever talked of his experiences. After that he never referred to them again. It was like lancing a colossal boil, after which the wound was sealed and healed.

  Jean McFadyen was still working for the Timber Corps when the war came to an end. The end-of-war celebrations meant release for her boyfriend Jim, who since 1942 had been held in a German POW camp in Yugoslavia. During his captivity correspondence between them had been intermittent. ‘I just couldn’t believe it when it came to an end.’ Jim had suffered appallingly. When the Germans realised that their bases in Yugoslavia were threatened by the Red Army they pulled out rapidly, leaving prisoners like Jim to their fate. Jean remembers Jim telling her how the men went mad, scavenging for food. Eventually they were found and flown back: the first time he’d ever been in an aeroplane.

  I got a telegram from his mother to tell me he was being trained up to Edinburgh. I couldn’t come straight away, because I had to apply for leave; then I travelled down to Edinburgh. And he came to meet me off the train, wearing a suit of his father’s that didn’t fit him becau
se he was so thin – suffering badly from malnutrition. There was a big difference in his appearance. But I recognised him.

  To be honest I can’t really talk about it … It was such a happy time. Just such a relief … Everything was over. The war was finished.

  *

  Demobilisation was a piecemeal process, and the conscripts and volunteers awaited so eagerly by their womenfolk returned to Britain only when they were authorised to do so. Doris Scorer’s boyfriend, Frank White, had volunteered for a three-year stint in the navy in 1943. Nothing she could say would dissuade him, and he left her in tears, with the words ‘Don’t wait for me’. But as time went by she missed him more and more. Their romantic canal walks, and Frank’s passion for the natural history of the Buckinghamshire countryside, passed into nostalgic memory – those happy days nutting in the copses, peering at the diadem spiders spinning their webs among the blackberries, secret kisses behind violet-scented banks. ‘He seemed so far away, when would he come home?’ She sent him airgraphs, and tracked the movement of his ship, the destroyer Exmoor, in the eastern Mediterranean. In February 1945 Doris found a column inch in the newspaper, describing how crew from the Exmoor had overpowered a German raiding party on the Dodecanese island of Nisiros, killing eight and taking thirty prisoners. She bubbled over with pride.

  Back at the Wolverton aircraft factory, Doris was temporarily assigned to a desk job. She quickly discovered that, far from being a task requiring awe-inspiring skill, the checking of invoices was un-demanding work. It gave her a vision of a better future. They did invoices at Bletchley Park, didn’t they? Doris went out and bought herself a dictionary: ‘I was going to conquer the world.’ If she learned to spell, and picked up shorthand, surely she could compete with those rarefied beings ‘over there at the Park’. But two weeks later she was put back on piecework.

  Doris’s war ended when her aircraft woodwork shop was abruptly stood down. With nothing to do, the girls were first put to work on their knees scrubbing the steps up to the manager’s office; then they were retrained as French polishers. She finished her Works career rubbing linseed oil into lavatory seats.

  Then came the telegram: BE HOME FRIDAY NIGHT STOP MEET ME STOP. Doris shared her good news with everyone who would listen. Friday came. She washed her hair, sluiced her armpits – ‘no bathrooms for us’ – made up carefully and dabbed her best perfume, Bourjois’s ‘Evening in Paris’, behind her ears. She sewed up a ladder in her stockings and put it to the inside, hoping it wouldn’t show, then made her way to the station wearing a pale-blue dress with a flattering ruched front. A cloud of smoke announced the chugging arrival of the train. ‘Wolverton! Wolverton!’ called out the woman porter.

  Was he on this one? There was someone struggling with a kit-bag, holdall and parcels, a tall figure in black … a face tanned from the Mediterranean sun, eyes bluer than ever. It was him.

  Later, an acquaintance of Doris who witnessed their rapturous reunion told her: ‘Ooh, it was lovely.’

  Chief Petty Officer White and Doris Scorer were married by special licence during his leave. But no sooner was the fortnight over than Frank had to head back to Chatham to complete his service commitment. With a year of that still to run, twenty-one-year-old Doris had her navy wife’s pay book to live on, and a run-down rented house to get into shape. Until his return, she was on her own.

  Frank was to prove a caring but conventional husband. ‘Hubby’, as she called him, was hard-working and over time scaled the job ladder to become a teacher and lecturer, but his expectations of his wife – that she would stay at home, and that meals would be on the table at a set hour – did not evolve along with his career. That urge to win the war and conquer the world stayed with Doris, however, as did the allure of putting pen to paper. Thirty years later, the Wolverton housewife wrote and published a memoir of the war years, in which her own experiences were centre-stage; its triumphant title: D for Doris, V for Victory.

  As the homecomings began, parties were laid on for the returning servicemen. In Liverpool, as elsewhere in the country, communities welcomed them back with slap-up feasts. There was great baking and cutting of sandwiches. Helen Forrester couldn’t help but feel bitter envy at the sight of happy wives, equipped with pails of whitewash, chalking the house walls with their husbands’ names: WELCOME HOME JOEY. WELCOME HOME GEORGE. Harry O’Dwyer was one of 30,248 merchant seamen who would never come home to her. Eddie Parry was one of the 264,443 British servicemen who would never come home either. It struck her then that nobody ever painted messages for ‘the Marys, Margarets, Dorothys and Ellens, who also served’.

  It was still a popular idea that women did not need things. They could make do. They could manage without, even without welcomes.

  In fact, many Marys, Ellens and Dorothys spent the next couple of months, or more, feeling jaded and impatient. WAAF driver Flo Mahony was in north Wales for the victory celebrations. There were, she recalls, some small bonfires. But more memorable to her is the sense of uncertainty and resentment:

  None of us knew how much longer we were going to be in the Air Force, or when we were going to get out. The war basically stopped. There was no more wartime flying. And so air crew were redundant and they didn’t know what to do with them. So they sent them to the Motor Transport section and told them to go and be drivers – and of course that was our job. So there was quite a bit of resentment of these air crew. And a lot of people were at the end of their tether and were quick to flare up, and there were lots of frictions.

  Everybody was given a demobilisation number. When your number came up, you went to the Demob Centre and were sent home. Flo Mahony’s friend Joan Tagg, a wireless operator, had joined the service later than she had, so didn’t expect to be released as early. But the great pride she had taken in this important and highly graded job suffered a mortifying blow when, in the summer of 1945, it was stopped overnight, and she was posted to Gloucester to do number-crunching in the Records Office:

  The men were coming back, and the men automatically took over our jobs. We weren’t wanted … And this was the worst possible posting they could give me because it was clerical. Also, when they posted me as a clerk they wanted me to remuster, which meant going back two grades. I had loved being a wireless op, and I was absolutely livid.

  Men and women alike chafed at the tin-pot bureaucracy and officiousness that now prevailed. ‘The day war ended they started the spit-and-polish,’ says Joan. Flo agrees: ‘The Air Force was known for being relaxed compared to the army. But now there were so many people sitting about with not enough to do, and suddenly, you had to go on church parade, you had to do this, you had to do that. You had to be properly dressed. And they started making us do drill all over again.’ There was work, but it seemed to have no purpose. Idle servicewomen – and men – were encouraged to attend EVT (Educational and Vocational Training) classes to prepare them for civilian life. A future as a shorthand typist or counter clerk beckoned.

  Still in Italy with the FANYs, Margaret Herbertson took up the offer of a job as ‘FANY Education Officer’. She too remembered the early days of peace as having an anti-climactic quality. The flow of signals had completely dried up, leaving coders and intelligence officers like her with nothing to do. ‘We all felt quite dazed. The war, for many of us, had lasted for over a quarter of our lives. I spent a day tearing up papers.’ The War Room, with its atmosphere of feverish urgency, its charts and diagrams, had been dismantled. As far as getting home was concerned, priority went to servicemen who had spent far longer abroad than the girls. Some of the FANYs immediately volunteered for the Far East. Others just applied for leave and went on sightseeing tours round Tuscany.

  Ironically for her new appointment, Margaret had herself opted out of education when she first decided to join the war effort back in 1939. But, untaught though she was, her superiors put her in charge of batches of FANYs who came seeking instruction in English Literature, Current Affairs, Needlework, Art History, Italian and so on. Has
tily, she assembled a rag-bag of tutors, including nuns, librarians and miscellaneous semi-qualified colleagues, and together with them devised a reasonable programme, which included educational outings. These last were fraught with peril. Every bridge in central Italy had been blown up by the retreating German army, and an improving day out to admire Quattrocento frescoes in the hilltop town of San Gimignano involved a spine-chilling detour up a zig-zagging 1 in 10 gradient. The road was barely wide enough for the three-ton truck, and the girls closed their eyes, clinging to the sides of the vehicle and praying. Undaunted, in June Margaret organised a cultural trip to Venice: getting there took fourteen hours across mountain passes, negotiating pontoons and carrying their own tinned provisions – but no tin-opener.

  By July arrangements were under way to send the FANYs back to England. Margaret had the job of processing despatch of their luggage, and ticking innumerable boxes relating to the hand-in of their uniforms: 952 small sleeve buttons, 310 tunic buttons, et cetera, et cetera. On 11 August 1945 she and her group of eleven girls piled their cases on to two army trucks and said goodbye to Siena. ‘[It] has continued to tug at my heart.’

  Then followed an experience which would be shared by returning personnel worldwide. Transit camps had all of the discomforts of barracks and billets, but none of their well-worn cosiness. Add to that the daily frustration of petty-fogging army bureaucracy and the intense heat of a Neapolitan August, and it was unsurprising that morale became low after three weeks not knowing when shipment would happen. Several of the FANYs became ill. At last, on 3 September, they embarked on the Franconia, ten of them sharing an airless cabin. On board were thousands of troops, and an apprehensive huddle of young women – Italians, Yugoslavs and Greeks – who were being sent to England: a shipment of foreign brides. ‘The weather, at first hot and sunny, grew grey and overcast as we sailed north west towards the Irish Sea.’