Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  QA Lorna Bradey arrived home in Bedford to an ecstatic welcome from her family. But after the brilliant colours of Genoa and Naples, everything looked shabby and diminished. And just as she had feared, things at home were very different. Lorna and her sister had always shared an unstrained intimacy; but when she opened her trunk, she found to her fury that her sister had ‘borrowed’ all her clothes. It took a while to appreciate that the family had been struggling for years to scrape by. Her mother – always selfless, never petty – said nothing as her hungry daughter polished off the week’s butter ration at one sitting. But the first question on everyone’s lips was, did she have any coupons to spare? ‘No, was the firm answer.’ She would have to go out, join a queue and get some. After Italy, home was all a dreadful anti-climax.

  I tried to get into the pattern of life – but I was lost. We had nothing personal to say to one another. If I talked about my experiences they were politely interested. They just did not understand.

  Tomorrow’s Clear Blue Skies

  For many, the weeks following the celebrations felt haphazard, disorienting. There was peace – but it was not peaceful. The final thrust of the Allied victory in Europe, and Germany’s last ghastly spasms, had subsided. But the after-shocks reverberated: there were journeys, telegrams, arrivals, departures, greetings, upheavals, reunions. There were marriages, and divorces. There was grief, mourning and fear about the future. So many people’s lives were still precarious, unsettled, subject to the agitating inconsistencies of authorities and politicians. Children had to be returned to their parents, sons to their mothers, husbands to their wives. In the longer term houses needed to be built and jobs found. In Europe the infrastructure was collapsing; populations were starving. And as the war in the Far East still dragged on, there was another great exodus of soldiers on their way to the battlefields of Burma, Malaya and Java.

  It was hard, in those days, to feel any faith in the promise held out by Vera Lynn’s heartfelt rendition of the Irving Berlin lyric, ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow … ’. On 23 May, a fortnight after VE-day, Churchill’s Coalition government was disbanded. A General Election was called for 5 July.

  What kind of world did women want? On the whole, nothing too radical. There is little evidence that Britain’s women were emerging from the Second World War with plans for a feminist revolution or a Utopia. Working on Sheffield’s city trams as a ‘clippie’ during the war, Zelma Katin had become known as the ‘Red Conductress’; throughout, she had made her voice heard at meetings of the Transport Workers’ Union. She made common cause with the workers, moved to solidarity with them by the injustices she saw regarding pay and hours, and displaying an admirable stamina on committees. When hostilities ended she felt grateful for all the insights her contact with the proletariat had given her and looked ahead to a brave new world. But more than a new world, Zelma just wanted a rest:

  I will confess that I am thinking not only of a future for humanity but a future for myself. I want to lie in bed until eight o’clock, to eat a meal slowly, to sweep the floors when they are dirty, to sit in front of the fire, to walk on the hills, to go shopping of an afternoon, to gossip at odd minutes …

  ‘And is this – THIS – your brave new world?’ you ask.

  Yes; just at this moment, when I’m hurrying to catch my bus for the evening shift, it is.

  There were exceptions. Naomi Mitchison’s socialism had remained intact throughout the war: ‘I doubt if anything short of revolution is going to give the country folk the kick in the pants which they definitely want, or rather need.’ Vera Brittain had spent a lifetime espousing both feminism and pacifism, which to her were two sides of the same coin. She had not hesitated to attack the leadership of Winston Churchill, continued to press for women’s equal participation in public life and found in her husband’s candidacy for the Labour Party a further cause to back. Left-wing women like this had plenty to vote for, a world to be conquered.

  After the First World War women’s history had turned a corner. In 1918 the vote had been granted to property-owning women over the age of thirty, followed by the full vote in 1928. But there was no comparable prize for women in 1945. After six long years of home-front survival Nella Last, and thousands more like her, were deeply tired. On VE-day Nella felt ‘like death warmed up’. It was a sensation that could only be alleviated by restorative contact with nature. Coniston Lake worked its usual magic:

  It was a heavy, sultry day, but odd shafts of sunlight made long spears of sparkling silver on the ruffled water, and the scent of the leafing trees, of damp earth and moss, lay over all like a blessing.

  Nella decided to vote Conservative. ‘I don’t like co-ops and combines, I hate controls and if … they are necessary from the economic point of view, I don’t want them so obvious and throat-cramming.’ For so many women like Nella, her home was her area of control. That May, the Lasts finally got workmen in to refurbish their bomb-damaged house. Carpets were relaid, electrical fittings rewired, and the pelmets were replaced over the windows:

  By 4.30, all was straight, and the air-raid damage, the shelter and the blackout curtains over my lovely big windows seemed a nightmare that had passed and left no trace.

  In 1945, the average British housewife cared less about broader issues and a great deal more about the roof over her head, about queues and food shortages. These had got so bad by the end of the war that one of them, fifty-year-old Irene Lovelock, decided to found the British Housewives’ League.

  In June 1945 something inside Mrs Lovelock snapped. The wife of a Surrey vicar, she returned home in a state of rage after spending a long morning queuing for food in the pouring rain; her fellow queuers included grandmothers and women with small babies in prams. She marched into the house and, though she had no experience of leading public meetings, told her husband she wanted to borrow the parish hall. There she took the platform and soon found herself waxing eloquent on the subject of queues and malevolent shopkeepers. Realising that she had tapped into a profound well of resentment, she then wrote to the local paper and got a huge response. The movement snowballed, and in July Mrs Lovelock became chairman of the BHL Committee, heading up a campaign to improve the lot of housewives and their families. In the early days there were only a few hundred members, whose principal targets were the manipulative shopkeepers who expected women to wait, often for an hour, until they were ready to open the shop. Provisions were then issued to the front of the line until – often within half an hour of opening – they cried out ‘No more’ and banged down the shutters. This happened all too often – particularly, it seemed, in the case of fishmongers. But the League grew; in August it held its first London meeting and, as shortages became harder to tolerate in the post-war period, so the BHL increased its active membership by thousands, who called upon politicians to attend with urgency to the things that women really cared about. Tradesmen’s deliveries should be resumed at the earliest opportunity. Queues should be eliminated. Housewives had worked their fingers to the bone for nearly six long years, running their houses without help, clothing their families, battling with the mending. Among the League’s stated aims were ‘an ample supply of good food at a reasonable price’ and ‘the abolition of rationing and coupons … These are a threat to the freedom of the home’. Some branches even swore an oath not to buy expensive imported fruit like pineapples or tangerines.

  Enraged by obstructive fishmongers, middle-class women banded together to voice their frustration.

  Mrs Lovelock and her League offer a fascinating case of the contradictory impulses that swayed women in the 1940s. Here we have a vigorous, independent-minded female activist, determined to mobilise women and make their voices heard in public. Her movement, with its parades and demonstrations, almost certainly drew inspiration from the tactics of the Suffragettes a generation earlier. But its aims, to begin with, were confined to getting butchers’ deliveries up and running and preventing exploitation by fishmongers. For Irene Lovelock’s world vie
w, like those of many thousands like her, was unquestioningly traditional. A mother of three and pillar of her local church, she would have accepted the biblical portrayal of the virtuous wife: ‘for her price is far above rubies … She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household … Her children arise up and call her blessed.’ Her wifely identity was bred in the bone.

  The League, while stoutly maintaining that it was non-affiliated, drew its membership from the conservative middle-class. Because of this, it was infiltrated and identified with the doctrinaire right wing of the Tory Party, who feared and resisted socialism in all its guises. Rationing, and controls, came under that heading. Soon the BHL’s crusading protest on behalf of the housewife began to look like bigoted and reactionary extremism. The press reported scuffles and disturbances at BHL gatherings. Labour politicians took advantage of the mixed messages to discredit the housewives’ cause as propaganda, denouncing these ‘middle class women’ for stirring up unrest and disaffection with their policies. Women’s primary interests – home and family – fell victim to dissent, and before long the protesters were regarded as a parochial, if strident, minority.

  It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Irene Lovelock and her tribe of honourably intentioned mothers and grannies. For six years they had meekly accepted the need for every aspect of their lives to be regulated by the state, and now their patience was wearing thin. With supply problems becoming ever worse, worry about food was even more intense in the post-war period than it had been during the years of conflict. Bread rationing, introduced in June 1946, was the last straw. But another whole six years would pass before queuing for brisket would become a memory.

  *

  Shirley Goodhart’s Mass Observation diary provides an insight into the way intelligent women thought about politics in the weeks immediately after the war. A conversation Shirley had with her mother shortly after VE-day shows them both thoroughly engaged with the question of their future government, but it also shows a generational divide:

  May 20th 1945

  Mother and I sat up till midnight talking politics … Of Attlee: ‘I used not to like him, but I am changing my opinion and I think that he will be our next Prime Minister …’

  I have said that I expect the General election to bring a Labour government with either Attlee or Bevin as Prime Minister. If Mother were free, I believe that she would vote Labour, but for my father’s sake I expect that she will vote Conservative. He always has been Conservative and is too old to change. Thank goodness she expects me to vote Labour! My parents-in-law would be horrified and to avoid arguments I shall have to be quite dumb about politics when I see them in the summer.

  On 5 July the British electorate voted; the results were delayed three weeks until the 26th, because postal votes had to be gathered from servicemen and women still stationed abroad. Opinion polls which indicated a swing to Labour were generally disregarded, and few doubted that Churchill would gain a majority.

  The Oxford student Nina Mabey had decided to join the Labour campaign. Already this vibrant, clever young woman had broken loose from her parents’ right-wing political opinions, which to her seemed inexplicable. Nina felt unaccountably lucky to have got a place at a top-class university. At Somerville College, where she was reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics, she had given the matter much thought. It would be a betrayal, in her view, to use her classy college education to fast-track her way into the privileged ranks. Enthusiastically, she had joined the Labour Club. ‘Our duty was to make sure, when the war ended, that a new, happier, more generous society would take the place of the bad, old, selfish one.’ And this was the line she had argued, vehemently, one evening in 1944, with another undergraduate in her year-group who, she discovered, was steering an opposite course by joining the Conservatives. The young woman in question was chemistry student Margaret Roberts, later to become Margaret Thatcher. She was ‘a plump, neat, solemn girl with rosy cheeks and fairish hair curled flat to her head who spoke as if she had just emerged from an elocution lesson.’ Though Nina felt her idealistic arguments to be compelling, she became aware after a while that they were not getting through. So she changed her tack. How on earth could one want to be associated with such a stuffy institution as the Conservative Club, when the Labour affiliates were all so much more fun? All the really interesting people were members.

  Margaret smiled, her pretty china doll’s smile. Of course, she admitted, the Labour Club was, just at the moment, more fashionable – a deadly word that immediately reduced my pretensions – but that, in a way, unintentionally suited her purposes. Unlike me, she was not ‘playing’ at politics. She meant to get into Parliament and there was more chance of being noticed in the Conservative Club just because some of the members were a bit stodgy.

  By the summer of 1945, however, Nina and her ‘fashionable’ friends were electioneering in earnest. The Labour manifesto, entitled Let Us Face the Future, promised the Dunkirk spirit applied to the tasks of peace. ‘The whole Labour movement was riding on a high tide of hope.’ Nina and a group of Socialist activists from Oxford decamped to nearby Reading and threw their energies into Ian Mikardo’s campaign. Mikardo, a prominent advocate of nationalisation and the extension of wartime controls, was hoping to overturn a safe Conservative majority of 4,591. The students were swept up in an atmosphere of feverish political excitement. In bus queues, in pubs and on the streets Nina sensed that the British people truly wanted change; from demobbed soldiers to grandmothers with shopping baskets there was, she felt, a groundswell of longing to make the world anew. Things could be different. There could be a free, equal society. They pounded the streets, knocked on endless doors and chanted their new campaign song: ‘Vote, vote, vote for Mr Mikardo, chuck old Churchill in the sea.’ Nina stood on a soapbox on a corner fighting to make her voice heard above the lively crowds. Her feet were blistered and her throat was sore. She lived for a week off marmalade sandwiches.

  Naomi Mitchison had mixed feelings when she heard that her husband, Dick, had been offered the Labour candidacy of the marginal seat of Kettering. As a candidate’s wife she worried about looking the part and felt she ought to acquire some stockings. But Naomi was essentially a bohemian and drew the line at wearing a hat. While Dick played by the rules in a city suit, his loyal wife supported him in gipsy glad rags, ‘eating chips out of a bag’. For his sake she canvassed, addressed envelopes and made speeches at street corners, but her heart was not in it. She preferred to spend time in Scotland, dealing with the practical needs of her estate, and writing. ‘They [Dick’s campaign force] don’t recognise that a wife has any job apart from her husband. Nor does Dick really recognise this farm. And never has recognised that writing is anything but a spare time occupation. I suppose the next generation will be better,’ she wrote sadly.

  But Naomi had no doubt that this election was of supreme importance. Everyone knew that a massive task lay ahead. Britain was still living with the legacy of the 1930s Depression: child poverty, slums, ill health and the spectre of unemployment loomed. War or no war, nobody had forgotten the Jarrow marches. The country owed £3.5 billion. Bombs had destroyed or damaged three-quarters of a million houses; willow herb flourished in the craters where buildings once stood. The streets were full of rubble, the roads potholed, trees and public spaces neglected. The houses that remained needed paint and repair work. All the park railings had been removed and replaced with barbed wire or nothing at all. Trains were late and slow, and there was little in the shops.

  Rations continued short. Nella Last couldn’t get any bacon; people in Barrow were having to wait a fortnight for sugar, and there were queues everywhere, she reported, ‘for wedge-heeled shoes, pork-pies, fish, bread and cakes, tomatoes’. In Slough, Maggie Joy Blunt complained of the unvarying diet on offer where she worked: ‘We have had nothing but cabbage on the menu in the canteen for weeks and weeks.’ Barbara Pym often felt close to tears when, after waiting for ages, buses failed to stop because they
were too full. Queues were so bad that she often decided to go without things rather than join them. She was bad-tempered and irritable, and her nerves felt frazzled.

  This sensation was shared by many. Mary Wesley remarked on a generalised feeling of ‘sadness and emptiness’. In Paris, the British Ambassador’s wife, Diana Cooper, was ‘overcome … with the miseries, the senselessness, the dreadful loss’. People laughed when the radio comedian Robb Wilton seemed to catch the national mood, joking about his wife’s gloomy reaction to VE-day: ‘Well, there’s nothing to look forward to now. There was always the All Clear.’ But it was close to the truth.

  ‘By the way, dear, did anything come of all that election fuss we had a fortnight ago?’ To many women, post-war politics seemed irrelevant to their dreary, everyday lives.

  The middle-aged novelist Ursula Bloom felt badly let down by the peace, which seemed to have little to offer women of her class and generation. Ursula was fifty-three, and came from solid patriotic middle-class stock. Her parents had gone without to bring her up nicely; she had always supported herself, had maintained standards by sheer hard work and had married a naval commander. At the end of the war she felt she deserved some respite from all the penny-pinching and self-denial, and she yearned to eat steak. ‘I’m growing very old, I thought, because after all I’m not even glad that the war is over. Apathetic.’ Now Ursula couldn’t get decent meat or a live-in maid for love or money. Above all she felt enraged and compromised by the black market in hard-to-obtain goods and luxuries. Even reputedly high-minded pillars of society cheated and lied to get whisky, nylons, eggs, petrol coupons or – her personal undoing – digestive biscuits. ‘I wanted to rejoice,’ she wrote, ‘[but] rejoicing did not come.’