Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  ‘Tighten your belts everybody, please – we’re approaching Great Britain.’ A neatly buttoned air hostess reminds her passengers that they will shortly be landing in the land of austerity. Punch, August 1948.

  *

  Joan Wyndham put £5 on an outsider in the 7.30 at White City. Jumping up and down and yelling her head off, she watched it nudge ahead of the favourite and win her £200.

  Lurching from feast to famine, the course of Joan’s post-war career was to prove correspondingly unstable and mercurial. Kit Latimer, her RAF boyfriend, showed up on leave, and they had a wonderful time both in bed and out, dancing round the bedsit to Fats Waller. After he departed money started to run short again. For £2 a week she marked time working for Ralph, an old pal in Fulham who made plastic ornaments for fish tanks, then moved on, this time stepping into the breach for a couple who ran a somewhat dubious hotel in a bohemian area of west London. Joan was employed to run it while the owners were off doing something illegal in Switzerland. Shortages and rationing contributed to the difficulties of hotel-keeping; with laundry services erratic, she ironed the sheets as they were, on the bed. The hotel offered an austerity breakfast: burned toast and dyed pink fishcakes which nobody would eat. But Joan was happy. She was working, and she was with people.

  Sadly, it all came to an abrupt end when bailiffs appeared on the doorstep and announced that they had come to take away the furniture. Nothing Joan could say would dissuade them, and, fearing that she would be blamed by her employers, she decided to close down the hotel. It was back to the Cadogan Street bedsit, and pining for Kit. Soon after, that relationship too bit the dust. He wrote, confessing that he had never had such wonderful sex in his life as he had had with her, but had met another WAAF and was going to marry her:

  He felt I was some kind of witch who had him under her spell … and was settling for a safe, cosy alternative. I nearly went mad with grief, and spent my time either crying or writing him long letters which were never answered. I had never felt so lonely in my life.

  A Pearl of a Wife

  Surrounded with small children, Verily Anderson was almost never lonely. The days before marriage and babies, when she was ‘nothing but a nothing’ had long gone. As a wife and mother, her life was focused. But Donald, her husband, was bogged down with Ministry work in London. Stranded in Sussex with the children, she missed him and yearned for the time when they could have a family home. Their infrequent days in the city together were spent house-hunting, to no avail, since everything vacant had been let, and, with house prices inflated by up to four times their 1939 price, a purchase was beyond their means. Verily’s mother, unutterably generous, came to their rescue. ‘ “I know what we’ll do,” she said … “I’ll buy a house, and you can be my tenants.” ’

  Verily bicycled round west London looking for somewhere to buy; at last she happened upon 43 Edwardes Square. The house’s stucco was grimy and peeling, and several windows were broken, but it was on the south side, its elegant cast-iron balcony giving on to the stately plane trees of the square, and its neglected rear garden filled with sun and straggling briar roses. For Verily, it was instant love – but first Donald had to see it. They arranged to meet the following day at the house agents’, at a time when Donald could get free between meetings. Next morning Verily returned to inspect it again. This time there were competitors looking round the premises. She leapt on her bicycle and pedalled like fury up to the agency in Kensington High Street: ‘every second counted’. She ran into the office only to find a third party, a well-corseted lady in smart gloves and high-heeled shoes, engaged in negotiations for Number 43. As soon as the smart-gloved lady had left the office Verily made frantic inquiries about her. Yes, she had made an offer, subject to a surveyor’s report, and no, it had not yet been accepted. At this moment Donald walked in. Twenty dramatic minutes later the house was theirs. Mrs Bruce had agreed on the price, the War Damages Commission would pay a proportion of the repairs, they needn’t bother with a surveyor’s report, and the owner in Cornwall had accepted their offer, at long distance.

  The war was over for us. I took the key again and held it in my hand.

  The smart-gloved lady in high heels returned to make arrangements for her surveyor to view the house, only to find herself pre-empted.

  Verily bought herself a sandwich and headed for Kensington Gardens. The traders around Earls Court Road were friendly and called her ‘Dearie’. This was where she would come for the rations, she thought. Little Marion and Rachel would peep over the counter. With luck, there would soon be somebody else with rosy cheeks in a pram outside. The unloved roses would bloom in their garden.

  I could almost see the family sitting round the table in our kitchen-dining-room. Two, three, four children, perhaps more, beating spoons and with gravy on their mouths. Donald presiding, and myself bringing the pudding from the cooking end. This was how home should be.

  *

  How perfectly Verily Anderson conjures up the post-war idyll, in just a few sentences picturing the happy home for which a nation had fought and laboured – men and women alike. Here in the west of London, six years of gruelling anxiety and physical hardship would be rewarded by the bounty of peace: the fecund womb and the overflowing table; the benign authority of the husband, the sweet complaisance of the wife. At 43 Edwardes Square, God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.

  A roof over one’s head, domestic contentment and a placid, industrious wife didn’t seem too much to ask after six years of tribulation. So much so, that the average man in 1945 simply took the entire package for granted, as a contemporary humorous song lyric illustrates:

  ‘Good morning, my sweet’,

  I say to my Brenda,

  She cares for my home

  And I’d die to defend her.

  She mends my old vests

  And she takes out the pup

  And she sees to the kids

  Now that Nanny’s called up

  She checks up the laundry

  And flatters the cook

  Then she goes to the library

  And gets me a book

  Her housekeeping money

  Is twelve bob in credit

  That ration book form is OK

  For she’s read it …

  She’s a pearl of a wife

  No man could have better

  So I kiss her good morning

  And then I forget her.

  But forgetting her was becoming less acceptable. The war had raised questions about woman’s role that could no longer be ignored, even in the popular press, which found it could sell copies on the ‘Future of Woman’ controversy.

  In December 1945 the Daily Sketch decided to air the debate – on one side, the ‘pearl of a wife’ model:

  Surely every married woman today is longing for the time when she can re-establish her home on pre-war standards, and is looking forward to this rather than to sitting behind an office desk, driving a lorry or plotting a plane’s course?

  on the other, the responsible, brave, intelligent woman who, having demonstrated her value and energy, was now poised to make her mark on the nation:

  We have taken off our hats to them during the war – let us keep them off now in anticipation of the time when we can erect a monument to the first woman Premier who leads this country to a new standard of prosperity and announces that the peace of the world will never be shattered as long as we have an all-woman Cabinet.

  The Sketch’s editors invited their readers to vote on the debate. The headline in their Saturday edition read ‘CAREERS and the WOMAN: The Voice of 1945 Says Home is Best’. The readership’s vote was conclusive:

  %age who think that women cannot or should not combine marriage and a career: 77.2%

  %age who think that women carrying on jobs after marriage is a good thing in itself: 12.3%

  %age who say ‘Let them choose’: 10.5%

  – all of which appears to confirm, empirically, what the historian Harold L. Sm
ith has argued, using a compelling line-up of statistics and evidence, that a high proportion of the women who had worked during the war were sick and tired of it, and that they nurtured a nostalgic longing to recreate their pre-war lives in the home.

  One of these was Dolly Scannell. In spring 1945 Dolly gave notice to the major at her American hospital base near Colchester. ‘Now that we were winning the war I decided it could manage very nicely without me.’ She was the mother of a six-year-old daughter, and the forces had no claim on her; the job had been a wartime fill-in, until she could resume her natural and normal destiny as a housewife. She and little Susan packed their bags, said their goodbyes and boarded a train for Liverpool Street; it was back to the East End, back to join the closed-in ranks of the housebound. Dolly’s husband, Chas, was still with the army in northern Italy but was due home soon after VE-day. They would be a family once more.

  Dolly was uncertain what to expect; Chas had been away for over three years. At this time women’s magazines cautiously urged their readers to make allowances for their returning men. ‘Don’t expect to pick up the threads just where you dropped them,’ wrote one psychologist, suggesting that wives would have to ‘court’ their husbands all over again.

  So Dolly planned an affectionate welcome for her husband. She had stretched the rations and, on the day, she had a nice piece of meat ready for his homecoming meal. Little Susan was playing in the street with her friends but was persuaded to come in and put on her best clothes to meet the daddy she barely knew. Clean and ready, mother and daughter sat and waited, but Chas didn’t appear. The child fidgeted, and an hour passed. Well, he would surely come tomorrow … They changed back into their everyday clothes, Susan happily rejoined her playmates, and Dolly, understandably irritated, returned to her chores. When the children knocked on the door for the fourth time to pester her for attention, she flung it open bad-temperedly with a ‘Well, and what is it now?’ – ‘And there was Chas.’

  Chas himself was not in the best of moods. What had taken her so long? And who was the dirty child in a green coat playing mud pies in the gutter? Not his daughter, surely? Dolly persuaded Susan to be kissed, before marching her off to the bathroom. But the child’s bedtime presented a problem. For nearly four years Susan and Dolly had shared a bed, snuggling up to each other through the air raids, maternal cuddles taking the place of conjugal caresses. There was only one bedroom, and the child eyed her new, single bed in the corner with aversion. ‘Is he going to sleep here then?’ she asked, horrified. Dolly did her best to persuade her that it was temporary, and kissed her goodnight.

  Slipping into her most glamorous brocade housecoat, Dolly went downstairs. After a shaky start, maybe Chas would mellow by the light of a flickering fire. She coaxed the coals alight and waited for him to make the first, amorous move. But something seemed to be preoccupying him; could it be that he felt shy after all these years? Dolly hoped that the dancing glow was heightening her attractions, but Chas suddenly switched on the light. There was something combative about his posture, and his voice, as he turned towards her, saying, ‘Now I’ll see the books,’ and it took Dolly a moment to realise that he was demanding to see her household accounts.

  I was furious, all my loving, welcoming mood evaporated. Everything had gone wrong, I was sure it wasn’t my fault, and thus ensued, on our first meeting after the toil, stress and misery of the war, a fierce argument.

  As an example of how the war had driven the sexes apart, Chas Scannell’s homecoming gives a taste. His time with the army had turned him – and many others – into a stranger. He bossed his family about as though they were insubordinate rookies. Dolly felt rejected and self-righteous. Chas, for his part, was fearful that the war had let his independent-minded wife off the leash, and that unless he staked his claim as man of the house from the moment of his return he would become a second-class citizen under his own roof. In Chas’s eyes, being anything less than dominant and masterful would be a betrayal of his manhood.

  Unfortunately, his manhood was doomed to disappointment, that night anyway. More or less reconciled, the Scannells went to bed. Tenderly, Chas reached out an affectionate arm to draw Dolly to him. As he did so – ‘a little voice came from the corner, “Can I come in your bed, Mummy?” ’ Dolly’s maternal heart softened; she understood that to the child her father seemed an interloper. She was about to gather her up, but Chas intervened with a sharp authority in his voice: ‘No, you cannot, just close your eyes and go to sleep.’ Tears were the result.

  Recent books by Julie Summers and Alan Allport* have combed the sources for similar tales of woe and incompatibility. Both books demonstrate how the war had derailed relationships, with stories of resentment, disillusion, dysfunction, exclusion and anti-climax on both sides. From men:

  ‘Probably, “When I was in Peshawar in ’43” is just as boring to my relations as their accounts of shopping trials are to me.’

  ‘There seems to be nothing but the dull prospect of a pre-fab, raising the family, the 8.30 up and the 5.15 down … the prospect appals me.’

  And from women:

  ‘We were two different people, so much had happened in those years apart.’

  ‘When their war ended, our war began.’

  Desert Rat Charles Hopkinson walked through the door of his home after four and a half years abroad. The conversation went like this: ‘Hello, Muriel, how are you?’ ‘Oh, Charles, I am fine. How are you?’

  Thousands of married couples were trying to rebuild their lives, but they were strangers.

  Divided We Fall

  Once demobbed, Chas Scannell found work with a dockland shipping company; thankfully, he quickly lost interest in the household accounts. The Scannells were saving to repair and modernise their Ilford home, and by 1946 Dolly was pregnant again. She was broody and quiescent; nothing surfaced to upset the gentle routine of her days. Susan was at school, and she made sure that Chas’s meals were always on the table when he got home from work. The baby boom was approaching a crescendo, and their son William was one of the 891,920 babies born in Britain that year; Dolly felt she should be counting her blessings:

  The war was over, my husband was safe home again, I had a son and a daughter, a house with a garden, a husband with a job he liked. What more can a woman desire?

  But perhaps she missed the friendships and flirtations, or even the dynamic efficiency, of her American army camp in 1943?

  I was restless. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  Already, the post-war idyll was showing signs of strain. Cookery expert Marguerite Patten’s constant contact with housewives gave her an insight into their conflicting motives and influences:

  A lot of women were glad to be housewives again. They said, ‘Oh, how lovely to go back home, oh, I don’t have to get up so early in the morning, oh, I don’t have to spend time with those tiresome people in the factory, and I don’t have to get dirty doing all that work, oh, what a relief!’ But then when it happened they weren’t so sure.

  Others weren’t glad: for example, they hadn’t got their own money. They didn’t like having to ask when they wanted a new pair of shoes, you know, ‘Can you let me have the money?’ And they missed the excitement, they missed the number of people they met; they wanted to go out, and they felt very closed in by the four walls of home.

  There were very mixed feelings among women.

  How could Dolly Scannell explain, without seeming ungrateful, her bouts of irritability at Chas’s childishness? He would come home late and blame her for the spoiled dinner and grumble when his tea wasn’t how he liked it. One day as he sat at breakfast whining about how the rinds hadn’t been cut off his bacon, it all got the better of her; she seized a dinner plate from the sideboard and smashed it over his head. But Chas was completely unrepentant; with ‘a look of fiendish hate’ he grabbed a cut-glass bowl and hurled it at his wife with all his might. It missed and shattered into shards beyond the kitchen door, through which it had pierced
a jagged aperture. Shaking, shocked, the Scannells faced each other across the debris of their kitchen. In the ten years since they had been married, Dolly had been through the Blitz, and Chas had survived the desert war and the Italian campaign; but never before had a domestic row come so close to physical injury:

  We both knew ‘what might have been’ … I knew then, that although Chas and I could argue happily until the cows came home, I must never ever lay my hands on his person again, however lightly, for both our sakes!