Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  Here was the challenge given to me for peace time. Could I meet it … ? Could I keep this man alive and help him get back into his life again … ? The toughness I had acquired would be all his, the humanity he had so lacked in the war I had in full measure … I had not seen and done all that I had for nothing.

  She laid her misgivings aside, said ‘yes’, and two months later they were married.

  Almost immediately Monica realised how inadequate she was to her self-imposed task. George Symington had been offered a job with British Petroleum; she, as the conventional wife, would keep house, and they were lucky to find a one-room flatlet in central London. But George’s ordeal as a prisoner-of-war had left him physically and mentally depleted. He had been starved and could not eat properly; was dizzy and uncoordinated. His emotions were chaotic and he would sometimes break down in tears impulsively. He suffered from intermittent but severe bouts of malaria, and when BP posted him to Iran for six months his health took a frightening dive. Left behind in England, Monica both feared for him, and missed him more than she could possibly have imagined. On his return she needed to draw on all her inner resources to care for him. There were times in those early days when she could not help contemplating what life might have been if George had been a well man:

  My mind kept returning to my handsome, healthy boyfriends whom I had left behind. I was miserable [but] the warmth of my husband shone through from underneath and gave me courage to continue.

  Time, and Monica’s patient and practical approach gradually helped George to heal. Many years later Monica described herself as ‘a very ordinary woman whose life was radically changed by the war’. In 1939 she had been ‘Miss Average’: middle-class, under-educated, lacking drive and looking no further than a qualification as a beautician. War had transformed her, giving her strength, confidence, patience, endurance and an overriding humanity.

  Monica Symington was a woman who – like so many of her generation – expected little more from life than marriage and its natural by-products: a house, and a family. But Monica’s marriage presented her with an unusually daunting challenge. Peace had no grand project to offer her, other than this: ‘Could I keep this man alive and help him get back into his life again … ?’ Returning him to normality was the goal to which she targeted her energies, and the achievement of George’s renewal, through her dedication to him, was to give her own life happiness and meaning. Her story demonstrates the reconstructive power of love and compassion. And her rewards were their daughter, born in 1951, George’s gratitude and steadily improving health, and the crowning success of his career as consultant to the House of Lords on energy, which were to bring his wife consolations and undreamt-of status and security.

  Out of Uniform

  Phyllis Noble was blessed with a string of handsome, healthy boyfriends. But marriage was not on her agenda in 1946. All her life Phyllis had wanted to travel; this desire had come before marriage, career, love or intellectual fulfilment. As a humble clerical employee, back in 1940, she had been struck with panic at the prospect – common to working-class girls like her – of a future confined to this island: ‘Suppose I do just stick in England all my life? Suppose I do develop into yet another suburban matron …! What a bloody, damnable, awful, awful, awful thought!’

  Though the war had failed her in this respect, as a WAAF she had at least got away from home. She felt she had come of age. But Phyllis’s autonomy at this time had been bought at a high price. She had reached the end of the line with an assortment of experimental boyfriends, while Andrew, to whom she had lost her virginity, and whom she had always assumed would be there for her, called time on the relationship. With her love life lying broken in pieces around her, she sank into a profound depression. In the spring of 1946 Phyllis suffered a sudden and frightening physical collapse and was rushed into hospital with aggressive peritonitis. The doctors told her mother she was unlikely to survive. Six months later she was released, several stone lighter, but glad to be alive. Something told her that she would never be the same again. Was this the end of her youth? Had the war, which had given her so many varied and highly charged experiences, also robbed her of her own springtime?

  In December 1946 Phyllis took her own first, shaky steps on the road to personal reinvention by undertaking her demobilisation formalities. There could be no new start until she was released from the WAAF. During her lengthy sick leave, she had been notionally ‘posted’ to a new station. She had to travel there and spend a miserable forty-eight hours unpicking her service identity: handing in kit, form-filling and reporting to the RAF medical officer. Then she was on the train back to London:

  I had shed being a WAAF, along with the uniform, like an old skin I no longer needed. Whatever lay ahead, I felt that at last I was closer to a new beginning …

  I had made up my mind that I was not going back to the kind of boring office life I had formerly known.

  In 1941, Phyllis had been a bank clerk at the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate. Now, with social reformers around her seeking to reconstruct society from the war’s ashes, it seemed to Phyllis Noble – and probably to innumerable twenty-four-year-olds like her – that her future was inextricably linked to the improvement of the post-war world. And after six months of hospitalisation, she also felt that she had a debt to repay. Secretly, she had begun to dream of becoming a doctor, which would mean another six years of study. Thus it was that early in January 1947 Phyllis set off, in a spirit of gratitude and civic idealism, to a government post-war advice centre in Tavistock Square.

  The youngish adviser was kind and courteous. But, pressed to specify what kind of a future she had in mind, Phyllis’s nerve failed her. The goal seemed impossibly distant and unrealistic. ‘ “Well,” I said cautiously, “I’m not really sure, but I don’t want to work in an office, and I’d like to do something really worthwhile.” “You mean like social work?” the youngish man asked. I grasped at the straw: “Yes. Well, that sort of thing.” ’ Promptly, she was given forms to fill in and instructed to attend for interview in a fortnight’s time, at the end of January.

  And thus the map was laid down for a career path that, despite some deviations, would eventually bring her to authorship and academic recognition in the field of social sciences. The working-class girl from south London was to achieve social mobility in a way that, before the war, she could barely have imagined.

  *

  In 1946 more than twice as many passports were issued in the United Kingdom as ten years earlier: nearly 430,000. ‘My generation was very much freer,’ remembered pacifist Sheila Hails:

  Very soon after the war [my husband and I] stayed on the Costa Brava, in a little pub, right on the beach. It was empty, almost desolate. There was a rough road to get there – you sent up clouds of dust. Today it’s one of these seething holiday towns. But then there were only two other people there, and the people came out from the village and they danced on the beach! It was a wonderful place.

  Frances Partridge was another pacifist who, as soon as possible after the war, opted to travel to a country untouched by conflict. In summer 1946 she and Ralph went with friends to Switzerland, where they found themselves welcomed with such forgotten luxuries as coupon-free bananas and croissants spread with lashings of butter and cherry jam, washed down with aromatic coffee. Learning more about the wartime work of the Red Cross, the Partridges delighted in the Swiss qualities of non-belligerence, humanity and civilisation, proof to Frances that the world could be a happy, benign place. ‘How clean everything was!’ she marvelled. ‘Three weeks’ bliss’.

  Vera Lynn also had the opportunity to travel in Europe shortly after the war; she toured northern Europe and Scandinavia, performing live to audiences who during the war had secretly – on penalty of death – listened to her BBC broadcasts on radio sets hidden in cellars and hayricks. Vera was astonished not only by the warm welcome she received but also at how well the occupied countries were surviving:

  The food! I re
member my husband, my pianist and I, were in the hotel in Denmark, and they said ‘Would you like some duck?’ So we said ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ Well, two ducks came on a platter! I said, ‘Is that just for us, there’s only three of us?’ We couldn’t believe our eyes! I thought – an occupied country can manage this! It was wonderful.

  Such pleasures and material comforts made ‘abroad’ a tempting alternative to home and austerity.

  WAAF Mike Morris was in Cairo when the war ended, still fancy-free and enjoying, more or less, an extended holiday. She was in no hurry to return to Berkshire, and – as her letters home and her 1946 diary chronicle – spent the next year making the most of the relaxations and privileges afforded to colonial expatriates in that seductive city. Mike’s days were taken up with dress fittings, having her hair done at Georges’ salon, shopping, sunbathing, playing tennis and enjoying the opera and theatre. As a high-ranking officer she frequented the Imperiale, the Medusa Bar, the Nile Club, the Gezira, and the Auberge des Pyramides and seems to have consumed copious rounds of drinks in all of them. In March she fitted in a short break in Italy to see Max, a boyfriend based in Positano, also making time for a shopping excursion to Rome for hats, jewellery and a fur coat. Romantically, she had no ties, nobody to answer to except herself. She conducted an enjoyable if risky balancing act between Max, James and the American Harald, all of whom were courting her, while she toyed, undecided as to which, if any, of them to marry.

  Mike was reluctant to be tied down and equally reluctant to return home. Nevertheless, she bore her family’s hardships in mind. They were so short of everything. She made a point of posting parcels of luxuries – easily available to her through the NAAFI, bazaar or black market – back to Berkshire:

  I’m worried to see you had a further cut in fats – I’ll buy some tins in town. I know the beef dripping was acceptable. I won’t send butter, it’s buffalo juice and horrid! If I see any really nice material I’ll buy it for curtains and send it home on duty-free label. Measure up your and Daddy’s room including bedspread.

  If you want anything – Yardley, Lizzy Arden or Helena Rubinstein, it’s only two-thirds of the price out here.

  But at last the time came when she could remain no longer. ‘My darling dearest,’ she wrote to her mother on 25 May 1946: ‘They say to say goodbye is to die a little … to-day I think I have died quite a lot. I have worked my last day as a WAAF intelligence officer … after nearly seven years it cannot help but hurt a little.’

  There were farewell noggins all round before she embarked in June from Port Said on HMT Corfu. On the 14th they passed Gibraltar: ‘Dear Mediterranean, I hope I’ll see you again soon. I love your blue seas and skies so very much. Somehow, I feel very depressed. This awful feeling of “¿donde vamos?” ’ Two days later the ship docked in Southampton. She had missed the 6 June Victory celebrations by ten days, and disembarked in pouring rain to a country suffering from anti-climax. The euphoria of reunion with her beloved mother soon wore off; downpour was followed by a chill drizzle, ‘very weary & oh, so cold’, and her aloof father welcomed her in like manner, ‘with a snarl’. By 21 June disappointment had set in, and she was utterly depressed:

  Between you and me Diary – a Goddamn fool to leave Waaf-ing in Cairo for this.

  Soon after, the entries thin out. In her own word, Mike ‘mooched’ – did nothing. Her main preoccupations during the early autumn of 1946 were her restless romance with Max, which she attempted to combine with the newer attentions of Geoffrey, and her application to work with the German Control Commission. At last in November her marching orders came through; by the end of the month she was only too happy to find her feet again in the Intelligence Division of the GCC at Herford in north-west Germany, followed soon after by a posting to Berlin.

  Independence, worth, usefulness and the knowledge that her initiative and expertise in the German language were being recognised set Mike Morris back on course for a fruitful expatriate career in corporate welfare and personnel over the next twelve years. But the love affairs fizzled out. When Mike eventually married a divorced colonial officer in 1958 she gave up work and started to collect antique furniture. In later life she also took up ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) and became proficient enough in that art to offer demonstrations through the National Association of Flower Arrangers.

  Vanquished

  In November 1945 Anne Popham boarded a Dakota bound for Bünde, Westphalia, in northern Germany. Three long years had passed since Graham Bell’s bomber had fallen out of the sky over Nottinghamshire. Time had eased the sharpest pain, but nobody had replaced Graham in Anne’s heart. She forced herself to resume a normal life, accepting invitations among the cultured milieux in which she had previously moved. And it was at one of these post-war parties that a foppish young man approached her to see whether she would be interested in helping the work of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Branch, which had been delegated to help restore the dispersed art treasures of Germany to their proper places, under the aegis of the Control Commission. As a German-speaker and former Courtauld graduate, Anne was ideally qualified.

  Well, I thought I’d love to have this job. I was concerned about all the bombing and the destruction and the horror and the moving about of pictures and so forth. And I knew I had something of use and value to offer. I agreed to do it.

  And so, late in 1945 – at a time when most Englishwomen, despite victory, were largely feeling crushed by unprecedented post-war gloom and hardship – Anne Popham found herself on a springboard to authority and future recognition. In post-war Germany she gave the best of herself, working to her strengths and finding in the meticulous task that now faced her a means of recovery, almost a salvation. Anne was given the rank of major, and based at headquarters in Bünde. The task of the five British zone regions was to reinstate the scattered or stolen contents of museums, churches and collections, to prevent the army’s misuse and abuse of architectural gems and to implement reconstruction. Anne’s job was to coordinate them. Her diary-cum-logbook of this work is a chronicle of frustrations and hindrances in the face of bureaucracy, broken-down phone lines and car engine failure. A few excerpts give a flavour of her busy working life in Bünde:

  7th November 1945

  Spent a lot of this afternoon trying to get through to Hamburg. Finally despaired & decided to wait till morning.

  5th December 1945

  Priority 1 call from Berlin. Public Safety have found a collection of pictures & require a monuments officer to inspect them immediately as it is a question of making an arrest.

  8th December 1945

  Chapter of accidents culminating in abandoning the Mercedes on the autobahn at 9pm … given a lift to Bünde, arriving 12 midnight.

  Off-duty, Major Anne relaxed her business-like efficiency. Gone were the days when it was thought unseemly for women to drink alongside men. The mess was immensely sociable, and Steinhäger gin was twopence a glass:

  One would go there before dinner and have one – and perhaps two, then a bottle of wine with dinner, followed by coffee and brandy. And sometimes the next day one would be pretty sorry for it … And then we used to go to Officers’ clubs and go dancing.

  Sometimes, things got out of hand:

  Once when we were on a field trip we caught sight – through a window – of a very nice sofa, which we thought would be just right for our mess. And our charming Dutch padre, who was the ringleader, persuaded us to steal it. We got it into the car and drove it back to Bünde.

  Together, work, fun, friendships and distance from England were healing the wounds. An awareness was growing in Anne, of her own worth: ‘Until then I’d always assumed that everybody else knew best, but in Germany I realised that I was much better at a lot of things than other people, and that in some cases I knew best. I knew I was good at my job, and I felt valued and recognised too.’ Anne was thirty now. She felt it unlikely that she would meet anyone to replace Graham, but she was convinced that, despite be
ing a single woman, her work and life had significance.

  The heartbreak had receded, the bad days were melting into the past. And if Anne needed any further reminder that life could be a lot worse, she had only to step outside the undamaged military enclave in which her Bünde HQ was situated:

  I went to Hamburg. It was destroyed – absolutely flattened, worse than Berlin. Acres of debris. And you sometimes saw somebody sort of creeping out of a hole – appearing like some phantom from the vast wasteland of rubble. It was a terrifying sight – how had these people not been killed? How did they even exist? They’d certainly got it as bad as we had, if not worse. This was far worse than England … I was glad the war was over, but I didn’t feel any sense of glory at all.

  Confronted by such evident suffering, the triumphalism of the victor seemed an alien emotion – at least to this particular young woman. Anne couldn’t comprehend her male colleagues’ punitive attitude to the Germans. Her fellow officers seemed filled with anger. One day she invited Graf Metternich, the German Director of Monuments and Fine Arts, ‘not a Nazi, but a very civilised, educated man’, to discuss their mutual concerns. Later, she dined with the Graf in the British officers’ mess and was dismayed to see a contingent rise and leave the room in protest at his presence. On another occasion, she was travelling with one of her colleagues when a German pedestrian accidentally collided with her on a railway platform. Her colleague flew into a rage with the man, abusing him roundly for not treating the Fräulein Major with proper respect. Anne conceded that the men had, perhaps, more reason to feel anger against the enemy: ‘They’d been through the war in a way that I hadn’t – though goodness knows us civilians got it almost as badly.’ But to her it seemed so unnecessary, with the German nation on its knees, for these male officers to keep on kicking their victims, as if to continue proving that they were top dog. Despite a visit to Belsen, all Anne’s instincts tended towards mercy and reconciliation with their one-time enemies.