Millions Like Us
Page 53
Blackheath, London: an envelope drops through Miss Mary Cornish’s letterbox, from nineteen-year-old Fred Steels. It contains greetings, and reminiscences about the days they spent together after Lifeboat Number 12 was cast adrift on the Atlantic ocean. ‘It is just over 4 years since we wrote to each other,’ he tells her,
but I do know that it is just over 8 years since we shared our nightmare experience, and I want you to know that I for one will never forget what you did for us during that experience.
Miss Cornish reads it and adds it to a growing bundle of correspondence from the boys – Paul Shearing, Ken Sparks and Billy Short – who still write to her, addressing her as ‘Auntie Mary’. She is fifty now and has returned to her life as a music teacher. If anything, her ordeal has sharpened her appetite for life: for music, gardens, books, travel and friendships. The fortitude and mental grip that helped Mary Cornish survive shipwreck and despair now propel her forward; she possesses, as her niece says, ‘a fiery spirit’.
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire: the wedding of Alan Milburn to Judy Pickard is taking place, just over a year after his return from Oflag VIIB. To his mother’s relief, Alan spends the six months following his release on light duties in a mixed battalion only 10 miles from Burleigh, the home in Balsall Common where she has spent so many anxious hours awaiting news of his safety. During this time he is billeted at a hotel named The Oaks, and it is here that he meets Judy, whose mother is the proprietor. Judy finds her new mother-in-law, Clara Milburn, to be a firm and friendly woman – ‘unique in many ways’. In her sixties, she continues practical and as busy as ever, gardening, reading, writing, painting and tending to her husband Jack’s needs. With Alan settled, she eagerly awaits the arrival of a Milburn grandson (and it must be a boy), for in Clara’s world view Milburn men still lead the human procession, while Milburn women are there to applaud, to wait and to sew on their buttons.
South Kensington: Frances Parker (née Faviell) is remaking her life in London after the extremities of the Blitz, the anguish of post-war Berlin. The bombs had razed 33 Cheyne Place to the ground; she and Richard have moved to an airy and comfortable modern house with a large studio in a quiet street behind Fulham Road. John is at school. Back in her old haunts, Frances picks up the artistic social life that she left behind in 1939. She has time and peace of mind, too, to give to painting, and canvases accumulate. The studio is stacked high with portraits of her many friends, lovingly executed miniatures, the occasional exuberant flower piece: a rhododendron, joyfully magenta in its blue vase. But the war memories persist. Painful and difficult though she finds it, Frances embarks on a book about her time in Berlin, followed by a book about the Chelsea Blitz. Writing them is both liberating and cathartic, and the books are well received. But A Chelsea Concerto will be her last. Frances Faviell now confronts a war that is unwinnable, for at fifty-seven she is dying of an untreatable cancer.
North Berwick, the Firth of Forth: it’s the Sunday before Kay Mellis’s wedding to Alastair Wight. In Scotland in 1950, working-class tradition still requires the engaged couple to hold open house for well-wishers, who are expected to call by bearing gifts: useful household items like wringers, sewing-machines and carpet sweepers. Kay’s mum has made it clear that she and Alastair ought to stay in to greet the many guests from their close-knit Edinburgh neighbourhood. But Kay and Alastair, who have known each other since childhood, have other ideas:
That weekend we decided that we weren’t going to be staying in on a Sunday, we were going to North Berwick on the bus. My mother wasn’t best pleased because she thought people would come and we wouldn’t be there. But still, away we went.
The couple walk along the bay arm in arm, past the outdoor salt-water swimming pool and round the picturesque harbour. Perhaps they reminisce about Kay’s Land Army days: the back-breaking years when girls like her ‘weren’t allowed to be miserable’ despite her sore hands, raw from hoeing, and the rats that plagued her nights. Or maybe she remembers John, the kindly farmer who employed her – ‘I was his chick’ – or the reels in the village hall after the day’s work was done.
But most likely she and Alastair talk about what it will be like when they are married. Dress-making is her love; she won’t have to give that up. His steady job with a printing machinery firm will ensure them an adequate income.
The war ending was going to be the start of something wonderful. We’d rent a house, it wouldn’t be bought, you know what I mean? – and we’d get some furniture. A Chesterfield suite, a dining room suite and a bedroom suite.
On that sunny afternoon, with the sea sparkling and the gannets calling from the Bass Rock, Vera Lynn’s promise of peace is being fulfilled for Kay and Alastair:
We had a lovely time in North Berwick. We had a bag of chips out of the chip shop. And I felt we had done what we wanted to do that day. Maybe we didn’t do the right thing. But we did it because it was what we wanted to do.
They feel lucky to be alive and in love. In a week they will be man and wife. They dream of a peaceful future. They will have a family and, in time, grandchildren. Kay’s sewing-machine will whirr all day, and there will be all the fabric she ever wanted.
Kay Wight is in her late eighties now. She and Alastair still live quietly in their modest home in an Edinburgh suburb. She tut-tuts a little about modernity – ‘Kids now grow up before their time. Och, it’s a disaster!’ – about the way her granddaughters don’t learn to cook – ‘What’s better than a plate of mince and tatties? Don’t get me started!’ – and about the way women wear trousers to dances – ‘There’s nothing worse.’ She laments the loss of community: ‘Life was so different then – your aunties and uncles and everybody lived nearby. Your whole life was different, you know what I mean? If you were bombed out it was a case of “Come in, come in.” There was always a door open.’ And teenagers get away with disrespect to the old in a way that to her is incomprehensible:
So I say, all right, I’ll go back to my wee old chair.
It is the fate of every generation, as it grows old, to be pushed to one side by the young. The achievements and sacrifices of the 1940s women have bought us peace, but we take them for granted. Their values are rejected as old-fashioned and irrelevant. We patronise them a little and, ultimately, forget them. The process is necessary, but we also lose by it. For if we are ever to learn from history, we must get under the skins of the people who made it: our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers, Kay Wight, and millions like her. They are us, and we will, in our turn, be like them.
1. Two young women from the Worthing ‘Blackout Corps’ paint their local hospital windows.
2. Spirit of the Blitz: a West End hairdressing salon picks up where it left off – in an air-raid shelter.
3. Cross-section of a life: the bombs exposed and revealed women’s interior-based existence as never before.
4. A cosy, if cramped, scene at Holborn station. No matter where, the 1940s mum always had something to knit. By the end of September 1940 over 170,000 Londoners were taking shelter in the city’s Underground stations.
5. As the threat to Britain intensified, every mother had to choose between her children’s safety and her maternal instincts.
6. Volunteers like Joan Wyndham (above, in uniform after she joined the WAAF in 1941)
7. Teenager Phyllis Noble, photographed at the time of Dunkirk, 1940.
8. Volunteers like Joan Wyndham helped trained nurses to staff the first aid posts established across the city.
9. For women, joining up often meant carrying out domestic tasks in a military context. This Wren steward has a typically unglamorous job.
10. A London Labour Exchange, 1941. After women’s conscription was introduced, recruitment figures increased more than tenfold.
11. The Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, or NAAFI, which ran canteens and shops for the forces, was ‘a forgotten army’, largely staffed by women.
12. Dorothy (‘Doffy’) Brewer went for training with the ATS in au
tumn 1941. ‘If you survive it,’ she wrote, ‘nothing … that life can bring afterwards can be as bad.’
13. Barbara Cartland with her ATS hat on, plus lipstick.
14. Unsuspecting ATS recruits arriving at Aldershot in 1941.
15. and 16. Two mothers, two wartime diarists: Clara Milburn and her son Alan; Nella Last and her son Cliff.
17. Women’s Institute members bottling jams and jellies. The making of preserves exemplified the frugal ethos of the older generation.
18. In the Y-service WAAF Aileen (‘Mike’) Morris became expert at eavesdropping on enemy transmissions. Her intercepts were despatched to Bletchley Park for decoding.
19. ‘Nobody ever blabbed’; like everybody else at Bletchley, code-breaker Mavis Lever was sworn to secrecy about her work.
20. The Decoding Room at Bletchley Park, nerve centre of wartime decryption.
21. Dressed for the job, women shipyard workers manoeuvre a steel girder into position. Between 1939 and 1942 the numbers of women in the workplace tripled.
22. ‘I felt that no one could possibly win the war without me!’ In 1940 QA Lorna Bradey believed the world was at her feet. This later picture shows her in battledress, which replaced the impractical, but feminine, scarlet capes and white veils.
23. For Pip Beck, her job as an R/T operator at Bomber Command seemed the fulfilment of all her romantic dreams.
24. ATS kit inspection in a typical services dormitory. Note the ‘biscuits’, in three sections, laid out to form a mattress.
25. and 26. Jean McFadyen was one of 6,000 members of the Timber Corps who worked in the forests year-round cutting timber for everything from pit props to coffins.
27. and 28. Land girl Kay Mellis from Edinburgh: ‘I must admit that, when I could thin neeps a bit better, and lift tatties a bit better, it did make me feel really good.’ Thinning turnips in the Lake District.
29. Images from the home front: a rumour has spread that this stall will be selling fish. A queue of hopeful housewives has formed, hours ahead.
30. Kerbside recycling, 1940s-style.
31. ‘Half of the lawn will grow potatoes,’ wrote Nella Last. Many housewives like her transformed their front gardens into vegetable plots.
32. Rag-and-bone women from a London branch of the WVS, collecting aluminium.
33. On VJ-day Helen Forrester (back row, far right) joined friends to celebrate. But her brave smile for the camera was a mask: she felt angry, lost and dreadfully alone.
34. Doris Scorer and her friends at the Works were bent on keeping up appearances: ‘We always hoped to look like mannequins.’
35. ‘Utility’ styles skimped on details, eliminating cuffs, frills and fullness to save fabric.
36. As skirt lengths rose, legs became more visible, and the stocking shortage became ever more problematic. This model demonstrates one solution to faking the perfect ‘seam’.
37. Christian Oldham chose to enlist in the Wrens because of the hat and the ‘nice straight uniform’ designed by Molyneux.
38. British girls were swept off their feet by the arrival of the sexy GIs. ‘Heard about the new utility knickers? One Yank – and they’re off.’
39. Verily Anderson with Marian and Rachel, 1945; childcare in wartime left her ‘sapped’ and wilting. Had fun become a thing of the past?
40. Not for all. Nightclubs and dance halls were humming throughout the war. Here, a black US serviceman in civvies teaches his partner to jitterbug.
41. Anne Popham and Graham Bell in his RAF uniform. ‘You are the dearest thing in my world,’ she wrote to him.
42. Schoolgirl Nina Mabey grew up to become Nina Bawden, well-known author of Carrie’s War, which was based on her experiences as an evacuee.
43. SOE coder Margaret Herbertson both experienced and contributed to the Allied victory in Italy in 1945.
44. Women welders were beset with danger from flying slag, burns and ‘arc eye’, partly because they often chose style over safety.
45. How to stay in fashion while fitting the caterpillar track to a tank.
46. ‘Mummy’s girl’ Thelma Ryder was sent away from home to work twelve hours a day making piston rings for aircraft.
47. Joyce Grenfell and her accompanist, Viola Tunnard, arriving in Baghdad, 1944.
48. Vera Lynn in the Far East, 1944. ‘I was an ordinary working-class girl. I was singing to my own kind.’
49. Backstage at ENSA HQ.
50. A QA tending a wounded soldier in an Italian field hospital.
51. QA Iris Ogilvie and a fellow nurse staging an upbeat publicity shot in front of a Bayeux hat shop, shortly after the Normandy landings.
52. QA Joy Taverner never questioned her early faith – ‘until Belsen’.
53. The war is over. A WAAF returns home.
54. Celebrating VJ-day in Aberdeen.
55. Christmas 1946: GI brides and their babies await passage to their new homes.
56. Happy holidays in the long, hot, post-war summer of 1947.
57. and 58. Frances Faviell; an old woman shovelling debris in the Russian Zone of Berlin. Faviell and her husband lived in the traumatised German capital from 1946 until 1949. She described ‘the grim streets with their huge mountains of rubble and mile upon mile of yawning open ruins’.
59. Vicar’s wife and activist Irene Lovelock (centre), flanked by two other leaders of the British Housewives’ League.
60. The harvest of peace, July 1948: the inauguration of the National Health Service.
61. Happy ever after? Helen Vlasto’s wedding day, 28 November 1946.
62. Peter and Phyllis Willmott in 1948, at the start of their forty-two-year marriage.
63. Laura Jesson chooses home and hearth in Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter.
Appendix: Military and Civilian Casualties among Women 1939–1945
Women’s Auxiliary Services
Killed Wounded Missing POW
Wrens 102 22
ATS (including Army Nursing Services) 335 302 94 20
WAAFs 187 420 4
Total 624 744 98 20
Civilians*
Killed or missing, believed killed Injured / detained in hospital
25,399 37,822
* figures include female Civil Defence workers.
Figures from: ‘Command Paper 6832 – Strength and Casualties of the Armed Forces and Auxiliary Services of the United Kingdom 1939 to 1945’, in W. Franklin Mellor, ed., History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Medical Series: Casualties and Medical Statistics (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1972), pp. 834–9.
Notes on Sources
The following notes give only principal sources consulted and are firmly aimed at the general reader rather than the academic. For all publication details please refer to the Select Bibliography on page 480.
At the risk of disappointing lovers of statistics, I have not credited the use of every figure throughout the book; statistical research on the Second World War is readily available. My principal statistical references derive from the following books:
Calder, Angus, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945.
Halsey, A. H., Trends in British Society since 1900: A Guide to the Changing Social Structure of Britain.
Howlett, Peter, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War.
Kynaston, David, Austerity Britain 1945–51.
Longmate, Norman, How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War.
Noakes, Lucy, Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex 1907–1948.
Summerfield, Penny, Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict.
Winter, J. M., ‘The Demographic Consequences of the War’, in H. L. Smith, ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War.
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–1955.
Certain sources recur throughout the book; in such cases
I have annotated them, for the sake of brevity, with abbreviations as follows:
AC/ENEMY Aileen Clayton, The Enemy is Listening
AC/PP Aileen Clayton, private papers
AP/A Anne Popham, author interview