Farming, Fighting and Family

by Miranda McCormick

  Moreover, Arthur Street’s literary and broadcasting work would soon resume. As early as 11 September Pamela records: ‘Pop has heard from the F.W. [Farmer’s Weekly] who do want him. So had some typing to do.’ Then on 10 November she writes: ‘BBC rang up at 10 for Pop to go & broadcast so dashed him into the train practically straight from the plough!’

  In the penultimate chapter of his book Wessex Wins, Arthur Street elaborates quite extensively on this incident. On the morning in question he was happily absorbed in his ploughing work which, as a result of his experiences in Canada some decades earlier, he had always regarded as the king of agricultural jobs:

  God was in his Heaven, the aeroplanes were in the sky, the sun shone, the birds sang, and all was as right with my little world as war would let it be. Into this ploughman’s paradise came a car, bearing Pamela with an urgent message from the B.B.C.

  ‘The B.B.C.’s just rung up, Daddy. Someone’s ill and let them down, and they want you to go to London at once to do an Armistice talk for overseas early tomorrow morning.’

  One can understand the urgency, from the BBC’s point of view, to find a replacement to give an armistice talk, commemorating the end of the First World War, in the very year that what would become the Second World War had just broken out; it needed to be given by an already seasoned and respected broadcaster such as A.G. Street. Nonetheless, Arthur’s mind was focussed on – to him – more pressing matters. His account continues:

  ‘Do they? Well, you can go home and tell the B.B.C. to chase its little self into the Thames. I’ve just got this plough to shine again, and I ain’t stoppin’ it for anybody.’

  ‘Daddy! Don’t be silly. The B.B.C. said it was important!’

  ‘So’s ploughing important, a damn sight more important than the B.B.C. Pam, you should show a better sense of values.’

  ‘P’raps, but come along. You know you were moaning some weeks ago that all your broadcasting stopped owing to the war. Well, now there’s a chance to do some, you want to go ploughing instead.’

  The upshot of this exchange was that Arthur Street went back to Ditchampton Farmhouse, rang the BBC and haggled with them for a somewhat exorbitant fee which finally persuaded him to be dragged away from his wartime ploughing and give a wireless talk which, in his opinion, many others with no agricultural commitments were equally qualified to do. But now, possibly thanks to Pamela’s urgings, at least he was firmly back in the broadcasting business.

  Happily for Arthur Street, a week or so later on 22 November, Pamela’s diary records that his foreman Charlie Noble came home, having been granted exemption from military service on the grounds that his civilian occupation was essential to the war effort. At a stroke Arthur Street was liberated from day-to-day farm work and could concentrate once again on writing and broadcasting.

  Pamela also found herself freed from some of the practical farming side of her war work, although this in itself caused her to feel guilty. However her parents had evidently decided that during the Christmas period her earlier efforts should be in some small measure rewarded, and that she should be given, albeit it in a low-key way, the party that had been cancelled earlier that autumn. Evidently a sufficient number of Pamela’s young friends had been granted time off war work for the Christmas period. The party went well, for on the evening of the day in question, Pamela records: ‘the party was a huge success & I think everyone enjoyed themselves enormously.’

  And so the tumultuous year of 1939 drew to a close, with Pamela still performing limited, largely secretarial, war work on the farm, and Arthur Street now firmly established as one of the leading voices of British agriculture. In an article later re-published in Hitler’s Whistle, ever conscious of the importance of British farming as one of the main lines of national defence, Arthur Street signed off his final piece for the year as follows:

  And so, although these are the last notes for 1939, I have decided to wish all my friends, neither a Happy nor a Prosperous New Year. Instead, I wish them a New Year during which, whether the war ends or continues, the townsfolk of Britain will realize and appreciate the enormous value of that stable godsend, the land of their own country.

  Three

  The ‘Phoney War’ and Descriptions of ‘Dunkirk’ (January–June 1940)

  For British civilians – particularly those living in the countryside – the ‘phoney war’ continued well into May 1940. However, out at sea the conflict was already being waged in deadly earnest. No sooner had England declared war on Germany, than on 3 September 1939 the Nazis demonstrated their indiscriminate ruthlessness (in a horrible echo of the sinking of the Lusitania in the early months of the First World War) by sinking the passenger liner Athenia near the starting-point of her journey across the Atlantic. The German navy, and in particular their U-boats, would immediately become a lethal menace to Allied shipping, both military and civilian. Meanwhile Allied troops were massing near the Belgian border, where any immediate land offensive was expected.

  Just how much of this news filtered through to the general British public is unclear; certainly there are no direct references to it in Pamela’s diaries for the period. Instead she constantly emphasises the ‘unreality’ of the war. On 3 January 1940 Pamela records selling programmes for an amateur production of Cinderella, and then being taken skating by friends. Her diary entry continues: ‘Strange as it may seem from this there is still a war.’

  Pamela’s first opportunity to engage in direct war work, albeit of a mundane nature, arose in early 1940 when she was taken on by the Food Office at the council offices in nearby Bourne Hill, issuing ration books and identity discs: ‘January 5th Had to go & see Mr Smart about a job in the F.O. and am starting tomorrow – terrific.* Wonder what I’ll do and be like.’

  It appears that the following day, 6 January, was something of a red-letter day for more than one reason: ‘Started my job. Wonderful muddle. ½ day … Ronnie came to dinner and we went to the White Hart dance and it was marvellous. I don’t know whether it was 12th night but I have actually been kissed which seems extraordinary when you come to think about it.’ A few days later Pamela was invited to a dance by another young man, after which she reports: ‘Rex was very very nice & kissed me goodnight which was amazing’.

  Pamela’s love life may have been improving, but things were not destined to go so smoothly in the workplace. As early as 8 January she records:

  My boj [sic]. Very hard day as heaps of people in and the start of rationing.

  January 15th My boj still going on and I haven’t got the sack yet.

  January 23rd Still boj & boj. Wonder if I’ll get very boj-like. It’s a great pity I wasn’t more appreciative of time before. Now there isn’t any.

  There follows a series of diary entries that show that Pamela was becoming increasingly exhausted and frequently obliged to take time off work. Finally on 2 March she reveals: ‘Ma took me to the doctors & that is the end of my boj – well – well – well!!!’

  Pamela was not the only member of the family to have suffered from ill-health during the early months of 1940. As she writes on 1 April, when her mother was in bed with a heavy cold: ‘It’s been a terrible winter & Ma & Pa have had continual colds every other week …’ But on 7 April, Arthur Street’s 48th birthday, the Street household was evidently in a happier mood: ‘Pop’s birthday … Planted a walnut tree with great celebration that I gave him …’ In the final pages of his book Wessex Wins, Arthur Street expands on how this gift symbolised his faith in the eventual outcome of the war:

  In the spring of 1940 I sought a more tangible way of expressing my faith in Britain’s future than by mere protestations in words, either spoken or printed. So when Pamela enquired what I wanted for my forty-eighth birthday I informed her that I wished to plant a tree, a walnut-tree, for I had always deplored that Ditchampton Farm lacked this necessary feature. Wonderingly she procured one, and on the 7th April 1940 I planted it with my own hands.

  At this age no man can plant a tre
e unless he has faith in the future of his country and of himself, and this the war has given me … I have planted my walnut-tree in the sure and certain faith that if I am spared to farm Ditchampton Farm when it first produces nuts I shall be living under a British flag and system of government that will permit me to offer those nuts to whomsoever I may please.

  This was the kind of wartime propaganda material Arthur Street was encouraged to write. Whether or not he truly believed his own words, the events of the day after his birthday, however, must have caused him to question this faith, for his daughter recorded: ‘April 8th Germany has invaded Denmark & Norway – in complete control of the former and has landed at several places in latter. It’s terrific. The spring offensive. What will happen?’

  From now on the war comes much more into focus in Pamela’s diary. On 17 April she recorded that the whole Street family went down to Southampton to wave goodbye to her cousin Philip, who had enlisted in the navy, commenting that ‘the docks were absolutely alive’. On 27 April Pamela wrote: ‘The war goes on like a great big weight which gets a bit heavier every day.’ The ever-perceptive Arthur Street clearly recognised the impact the war was having on the womenfolk of his household and did his best to lighten this weight. On the following day, 28 April, Pamela records: ‘Pop took Mummy and I out to the Haunch* to feed and drive through Downton. It is a very nice world when you can forget the war.’ But there was no escaping the bleak news that by now was being broadcast daily, as the entries in Pamela’s diary continue:

  May 3rd The situation in Norway gets blacker every day.

  May 4th We’ve retreated a lot in Norway. I think if Daddy doesn’t want me I shall go & do something in the Infirmary, because I’m just useless at the moment

  May 10th Hitler has invaded Holland and Belgium – Poland, Czech, Norway, Denmark and now this – it’s awful …

  Pamela was by no means as useless as her self-deprecating diary entry for 4 May suggests, for on 13 and 14 May her entries read respectively: ‘Tractored all day – very burnt’, and ‘Tractored all the morning & got very brown’. Additionally during this entire period she was continuing to do typing and other office work for her father and drive him to and from Salisbury station when he was summoned to London to broadcast.

  On 15 May Pamela wrote: ‘Pop has joined the local Defence for Parachute troops. Holland has given in.’ The moment when Arthur Street was finally able to enlist with the LDV** was of particular significance. Arthur had been deeply hurt by his rejection from active service, on account of his deformed feet, by the military authorities both in Canada and England during the First World War. Therefore the opportunity to defend his country – albeit at the more mature age of 48 – would have been a source of great pride, and he subsequently took his duties very seriously. Pamela later wrote about the moment when the call for LDV volunteers went out:

  On Wednesday, May 15th, after Holland gave in, we all sat listening to the wireless as Anthony Eden broadcast a request for Local Defence Volunteers … It was a glorious late spring evening and, as soon as the broadcast ceased, my father left the room and I heard his car going down the drive. I wondered where he could possibly be going. Next day I discovered that he had been the first round at Wilton Police Station to put his name down. At last, in middle age, he found that his services were not rejected by those in charge of defending his country.

  Possibly spurred on by her father’s example, Pamela quickly volunteered to help out at Tower House, the local emergency military hospital, where a few months later she would become a qualified VAD* nurse. So on 18 May her diary entry reads: ‘Went into T H for the first time … Didn’t do really very much but liked being there.’

  Pamela’s entry for Friday 24 May touches both on domestic life and the catastrophic events that were now taking place on the other side of the English Channel: ‘Started hay-making. Tom & Ian [the two billeted officers] went off v early this morning. Horrid feeling inside … The Germans have got Boulogne, Abbeville but they can’t win because they mustn’t. There’s been heaps of internal arrests of fascists here.’

  For the next couple of days Pamela continued working at Tower House, but then on 27 May her diary states: ‘Mary Way rang up about some canteen work [at Salisbury station] for a rush tomorrow.’ This would have been Pamela’s first inkling that ‘Operation Dynamo’, the evacuation of British, French and Belgian troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in late May and early June 1940, was already under way. The Allied forces massing along the Franco-Belgian border – from which any German offensive was expected – had been taken completely by surprise by the Blitzkrieg tactics of a second, simultaneous, rapid offensive of Panzer divisions through the seemingly impenetrable natural barrier of the Ardennes region south of the French protective Maginot Line. The German tanks suddenly appeared at the Allies’ rear, sweeping up towards the French coast, thus effectively cutting them off from any retreat westwards back into French territory. One by one the French towns near or on the coast – Abbeville, Boulogne, Calais – were taken by the Germans, and an emergency plan to evacuate the Allied troops from Dunkirk was implemented. In addition to Royal Naval vessels, an armada of smaller craft of all shapes and sizes crossed and re-crossed the English Channel to pick up the exhausted troops waiting on the Dunkirk beaches, both rescuers and those waiting to be rescued being continuously strafed and dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe or under fire from German positions inland. With hindsight it seems little short of a miracle that some 340,000 Allied troops made it back onto English soil in this ad hoc manner.

  Pamela’s diary for this crucial period of the war is a précis of the events she witnessed and the small part she played in them; however it shows how the enormity and gravity of the situation quickly became apparent. Her diary for late May and early June 1940 continues:

  May 28th … Cut up bread and butter at the canteen for B.E.F.* troops coming back from Belgium because Leopold has given in to Hitler and been a complete traitor to his country …

  May 29th On the station all day – our troops are pouring back – it’s terrible – practically the whole of our army trapped and trying to get out. The navy have been marvellous but the troops keep saying about the incessant bombing and they’re terribly done up.

  May 30th Station 2–6. Still coming back. The awful atrocities the Germans have committed are terrific. It’s a help to feel you can do a little even if it’s only giving a few something to drink. They’re so grateful …

  May 31st An ambulance train went through either today or yesterday but it’s such a rush it’s difficult to remember. We gave them tea – it’s more like a nightmare than anything else. Vi fetched me because the roads are blocked. Pop out all night.

  June 1st Spent the day resting as on night duty tonight … They’re getting frightfully strict because of all this fifth column business and the roads are blocked.

  June 2nd From 10 last night till 10 this morning. Spent the night in a railway carriage … it’s just fantastic – I don’t think I’m me at all. Awful rush in the middle of the night – and French through this morning. But we’ve got to come through one day I’m certain …

  June 3rd Hay-making at home but still the station for me because the French troops are still coming through …

  June 4th Station all the morning. Pop hay-making & I feel I should be there but this evacuation job will soon be over I think. Thank heaven they were able to get them out – it’s a miracle but it gives you some hope. Mummy brought 4 invalid soldiers from Tower House to tea …

  This wartime experience on Salisbury station made a lifelong impression on Pamela, and she later wrote or lectured about it in different formats. Perhaps the most vivid version was the fictional account she gave of it at the beginning of her novel Many Waters. The main characters here are based on two of her maternal aunts rather than her younger self, but there is no doubt that the events described are exactly as Pamela herself would have witnessed them:

  The trains kept coming.

&nbs
p; There had been over twenty of them passing through Westonbury [Pamela’s fictitious name for Salisbury] station during the night – one roughly every half-hour. All their carriages and corridors were packed with soldiers in varying degrees of exhaustion. In the dimness of the black-out it had just been possible for volunteer helpers to discern their dishevelled bodies, some stretched out, dead to the world, lying half on top of each other on the floor; some without boots, their feet so swollen that they were incapable of struggling to the windows for the cups of hot sweet tea and sandwiches being handed to their more fortunate companions, who did their best to pass them back inside. Occasionally, an excited French voice could be heard above the deeper gruff chorus of ‘Bless you lady’, ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  It was by now eight o’clock on the morning of Saturday, June 1st 1940. A bright summer sun was just beginning to break through the early morning mist covering the valleys of southern England. The survivors of the British Expeditionary Force were coming back from Dunkirk.

  When fresh volunteers arrived at the station to relieve those who had been on night shift, Katy Mason and her sister, May Lodge, drove back to Netherford to snatch a few hours’ sleep – although not before they had dealt with the various messages which had been thrust into their hands by men desperate to let their families know they were safe. Scrawled on the back of cigarette packets or odd scraps of paper, Katy and May had sent off quite a collection of these since they had offered their services at the beginning of the week. Where possible, they telephoned relatives. If not, they posted the missives, made all the more poignant by their brevity: ‘I’m O.K. Mum’, ‘Be seeing you, Ginger.’