Like most of their friends and neighbours, the evacuation from Dunkirk had taken them completely by surprise. Even now, witnessing but an infinitesimal part of it with their own eyes and listening to snatches of servicemen’s conversation, it was hard to take in that it was really happening. Official news was, of necessity, negligible. It did not seem possible that the British Army was withdrawing, defeated, from the continent, that some of the men to whom they ministered that morning had been ferried across the Straits of Dover by the Margate lifeboat – others, by a small Thamesside tug. The situation was unthinkable, unprecedented, a nightmare from which they would awake …
The authorities – and indeed many civilians, including Pamela’s parents – fully expected the Germans to launch an immediate invasion on the heels of the retreating troops. The reference in Pamela’s diary entry for 31 May to her cousin Vi being sent to collect her from Salisbury station and the roads being blocked was a direct consequence of this belief. If the Germans were to invade, Pamela’s parents wanted her with them at home. The fictional characters in Many Waters describe the efforts being made by the authorities to outwit any invaders:
As Katy turned down the lane towards their home, the signpost saying NETHERFORD ¼ MILE had already disappeared and they could see anti-tank traps being erected a little further on towards Wilhampton [Pamela’s fictitious name for Wilton]. Nazi invasion was feared imminent and both women knew that the Government had given orders that anything which gave an indication of the name, direction or distance to any place must be obliterated.
Thankfully the Germans did not press home their advantage. Pamela’s diary for the remainder of the first week of June finds her back at work on the farm hay-making, but also intermittently helping out again on Salisbury station: ‘June 7th Station again in afternoon because the B.E.F. troops are all over the place & returning again and there is such a lot to do.’ Accommodating a beaten army back in England was a monumental and hitherto unparalleled operation. Emergency military camps on Salisbury Plain would have catered for a fair number, but there was much to-ing and fro-ing of personnel, which kept the canteen volunteers at Salisbury station busy for several days after the evacuation had officially been completed. But finally Pamela’s duties came to end, and she found herself back at Ditchampton Farm, brooding on how best to contribute to the war effort: ‘June 11th Hay-maked all day. I broke the sweep. Life is so busy just now there isn’t time for anything. I am having a terrific toss-up with myself. Shall I join the Fannies or be a nurse. I’m late in the day, like England, but the war is just terrible and I’m desperate.’
More bad news continued to come from across the Channel, as Pamela carries on:
June 12th The Germans are pressing on like a tidal wave but they’ll have to wash back some day, I expect.
June 14th Paris has fallen. It’s too bad to think about. Somehow life goes on … but when you think of what they’re doing out in France it makes anything short of a 12 hr day seem wrong.
Evidently this latest calamity forced Pamela to make up her mind about her immediate wartime role, for the very next day her entry reads simply: ‘June 15th I am going to try to be a V.A.D.’
* * *
The evacuation from Dunkirk was also being witnessed, at rather closer quarters, by a young man whom Pamela was shortly to meet. David McCormick, having enlisted in the Royal Artillery at the outbreak of the war, finally received instructions to report to the Fifth Field Training Regiment in Dover at the beginning of March 1940. Like Pamela, he later chronicled some of his wartime experiences, including his time spent at Dover Barracks before, during and after ‘Operation Dynamo’. David’s memoir begins with a description of his attitude towards the outbreak of the Second World War, evidently shared by many young people of his generation, including Pamela herself:
Before the war I was like Voltaire’s Candide. I believed that all was for the best in the best of worlds. I have a profound faith in human nature and am one of those who seek to see the best in others, and overlook their worst qualities … Also I am the possessor of one asset, which, if overindulged, becomes a weakness: that of seeing the other man’s point of view. Consequently I could not believe that Germany really intended a war. I thought then that perhaps after all the Germans had been rather harshly treated at Versailles,* and I could understand why they wanted room to expand their increasing population. In the early stages of the Nazi aggression I thought perhaps all was just and for the best …
When I allowed myself to look at the facts I was very worried but I refused to admit that after the calamity of the Great War that Europe could possibly allow such a horror to occur again. Consequently when war actually descended upon us I was not surprised, but rather permitted myself to be taken by surprise.
The Dunkirk evacuation rapidly disabused David of such a youthful, Panglossian attitude. In his memoir, having described his period of training, he goes on to give a vivid account of how he and his companions heard about and experienced the unfolding events:
While we had been playing at soldiers at Dover events had taken place on the other side of the channel. The Germans had started their advance through Belgium, and soon we began to realise that all was not well. Then came the withdrawal of the B.E.F., and the gunfire, which we had heard occasionally when the wind was in the west, became gradually a continuous distant thunder. In the evenings the sky was lit up with a reddish glow. One evening volunteers were called for to go down to the docks. There we found our troops arriving from the other side, haggard, tired, and dirty. Some said ‘the damn froggies’ had let them down, others that our anti-tank rifles were no good. ‘Our bullets just bounce off the tanks,’ they said, ‘the Germans rush down the roads in their tanks throwing out hand grenades as they pass. If we do hold them up for a few minutes, they just radio back for aeroplanes, and then we get bombed to blazes. We can’t stop them and we never see the R.A.F.’ Units were being continually cut off from the main body, and no one knew where anyone else was. They told us that some of the French were going to defend Paris, others just going. They had seen groups of French soldiers surrendering, being relieved of their arms and told to go, and then being shot in the back when they had gone a few yards away. Forty men who had been hiding from machine-gun fire under the pier at Calais arrived in a tug. They said they had been rescued just before shooting themselves. They had been watching the Germans herding refugees down to the water’s edge, and then mowing them down with machine-guns. The Maid of Orleans came in covered with holes. Thirty had been killed and ninety wounded by shells and bombs while leaving the harbour. Somebody said the Maid of Kent had been sunk. On one destroyer all the officers on the bridge had been sniped whilst entering Calais. Everyone seemed to have seen deliberate bombing and machine-gunning of refugees. One soldier, who had tramped to the coast from Rheims, said ‘You probably won’t believe it but I saw a motor-cycle combination captured by the Germans, who shot one tommy and tied the other, who was wounded, into the side-car, then poured petrol over him and set the outfit on fire.’
David commented about this last-mentioned incident in a letter to his parents: ‘If these fiends ever come to this country or we ever get to Germany I think we will know what to do with them.’
Three of David’s letters to his parents from this period still survive. Despite the restrained style in which it was then customary for young men of David’s background to write, it is clear that the events he witnessed affected him profoundly, as the following extracts reveal:
Thursday May 23rd Of course we have heard a lot of guns & bombing going on & fairly frequent air raid warnings. Some people in our regiment are spending all night stretcher-bearing down on Dover. I expect our turn will come soon …
For myself I feel that I am in a very dangerous place now, if the Germans decide to attack England either in their flat-bottomed boats or by parachutes. I feel that an air raid or two on Dover are only to be expected, but we are quite a long way from the Harbour & should be quite safe.
But if they decide on any night parachuting on the days I am out I might just as well be in the B.E.F. [David was frequently out much of the night on road-block duty] …
We are rigidly confined to Barracks. Two Sundays running I have spent on duty all day & I am feeling quite depressed about everything …
Tuesday May 28th I don’t think now that anyone could take anything but a very pessimistic view of things. I have been down to Dover harbour lending a hand & am very shocked at what I have seen & heard. I am also out every other night on road duty, & the other night when we had three German planes over I had no sleep for 25 hours & then only 1½ hours, then on again for 14 …
The air attack was a magnificent sight. As far as I know the Germans only dropped a mine outside the harbour, which went off with a terrific bang. We saw two shot down & splendid fireworks for about ten minutes. All the pompoms all along the coast got going with lines of red bullets & there were several heavy A.A. guns going off & the guns from the destroyers in the harbour.
Wednesday May 29th We are up practically all night on this something road guard, which is a 24 hour affair lasting till 6 p.m., we then go to bed & are woken & taken down to the docks at 1.45, where we undergo physical strain & mental torture until 8.30 carrying corpses about & loose hands & brains are all in the days work. I feel very upset & sometimes feel like crying when I am down there. It is all so pointless & I hate the callousness with which it is treated by the majority of our people who chiefly go down to see what they can pinch in the way of cigarettes & money from the hit lying about in the dock …
It seems a miracle to me that Dover has been left by the Germans, as practically all the B.E.F. troops have been landed here. One night about a week ago we were having a slack time down there & fell asleep on a whole lot of packing cases, which we discovered when day broke were about 1000 land mines & crates of hand grenades. One bomb on these would have just about finished Dover harbour I should think …
I feel that our danger is over now. If the Germans were going to bomb us they would have long ago. Now that they have missed their market they would be very unwise to waste their planes on Dover. But I still feel slightly uncomfortable when sleeping in England’s front line trenches, which incidentally are extremely uncomfortable & make one into a white & chalky mess, & shall be quite pleased if the rumours that we are going to be moved to Wales or Gloucester materialise …
In the event, David and eleven of his companions, who had earlier been singled out for officer training, had to wait a couple more months before being posted, neither to Wales nor Gloucester, but to Larkhill Camp on Salisbury Plain, where they soon found themselves being entertained, during their time off duty, by local families such as the Streets.
Notes
* Some of the adjectives Pamela used in her diaries then had different meanings. By ‘terrific’ she meant ‘terrifying’. By ‘fantastic’ she meant ‘unbelievable’.
* The Haunch of Venison, at the time considered the best restaurant in Salisbury.
** Local Defence Volunteers, as they were known before they were renamed the Home Guard.
* Voluntary Aid Detachment, an organisation providing amateur nursing services to British and Allied forces during the First and Second World Wars.
* The British Expeditionary Force, first deployed along the Franco-Belgian borders with Germany after war was declared in September 1939. Hostilities began in May 1940 following the German invasion of France.
* This was the peace treaty signed at the Palace of Versailles in 1919 after the end of the First World War, which amongst other stipulations required Germany to cede much previously German-held territory to its neighbours France, Belgium, Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Four
A Defiant Nation: Nursing, Officer Training and Romance
(July–December 1940)
Although the anticipated invasion of England by the Germans following the evacuation from Dunkirk never materialised, British civilians were kept on tenterhooks all through the long, hot summer of 1940. Reconnaissance photographs revealed fleets of flat-bottomed barges waiting in ports across the Channel. However these craft were designed for river use rather than for potentially choppy open seas, and would have made an easy target for the RAF. Therefore the Germans’ strategy was for the RAF to be annihilated before attempting the crossing (code-named ‘Operation Sea-lion’), which needed to take place before the onset of the equinoctial tides and potential storms in September.
Events did not go as smoothly as the German High Command anticipated, however. This was the period about which Winston Churchill, who had taken over as prime minister in May following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, famously declared, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ During what became known as the Battle of Britain, young British airmen waged ceaseless battle against the numerically superior German air force in the skies of southern Britain. Both sides suffered severe losses, but the RAF proved so surprisingly skilful and resilient that by 17 September ‘Operation Sea-lion’ had to be postponed indefinitely.
During the course of the summer, however, while the outcome was still in doubt, British civilians could only watch and hope as vapour trails from aerial dogfights criss-crossed the skies of southern England. Most of the action took place in the South East, so for residents of Wilton and the surrounding district sightings of overhead skirmishes were rare. In her diaries during this period Pamela frequently comments – almost with feelings of guilt – on the sense of unreality that such monstrous events should be taking place only some 80 miles or so away from her place of comparative safety, or indeed only 30 miles away in the instance of the bombing of southern coastal ports, which had begun in earnest. Nevertheless air-raid sirens constantly interrupted the Street family’s sleep, and they frequently spent nights in the cellar. As Pamela’s diary attests, Arthur Street was out most nights on LDV duty, which he took very seriously.
In order to qualify to become a VAD, Pamela had to spend fifty hours working in an ordinary hospital. Consequently her diary entry for 17 June reads: ‘Saw the Sister at the Infirmary & can start on Wednesday morning …’ Her entry for later that day continues: ‘France gave in at one o’clock. We are in splendid isolation.’ The next day Pamela mentions ‘seeing about uniform’; then on 19 June she writes: ‘Started in the children’s ward & fed babies … No settled armistice v France Germany yet …’ On the following day her diary reads: ‘Women’s ward. Had an air-raid warning last night … Stayed in the back hall & Pop went out in uniform.’
This mention of uniform is significant. It took a long while for the Local Defence Volunteers to be adequately equipped with uniforms and weaponry, but uniforms were of psychological importance to the LDV members, enabling them to show that they were a serious force to be reckoned with. Going out ‘in uniform’ would have been a source of pride particularly for Arthur Street, after his experiences of rejection during the First World War.
Pamela’s next entry reads: ‘Men’s ward – medical. Am petrified of the sisters – do everything wrong always …’
Given Pamela’s highly developed conscience she was doubtless being far too hard on herself, but this was to be a continuing problem throughout her time both at the Salisbury Infirmary and again when she arrived at Tower House, the emergency military hospital. Feelings of guilt and low self-esteem clearly caused her to take all too seriously the hospital discipline meted out to her. Moreover the lack of physical stamina, from which she seems always to have suffered, ill-equipped her for the arduous hours, including night-duty, that nursing entailed. Her entries for the following few days bear further witness to this:
June 22nd Men’s surgical. Saw some dressings – didn’t mind all that. Get on very well with the mental defectives, otherwise feel a fool & my cap won’t stay on …
June 23rd [a Sunday] Men’s surgical again … I am a hopeless nurse – an old man yelled for a bedpan in the middle of a service & I forgot to use th
e screens …
June 25th Casualty. Awful sisters. Saw an op on baby. Didn’t mind but felt a fool because of the sister. Came home – have finished. Air raid hooter last night – stayed in the cellar.
Pamela had now completed her fifty hours’ nursing apprenticeship at the infirmary. In the interval between working there and starting at Tower House, she found herself once more caught up with the everyday life of the Street family. On 27 June she and her parents dined again at the Haunch of Venison to celebrate the publication of Arthur Street’s latest book, his only detective novel, A Crook in the Furrow. In her diary Pamela comments about this, ‘Ludicrous, isn’t it?’ This is one of the many references in her diary to the incongruity between the mundane domestic events that were still taking place despite the war, and the war itself. Another entry a few days later reinforces this feeling: ‘June 30th Some of the Southern Command are coming to Wilton House … The Peacocks [a theatrical agent and his wife, friends of her parents] came to tea and there’s a war on!’ By 3 July Pamela’s recent period of inactivity during wartime was clearly troubling her conscience: ‘Pop has to go to London tomorrow to the House of Commons to report on an agricultural debate. I’m ashamed of myself not having really done a thing. I do hope I’ll soon get to Tower House.’ She did not have much longer to wait, however, because on Sunday 7 July her diary reads: ‘Went to the hospital & matron said she’d take me on but not my hair sort of thing – anyway I’ve got to put it back. Ha!’ By this time Pamela had painstakingly grown her hair into the then fashionable ‘page-boy bob’, and was clearly disappointed at having to hide it under a nurse’s cap. Presumably her hair passed muster on the following day, when she finally reported for duty at Tower House. But once again her diary reveals the continuing feelings of unreality and confusion that both she and others around her were experiencing: ‘It’s all a bit phoney, gosh what a war. Two new officers are billeted on us. People poked hither and thither & I don’t believe anyone knows what they are doing – at least I know I don’t.’
Farming, Fighting and Family Page 7
