Farming, Fighting and Family

by Miranda McCormick

  The diary entry for the next day includes a prescient remark by Arthur Street: ‘Pa thinks the war’ll go on for years. It’s just too depressing to think about …’ Evidently Arthur Street was not alone in this opinion, for on 15 July Pamela writes: ‘The invasion hasn’t happened yet and we’re all on tenderhooks [sic]. Sort of bomb and bomb back and nothing else. Everyone says it will be a long war …’ On a happier note, Pamela records on 6 August: ‘Pa has just finished a bumper harvest. The wheat we rolled turned out marvellous.’

  One thing that would have pleased Arthur Street, and his fellow farmers, was that during the summer of 1940 the weather seems to have been on their side. The results of this early harvest must have been a fitting reward for British farmers, who had been encouraged, and indeed in some cases compelled by local War Agricultural Committees, to plough up their pastures for cereal production.

  Pamela’s diary shows that she spent much of her time off duty in bed recuperating, often pondering on whether she had chosen the right wartime occupation. On 16 July she writes: ‘Spent my second day in bed – Read ‘I was Hitler’s Maid’ which was absolutely fantastic and almost unbelievable … I can’t help it but I keep wishing I’d ATTED* if this war is going on. It’s awful to recriminate like this but sometimes I hate nursing like poison.’

  Unfortunately for Pamela, she soon had to buckle down to her nursing duties even more seriously. Instead of living with her parents in Wilton, some 3 miles away from the hospital, she was billeted on the Bishop of Sherborne in Crane Street, just outside the confines of the Cathedral Close in Salisbury. However terrified Pamela may have been of the Matron of Tower House, the Hon. Gertrude Best, the latter was evidently an astute and humane commander of her particular military team who took a personal interest in the staff under her command. On becoming aware of the sheltered upbringing of her latest recruit, she appears to have identified a particularly appropriate billet. Her choice was a sound one, because Pamela quickly became fond of her new hosts, describing Bishop Rodgers and his wife in her diary as ‘frightfully sweet’. Her diary reveals that on 7 August she went to a party, ‘and the Bishop waited up for me!’ Later in life Pamela elaborated on this incident:

  I had promised to be back by 10.30 and was there on the dot – he was too nice a man to let down and I knew how worried he and his wife were about the responsibility of a young nurse in their home. They usually locked up and went to bed at 9 p.m. As I returned to the fold, there he was standing in the hall wearing full regalia, including gaiters, beaming with pleasure at my safe and prompt return and proffering a tray on which there was a glass and a thermos of hot milk, explaining that his wife had already retired. Not the sort of thing the young of today would credit!

  Pamela’s stay with Bishop Rodgers and his wife proved relatively short-lived. On 19 August her diary reads: ‘Matron said I was to go on night duty tonight. Had the morning off to part from the Rodgers with great reluctance. Horrid having to come up to the Home.’ Many years later she expanded on this entry, explaining the reasons for her change of lodging:

  Nurses on night duty all had to live in quarters within the hospital grounds, where a vigilant sister snooped round to see we were in bed by 11 a.m. each day. I found difficulty in sleeping. It was always light and the partitioned room had two cousins who made an awful racket and played Just One of Those Things on a gramophone.

  Pamela’s diary entries for the next couple of weeks are of necessity rather sketchy and scrappy given the change in her routine, but give a glimpse of how she was feeling during her period of night duty: ‘Sleep and work, work and sleep. Ack-acking* this morning along the road. Fantastic. Where are we? – what will happen? … Some day will everything come right? Will there be a future before it’s too late?’ A welcome relief came towards the end of August when Pamela was unexpectedly given a few days off duty. During this time Arthur Street took her to London for a meeting with a company interested in making a film of his second book, Strawberry Roan. Just how much this treat was appreciated can be judged from Pamela’s enthusiastic entry for the day in question: ‘August 30th Went to London. Absolute heaven because I haven’t been outside a 5 mile area for ages … Went to Blackheath to the film company people. Great fun. Had 3 air raid sirens – got home safely at 8. Gorgeous drive. Defences everywhere. All phoney.’

  On the following day, a Saturday, another significant event in Pamela’s life took place, though she could not have realised it at the time. Her diary records that she went to a dance at the very last minute. On the Sunday afterwards she states: ‘Two people from Larkhill, David McCormick & Dick Bramley, came to supper. They were at the dance & rather fun. They say too that the army deprives you of all sort of confidence – same sort of feeling I have. Horrid.’ This, then, was the weekend during which Pamela first met her future husband David, and it seems that they found they had things in common, even if – at least on Pamela’s side – it was not exactly love at first sight. A passage in Pamela’s later memoir explains the context in which she and David met:

  At that time there were a number of well-meaning matrons in the district who felt that their particular contribution to the war effort was to entertain the troops by getting them introduced to suitable girls. They were known as ‘mesdames’, although I’m not sure I then knew the full meaning of the word. I met my future husband in a Paul Jones at the White Hart Hotel in Salisbury just after the Battle of Britain. I don’t know who Paul Jones was, but he had a lot to answer for …

  Any thoughts of romance on Pamela’s part would have been almost immediately off the menu, however, as she had to return to work at the hospital the very next day. Evidently it was not an easy week. Her diary entry for Tuesday 7 September finds her letting off steam:

  If S [one of the Sisters] has to suffer my cooking till the war is over she’d kill me. It’s awful awful awful – everything I do is wrong. I feel put upon and a fool & everything else & I’ve lost all the self-respect I ever had … What a life! Oh!! Oh!! Oh!!

  At the end of the week a far greater worry was about to come. Outside Pamela’s narrow world of the hospital, the Battle of Britain was nearing its climax. On Saturday 7 September Arthur Street drove up to stay in London in order to deliver a BBC broadcast the following morning. Pamela’s diary for Sunday 8 September reads:

  London had the most frightful air raid last night. Came home [from the hospital] in the morning because I knew Mummy would be terribly worried. Daddy got through all right and arrived 11.30 thank goodness. It’s awful to think about …

  In his book about the Home Guard, From Dusk Till Dawn, Arthur gives a vivid account of this experience, which is worth quoting almost in its entirety:

  Without warning, during the first week-end of September 1940, came the threat of invasion. On that Saturday afternoon, evening and all night the Luftwaffe carried out its first real blitz on London. The enemy bombed that city almost continuously from 3 p.m. until about 3 a.m. Here I do not speak from hearsay, as I was sleeping at my club in order to keep a broadcasting engagement timed for 8.30 on Sunday morning.

  Not having enough military knowledge to know what was happening, I played bridge until the first ‘All Clear’ at about seven o’clock. Then, finding that a friend and fellow member, Commander Kenneth Edwards, R.N., agreed with me that September spelt oysters, we set out to find some. As we crossed Piccadilly the siren sounded again, but we both agreed that as this might well be our last chance of oysters, the thing to do was to walk on to Bentley’s. There my companion found an old shipmate behind the bar who said that in spite of the Luftwaffe he would open oysters as long as we would pay for them, so we did our best, and a good best it was. We then went our several ways.

  Later on when I was back at the club the blitz began in earnest, and continued throughout that long summer night. We soon decided that a card-room three stories up was not the best place under the circumstances, and retired to the basement to continue the game. After a while bridge did not seem to be so interes
ting as usual, so every now and again some of us went outside to watch. We heard the crack of ack-ack guns and the heavy crump of enemy bombs. The attack seemed to be mainly along the river, and soon we were to see a glow in the sky as though the whole of the east of London was on fire. Somewhere about two o’clock there was a lull, and one or two of us crept along the street with an idea of getting some bacon and eggs at a Corner House. But before we had gone fifty yards a bomb dropped somewhere on the other side of the river, but close enough to make us hesitate; whereupon a constable advised us that bacon and eggs might be dearly bought. So we retired to the club basement, and gave both the Luftwaffe and the bridge-table best for a while.

  All that may sound silly, callous and impossible, but I am telling it just as it happened. Also the time factor must be considered. At that date no one had experienced night bombing and therefore we did not realize what was happening. At that date one could motor up to London occasionally, and perhaps enjoy some oysters.

  Anyway, that was my end of it, and I drove away from Langham Place at nine o’clock next morning in complete ignorance of what had happened in the countryside. Once out of London I was stopped by regular soldiers or Home Guards at every bend in the road until I arrived at Salisbury. This could not be merely a local exercise, so just west of Staines I enquired the reason from a regular sergeant. ‘Don’t rightly know,’ he said. ‘But there’s one hell of a flap on, and we’ve been stood to all night. You’d best go careful.’

  Arthus Street goes on to talk about church bells ringing out somewhere in southern England, which raised the alarm ‘from London to Bristol and beyond’.* He himself was bitterly disappointed in having missed out on the action:

  … And I, an enthusiastic Home Guard, had missed this first real job of work, simply because I had been broadcasting. Somehow that hurt.

  London was at the time the prime target. Out of the immediate firing line, however, Wiltshire country-folk could still occasionally forget about the war, as Pamela’s entry for the following day illustrates: ‘Pop has sent me a cheque for £10 – lovely – very nice of him seeing that I have been actually paid £5 6s 11d. Home tomorrow!’ Pamela eagerly awaited her spells of leave from the hospital, and her relief to be home at Ditchampton Farm is evident from the next day’s entry: ‘Home, sleep & food!!! Thank heaven. Lovely. Bought a frock and some shoes.’

  Pamela had long since metamorphosed from a lanky teenager with acne into a striking, tall, slender young woman with fashionably coiffed dark hair and large hazel eyes set beneath winged eyebrows. Arthur Street’s present to his daughter was clearly made to help her look her best for an event that was to take place the following day. By now Pamela and David McCormick were beginning to meet on occasions when both were off duty. Pamela’s parents evidently encouraged the friendship, doing their best to provide hospitality for David and his fellow officer cadets back at Ditchampton Farm. In her later memoir Pamela wrote:

  Throughout that winter, this particular Officer/Cadet and I saw quite a lot of each other whenever he could get down from Salisbury Plain. He would take me out to dinner or the pictures; while my parents, having enlarged Ditchampton Farm just before the war and put down a parquet floor in the drawing-room and installed a radiogram, would give little tea-dances, a form of entertainment much in vogue at that time. I would bring half a dozen nurses from the hospital and my Paul Jones pick-up would bring half a dozen cadets, with whom he shared quarters near Larkhill.

  The first of these occasions took place on 15 September, a Sunday, as Pamela records: ‘[various girl friends], David, Dick, Luke etc etc came to tea. We danced. Played foolish games. Went terribly well. Di & I went out to dinner with them. I was so tired I couldn’t speak but great fun.’ The following day, however, such light relief from war work was over, with Pamela returning to the hospital: ‘Came back to school, school, school, depressed as the dickens, but I hope it will wear off. Somehow I can’t think at all these days & I’m getting slower on the uptake than ever …’

  On the next day, 17 September, Pamela was once more worrying about her father’s safety: ‘Pop may have to go to London again this week. They’re still at it. Only 80 miles away and yet it seems thousands – so peaceful down here. Everyone seems to think invasion is coming but somehow I can’t conceive it …’ This last sentiment seems to have been shared by Pamela’s nursing colleagues, as Pamela explained in her later memoir:

  Wrapped up as I was with … the day to day affairs of the Emergency Hospital on the outskirts of Salisbury … I never realised until afterwards the miracle that was taking place in the skies over the south-eastern corner of England and the seas which lapped its shores. I think we local VADs simply went about our duties, vaguely expecting Hitler to ‘come on over’.

  Pamela was by now finding her periods of night duty at the hospital increasingly arduous, as her diary entries for 19 and 21 September reveal. Sleep in the daytime was a near impossibility: ‘Bed, bed, bed, but never any proper sleep. What a life … and it’s going to be a long war … had my frightful paralysed fit again last night of not waking up.’ This last rather curious entry is explained by a clearly autobiographical passage in Pamela’s later novel Many Waters, in which the young heroine, Emily Mason, is also on night duty at a military hospital:

  She was feeling particularly weary that morning for, during the night, she had had another of her ‘attacks’. They had been happening quite frequently lately and she had been given to understand that they were what was known as ‘night nurses’ paralysis’. They occurred at the end of the two hours’ rest period, which all V.A.D.s were allowed to take, either between eleven p.m. and one a.m. or between one and three. At these times, owing to her lack of sleep during the day, she would disappear gratefully into some quiet part of the long makeshift hut – usually the linen cupboard – where she would fall into a kind of stupor. When her allotted hours were up, one or other of the nurses would come along to wake her but, although she could hear a voice urging her into action, it took several minutes for her to regain full consciousness. Meanwhile she was aware of her limbs thrashing about frantically, waiting for her mind to get the upper hand over her body. It was a horrible experience and she had begun to dread it. Sometimes she wondered whether she was altogether cut out for nursing

  By her own admission in her memoir written many decades later, Pamela was indeed probably not cut out for nursing. Explaining the reasons from a more mature perspective she wrote:

  I was no good at it. I worried. Somewhere along the line I had absorbed worry … An over-active conscience is a terrible handicap. It shackles you. One is like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail … A conscience obliges you to do what you think is right and makes you miserable if you don’t. Coupled with an over-active imagination, it is lethal. If you take up nursing, as I did, you go back to your billet tired out, wondering whether you gave Corporal Jones the right dose or whether Private Smith will have a relapse because you let him sneak an egg for breakfast when he was on M & B.*

  There are numerous instances of this type of worry in Pamela’s diary during her period of nursing. For example, on 19 October she wrote:

  Kid’s tonsils out. I just can’t take responsibility. I’m hopeless – oh dear. I wonder if I’ll ever be any good. A man with a hernia wanted lifting and I think I hurt him and I’m terrified he might have bust his stitches. It’s awful being left alone. Sometimes I just want to go and bury my head somewhere and forget everything. I don’t think I was ever the person who used to hunt and all that. Worrying’s hell. The jerrys are over whilst writing this – you can hear the wretches but sister’s got Jack Warner on the wireless. It’s all so fantastic somehow. One long nightmare.

  Pamela had already mentioned earlier in her diary how much the Sisters frightened her. One particular Sister was evidently her bête noire: ‘I can’t help it – I just can’t work with Sister S … We just get on each other’s nerves & she obviously hates me …’ Decades later Pamela was to get her own back on
this particular Sister, albeit in fictional form. In her novel Many Waters, the heroine Emily Mason, a young VAD nurse, has been asked to ‘special’ a certain Corporal Long, who was due to undergo a lumbar puncture. This meant that Emily had to put screens round his bed and give him one-to-one nursing care both before and after the surgical procedure. The incident that followed was almost certainly based on personal experience:

  Time hung heavily for both of them for, until there was a report on the spinal fluid which had been taken, she was still unable to join in the customary bustling activity of the ward. In one way Emily was relieved, as she was suffering from a particularly heavy period and would have liked nothing better than to sit down. Once, for a few moments, she perched on the end of Corporal Long’s bed, doing her best to cheer him up with a little light-hearted conversation. Unfortunately, it was exactly at this juncture that Sister Matthews suddenly put her head over the top of the screen.