Farming, Fighting and Family

by Miranda McCormick

  When it came to the question of marriage, as can be seen from the above correspondence, Pamela found that the matter had already been taken out of her hands and that she was being swept along by events. In her later memoir she explained, rather wistfully, how this somewhat unromantic state of affairs had come to pass:

  Having let my diary-keeping lapse during the last half of the war, I have no record of being formally proposed to. It just seemed to be taken for granted that we would marry and a date was fixed – July 3rd – which happened to be my fiancé’s thirtieth birthday and my mother and father’s wedding day back in 1918.

  David and Pamela were officially engaged for some six weeks. David’s return to normality after his long period of captivity inevitably proved a protracted affair. Now safely back in England, he was finally able to reveal to his shocked family and friends, in a way that had not been possible in his heavily censored letters home, just how severe his ordeal had been. For example, he told Pamela that during the last months of the war, when Red Cross parcels had dried up, he and his fellow prisoners had come so close to starvation that at one point he had swapped a dead mouse for some orange peel by way of a scrap to eat. He also recounted how at the end of the war, when their guards laid down their arms and left the camp, the prisoners had become so institutionalised that during their first few days of freedom they continued to conduct twice-daily roll-calls. It would be many months before David was able to shake off what had become instinctive prisoner-of-war habits, and the scars of warfare and captivity, both physical and psychological, would remain with him for a long time to come.

  Meanwhile wedding plans were progressing, with Pamela’s doting seamstress aunts finally able to go ahead with the wedding dress that they had been longing to make. Pamela’s best friend Sybil Edmunds was to be her bridesmaid, also wearing an outfit made by the aunts, and David’s great friend and fellow prisoner of war, Bill (Quilly) Kerruish, his best man. The marriage ceremony would take place in Wilton’s architecturally incongruous church of St Mary and St Nicholas, rebuilt from medieval ruins in the mid-nineteenth century by the Pembroke family in the style of an Italian basilica, complete with tall campanile.

  At one stage during their engagement, David took Pamela to meet his grandfather at Breckenbrough Hall. Pamela later wrote of this experience:

  I think my visit to Yorkshire must have taken place during a cold snap. In spite of the time of year there were open fires in the vast downstairs rooms, while a tweeny maid came to light one in my bedroom every morning, reappearing later on with a brass can of hot water so that I could perform my ablutions at the old-fashioned washstand. The eldest and unmarried daughter of the house was a somewhat fearsome and eccentric chatelaine, going round muttering to herself and jangling a bunch of keys. The atmosphere was remote, vaguely Wuthering Heights stuff, but most romantic, or so I felt. I fancied I was in love, or did I make myself fancy this?

  Shortly before her wedding, Pamela began keeping another small pocket diary. On 21 June she recorded an event which could have led to the postponement of the impending nuptials: ‘June 21st Daddy’s fallen down & had a bad heart attack. He is very ill. Sybby got Dr. B over at once. It is very serious.’ Whether or not Arthur Street’s heart was to blame for the fall proved uncertain. In My Father, A.G. Street Pamela describes this incident in greater detail – and her father’s reaction to it:

  Just a few days before our wedding, my father fell down in the haymaking field and hurt his shoulder. It was thought that possibly his fall might have had something to do with his heart, and the doctor raised doubts as to whether the wedding ought to be postponed.

  However, my father would have none of that. With his arm in a sling we walked up the aisle of Wilton church together on the appointed day. I do not know what his heart was doing just then, but I know my own was bouncing around in the most extraordinary manner …

  The wedding very nearly got cancelled at the last minute for an entirely different reason, which Pamela later explained:

  A few days before our wedding, my fiancé did something which seemed to me really eccentric. It was so extraordinary that I could hardly believe what he was saying on the telephone from Weybridge to Wilton. He told me that he had asked his mother’s other sister and her Brigadier husband – both of them artists – to come on our honeymoon with us … Apparently, he had been feeling terribly guilty because he and his brother had both returned safely from the war and his aunt and uncle’s only son – a commando – had been killed just before the end of it. They needed a break, he said …

  Pamela and David had earlier decided that it would be suitably romantic to spend their honeymoon at Weston-super-Mare, where they had said goodbye to each other in 1941. Despite the fact that in the summer of 1945 hotel rooms were full to bursting with American and Colonial servicemen waiting to sail home, they had managed to acquire a room at the Grosvenor Hotel, whose manageress Arthur and Vera Street happened to know. Pamela’s memoir continues:

  My fiancé had evidently cashed in on this and, without consulting me, had telephoned her and managed to get another room for his aunt and uncle, who would be arriving three days after our wedding. I was devastated and, after ringing off, burst into tears. I don’t know why I didn’t make more fuss. Yet it seemed so mean, when I thought about losing their son.

  There was an additional reason for David’s curious action, which only came to light many years later, and which is yet another indication of how unstable both young people were feeling at this landmark moment in their lives:

  Once … when I talked to my husband about this, he admitted that he hadn’t been exactly honest or fair about it all. I suppose he was having pre-wedding nerves, as I was. He felt it would be nice to have others around him whom he knew, rather than to be alone with me for ten days. He always liked a party.

  The entries in Pamela’s pocket diary give little indication as to whether or not the marriage was consummated during the honeymoon, although they do mention long periods spent in bed simply recovering from the stress of the wedding. One clue can be found in her entry for 8 July, the fifth day; Pamela, who at the time barely touched alcohol, recorded drinking two double vodka and ginger ales that evening, presumably to help her relax. It is doubtful whether this ‘medicine’ had the desired effect, for in her later memoir Pamela wrote, somewhat cryptically: ‘It was not surprising that our honeymoon was not a success.’

  Like countless other newly-weds at the end of the Second World War, David and Pamela had no home of their own or jobs to which to return. It was by no means unusual for such young couples to start their married lives living with their parents or in-laws, and David and Pamela were no exception. After their honeymoon they returned from Weston-super-Mare to the McCormick family home in Weybridge, breaking their journey for the night at the conveniently situated Ditchampton Farm. Pamela begged her mother to be allowed to stay on alone for a few days to recover, but the astute Vera Street – sensing that things had not gone exactly according to plan at Weston-super-Mare, but keen that her daughter should make a go of her marriage – forbade this, telling her daughter, ‘You are a married woman now. You should go with your husband.’

  This proved sound advice. Although Pamela never completely forgave David for asking his aunt and uncle to share their honeymoon, she appears to have put the matter behind her fairly swiftly. Her diary entries for the remainder of the year record her settling down to her new duties as wife and daughter-in-law comparatively happily. Her artistic talents were almost immediately put to use in arranging the household flowers, and she willingly did her and David’s washing and ironing, and from time to time a little cooking. She clearly enjoyed walking David’s dog Rigo, and did her best to fit into the busy St George’s Hill social life. Nevertheless, for a Wiltshire farmer’s daughter, this whole new environment continued to feel very alien.

  There are no mentions in Pamela’s diary during the summer months of 1945 of the continuing war in the Far East, although on 15 and 1
6 August there are two little notes against each date, ‘VJ Day’ and ‘VJ2’ respectively. Whether or not the cataclysmic dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which finally ended the Second World War – truly sank into the British national consciousness at the time is debatable. Many years later, however, in the closing pages of her novel Many Waters, in which she wound up the lives of her main characters, Pamela included the following moving account of how she imagined the fall of Japan might have felt like to its ordinary citizens:

  On the other side of the world, in a land where the sun had already risen heralding a new day, a little Japanese boy called Taro Suzaki looked up from where he was playing by a stream. Suddenly, in the distance, he saw a strange dark mountain rising in the sky, its top spreading out like a mushroom and growing larger and larger. Panic-stricken, he ran indoors screaming, ‘Okaa-san, Okaa-san,’ and his mother came at once and held him close, while she, too, stared at the terrifying sight – then quickly turned the other way.

  What had been the city of Hiroshima at eight-fifteen a.m. on Monday, August 6th, 1945, had now gone up in a cloud of dust-filled smoke. The Second World War was over.

  Although for Pamela tiredness continued to be a problem, it was her new husband’s health rather than her own that now became her chief cause for concern. David’s long period of incarceration and inadequate diet had left him severely debilitated and unable to resist any prevalent infections. Shortly after the young couple returned from honeymoon, a cocktail party was arranged at Shaws to celebrate their marriage. The day before, however, David went down with a severe cold and high temperature and was obliged to remain in bed. Pamela wrote of the party afterwards: ‘It was a great success but shame about D.’

  More such diary entries crop up throughout the remainder of the year. On 23 July Pamela wrote: ‘Doing my nursing act’; at the beginning of August she commented: ‘David isn’t at all fit.’ In mid August he was again in bed with a high temperature, and the family doctor insisted on a blood test. The main cause of David’s ill health was finally diagnosed; like so many soldiers who had served in the Middle East he had unknowingly contracted malaria, and would suffer repeated bouts for some time to come. Later that winter, one such proved so severe that it required hospitalisation. David was still technically in the army, and at the time had been seconded to the Army Educational Corps in North London. David and Pamela had temporarily acquired a room at one of George Cross’s hotels in the Cromwell Road; no sooner had they settled in, however, than David developed a high fever. Pamela later described what happened next:

  When the ambulance came to take him to hospital, having no idea how far away this might be, we traipsed through the lounge carrying hot water bottles and blankets, much to the consternation of some aged residents, only to find he was going to St. George’s, half a mile along the road at Hyde Park Corner …

  David had the misfortune to be put in a bed next to a patient who kept him awake by striking matches and looking at his fingers, saying, ‘See these hands? They were once man’s hands. Now I am turning into a woman.’ After a few days of this, David could stand no more, and took matters into his own hands. Pamela’s memoir continues:

  One morning my husband simply discharged himslef, with various members of the nursing staff running after him down the corridor. But he merely pressed on, hailed a taxi and arrived unexpectedly at the hotel.

  The upshot of this incident was that after many months of waiting to be demobilised, David was now formally discharged from further military service. At last he was free to embark on the next stage of his and Pamela’s life together.

  Despite the inauspicious start to her marriage, 1945 ended for Pamela on an infinitely happier note than on the previous year. During the autumn, whilst getting used to her new life, she was still able occasionally to indulge in her favourite pastime, writing poetry. The following poem was accepted by The Field and published shortly after Christmas. In it, Pamela captures what would have been the prevailing sentiments of most British citizens at the time. She compares wartime Christmases with the one just past; she intimates her relief that the Second World War is finally over, and dares to look ahead to a better future.

  Christmas

  I walked abroad on Christmas day,

  The ground was hard and dry,

  The clouds rolled westwards, large and grey,

  Across the wintry sky,

  And as I walked up Ibsbury way

  The leaves went whistling by.

  I trod the old green downland track

  And thought of other years,

  And memory brought strangely back

  Those hopes that turned to fears,

  When Christmastide was grim and black

  And joys gave place to tears.

  But when at dusk now homeward bent,

  I paused by Ibsbury wood,

  It seemed the light before me meant

  That life might still be good,

  For Christmas day this year was spent

  In peace, as Christmas should.

  Eighteen

  Post-War Life: America, London and ‘Operation Farming’ (1946–49)

  After the war, with the benefit of hindsight, Pamela wrote that it would have been far better had she remained helping out on Ditchampton Farm, rather than attempting other types of war work for which she was plainly unsuited. Arguably she might have been spared her ultimate breakdown and the intense anxiety it caused her family, particularly her father. What she perhaps failed to appreciate, however, was that her training as a VAD nurse and as both clerk and officer in the ATS equipped her – along with so many other young women of her generation – with life skills which would prove invaluable in years to come. In particular her nursing experience was almost immediately put to use in caring for David during his frequent bouts of ill health as he recovered from his prison camp ordeal.

  The first few years following the end of hostilities were a deeply worrying time for all servicemen returning to ‘civvy street’. Concerns about how to support himself and his new wife, and where they might live, certainly would not have helped David’s physical recovery. Early in 1946, however, shortly after he was demobilised, an unexpected and exciting opportunity arose. A family friend, a partner in an insurance firm with American branches, suggested that since Edward McCormick was an American domiciled in the UK, this might enable David to acquire dual nationality, enabling him to travel to Chicago to see whether he could drum up some insurance business from the wealthy McCormick relatives. Negotiations with the American Embassy in London were ultimately successful and he was granted a visa, and eventually Pamela also obtained permission to accompany him as a GI bride.

  Accordingly, in June 1946 the young couple set sail on the SS Argentina. The ship had not yet been converted back to peacetime use, so the sexes were segregated, David sharing a cabin with several other men and Pamela with a number of other GI brides and a middle-aged American woman. A seasoned traveller, she took a shine to Pamela and gave her many valuable tips on life in the USA, such as never wearing white after 2 September or ‘Labor Day’.

  On arrival, first in New York and then in Chicago, the young McCormicks found themselves immediately fêted by David’s relatives and their friends. Pamela later described their welcome as follows:

  We were hailed as the poor dear heroic British who had been through the war. Everyone wanted to hear all about it. I think many of them, especially the men who had not been involved, felt guilty at having had so much while others across the water had had to get by with so little. Their wives could hardly credit stories about rationing, particularly clothes’ rationing. They showered me with presents: nylons, shoes, dresses, swimsuits. Their spontaneous generosity was endearing. They even offered us free use of their homes.

  As things turned out, Pamela was the first to earn any serious money on the other side of the Atlantic. Almost immediately, one of David’s aunts pulled off something of a coup on Pamela’s behalf by arrangin
g for her to be photographed for the cosmetic firm, Pond’s, by the leading portrait photographer Philippe Halsman. Pamela later wrote of this experience:

  Suddenly I found myself all dolled up with an unrecognisable hair-do, wearing a hired evening dress and fake jewellery, and described as the lovely British bride of the famous Chicago family etc, seemingly unable to live without a face cream I had hardly ever used. But it was fun, fun for which I received five hundred dollars* and an enormous supply of cosmetics, which I posted back home to my mother and Vivi.

  Pamela had initially regarded the trip to America as something of a late, extended honeymoon, and had not seriously contemplated the prospect of living permanently across the Atlantic. Despite the kindness and generosity of her new friends and relatives, she found their way of living so alien to her previous life in England that she soon began to feel intensely homesick, sentiments she did little to conceal in letters home to her parents. Although Arthur and Vera Street missed and sympathised with their daughter, they did their best to encourage her to give life in America a go. In a letter dated 6 August 1946, Arthur Street – using typical horticultural metaphors – wrote to Pamela:

  Naturally we would have preferred that you made your home in England, but we both realise that at your age you are right at any rate to give this American thing a fair trial … Please don’t imagine from this that I don’t see your side of it, Pam, because I do. You have roots in England; you haven’t been away from home much before; and the American way of life from what you have seen to date, doesn’t attract. It doesn’t attract me … But in spite of your deep roots, you are young and therefore more easily transplantable …