Mrs Miles's Diary

by S. V. Partington

  At times Connie questioned her motives for keeping her journal. She told herself that it was for Harry and Basil, but more than likely she wrote in the main because she felt driven to do so. No other reason explains why she wrote well over 400,000 words, of which the present book represents a fraction. Writing for her was not just a means of earning a living. Words were both her solace and her passion. Contemplating the destruction of Paternoster Row in what came to be called ‘The Second Great Fire of London’ on 29 December 1940, she grieved for the lost works of the publishing houses which had stood there as much as for the more tangible wreckage of bricks and mortar, writing: ‘Five to six million books have perished. Oh, the brave, bright paper jackets, the lovely purple covers, the crisp, unopened pages, the quips and cranks, the love scenes and the thoughtful essays, the learned remarks, the verses and the valuable paragraphs, the pure new bindings in red and yellow, blue and mauve and olive green, the messages and signals to the human race that were embraced by the horrible flames!’

  Her own writing style is impressionistic, moving swiftly from one scene or thought to another; but what impressions they are. Remarks made almost in passing linger indelibly in the memory. In the freezing winter of January 1940, with fuel for heating already in short supply, Elystan sits ‘slowly knitting a khaki scarf with chilly fingers’. An anguished father whose son is reported missing in Singapore ‘strides about the countryside for hours to try and forget it’. In the village canteen, ‘at one table sits the Squire’s sister, very determined and ruthless under a blue hat, who kisses no-one, but does kiss her clever old black poodle.’ On a crowded railway train, a soldier switches his wireless set on, and the passengers are transported by the story of Grimalkin read out on Children’s Hour – only, being British, no one will admit to listening in.

  She has a gift for the sharp poetic phrase. She summarises the state of the nation in April 1941 as ‘the necessary machinery of a million households cracking’. Trying to forget the war for a moment in the glorious autumn of Netley Woods, she writes, ‘Walked with Basil to look at the beautiful and death-struck year.’ But she also has a fine ear for comic dialogue. On a bus, apropos of food shortages, she overhears one woman saying, ‘I had nothing in the house to give my husband yesterday, so he had vegetables. And do you know, in the evening, he was quite limp! Hadn’t had his proper dinner, you see.’

  Quite apart from her skill as a writer, the great value of her journal lies in her unusually wide acquaintance. Connie’s is not the only voice we hear. Her network of correspondents sent a constant stream of letters from all over the country, which kept her – and keep us – informed of events outside the confines of Shere. Letters were vitally important, not just for contact but as a means of emotional support, and many are revealing as to their writers’ states of mind.

  She had friends or family in Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, France, in Africa and Singapore, so we also have snapshots of what was happening overseas. A refugee tells of a narrow escape from the Germans advancing on Paris. Letters from the USA reveal the deep divisions between those who felt that America was morally bound to join the war and those who believed that she should not. Before the war, Connie had friends in Germany, too, with whom Basil stayed while he was at medical school in Tübingen, near Stuttgart. Much as she loathed Hitler and all he stood for, she writes of her concern for the Von Brunn family, even though their son had joined the Hitler Youth.

  She is accustomed to being on first-name terms with public figures. She lunches with Montgomery’s sister; discusses Churchill with William Nicholson, celebrated painter; chats with the vice-president of the Stock Exchange, who happens to live nearby. But she is equally at home in the local workers’ cottages, the ease with which she moves between these two very different worlds reflecting the makeup of rural Surrey in the 1940s, where the Stockbroker Belt and the old farmworkers’ families whose roots on the land went back generations still lived side by side.

  She read the newspapers daily and listened avidly to the radio, quoting Churchill’s speeches one moment and German propaganda broadcasts the next, reporting news from Finland or Greece as much as from the home front, recording a kaleidoscope of views and reactions from the highest decision makers to – literally – the man or woman in the street.

  Two voices in particular add their own distinctive character to the diary. One is that of Elystan, whose wonderfully pithy and caustic remarks punctuate it for all the world like a kind of one-man Greek chorus. The other is that of May Browne, later May Sinclair, Connie’s closest friend, whose several roles as a shopkeeper, an ATS instructor and a manager at the BBC make her a kind of Everywoman whose comments Connie valued above almost anyone else’s.

  When Connie began her journal, Britain had been making preparations for the outbreak of war for some time. Regulations and training concerning Air Raid Precautions had been in force since 1937. Plans to evacuate London children to rural enclaves were first put in place in September 1938, and local volunteers, of whom Connie’s downstairs tenant, Madge Davidson, was one, were actively engaged in finding billets. This was no easy task, since, as Connie succinctly explains: ‘The women of England [were] depressed to death at the prospect of the shared kitchen and the children unknown.’

  The promise of peace brokered by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich in September 1938, which enabled Hitler to annexe the Czech Sudetenland unopposed, had already proved hollow when Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Several families in and around Shere were hosting Czech refugees who had fled the invasion, so the village was well informed about the threat of Nazi aggression.

  Yet the sense of shock when war was declared is clear, as is the extent to which people were not in fact prepared. From its opening lines, the overwhelming impression we get from the first few entries in the journal is of confusion amplified by fear, and the sense that what people were dreading was not the prospect of war itself so much as the disruption it brought with it.

  Certainly the popular image of everyone pulling together was not much in evidence during those first few months. The so-called Phoney War, in which neither side ventured a major land or air offensive while shipping losses mounted, lasted well into the spring of 1940. People were edgy, disquieted, waiting for something to happen and deeply unsure what was going on. Everyone had something to complain about, from the shopkeepers struggling to deal with the bureaucracy of rationing to the tensions between the evacuees and their hosts. (‘Shan’t we be glad to get out of this blinking house!’ chant two small boys at one of Connie’s friends.) On 3 October, Connie writes: ‘What shall we be like at the end of the war? Poor, and . . . quarrelling among ourselves.’

  The German invasions of Norway and Denmark in April and the Netherlands and Belgium in May brought the Phoney War to an end. On 13 April, Connie writes that ‘the war is now on our doorsteps’; and on 18 May, that she had ‘never felt so acutely a sense of impending disaster’. Watching a cricket match on the village green, she warns: ‘I sometimes think we deserve to lose this war. Boys of twenty-six are not yet called up. A look of infinite boredom breaks over many faces when Robin urges that trenches should be dug . . .’2

  Two months later, France had fallen, the air war had intensified and, with the Battle of Britain, the conflict began in earnest for those at home. On 10 September, three days after the start of the Blitz, she writes: ‘Various men and women with suitcases appeared in the village today, trying for rooms. They have been bombed out of their homes.’

  Gradually, the unthinkable becomes commonplace. The famous Blitz spirit comes to the fore as ordinary men and women are called upon to make extraordinary efforts, and step up to the plate. The fear of invasion, while Hitler abandoned his initial plans in September, did not diminish for many months. The government was still issuing instructions about what to do in such an event in March 1941, at which point Connie was keeping a backpack by the door in case they should have to leave home at a moment’s notice.
Food becomes a constant concern – the sheer grind of obtaining it, stretching out rations, never knowing from day to day what the shops might have in stock. The litany of losses grows longer, too, until almost everyone Connie knows has lost a son, a husband, a brother, a cousin, a friend.

  But perhaps the most poignant and least familiar aspect of her account is the amount of peripheral suffering caused indirectly by the war: the loss not of homes or lives but of livelihoods, hopes and dreams. Tradesmen and craftsmen – the gardener, the chef, the piano tuner – lost work because their clients had moved to safer districts, or else no longer required or could not afford their services. Those whose premises were wrecked by bombs lost everything. Small businesses suffered terribly, owing to either lack of supplies, lack of customers or having all their staff called up; and sometimes, as with May Browne’s shop, a combination of all three. Connie’s hairdresser had put all her savings into her one shop and has to try and keep it solvent entirely alone, with no assistants. Another woman, who had built up a small successful school, finds herself homeless and jobless at forty-five, her life’s work gone. There was no financial safety net or support for those who found themselves in such circumstances, other than friends or charity; or, for those who were totally destitute, poor relief.

  Life was altered not just for individuals but for the country as a whole; and reading the journal one gets a real sense of the changes the war was bringing. Domestic service for middle-class families vanished almost overnight as women of working age were called up for war work, and many often elderly people found that they had to clean and cook for themselves for the first time. Young women took on many roles, from offices to factories, which had not been open to them before, prompting Connie to comment that ‘girls are the gainers in this war’.

  Wondering what sort of world the younger generation would inherit when it was over, she followed the debate that led eventually to the formation of the National Health Service and the welfare state. Towards the end of the journal, in March 1943, she recounts a conversation in which a mechanic says to Elystan that the changes must come, or there will be revolution; to which he replies that ‘life in this country after the war will not be Paradise’. Connie herself was greatly in favour of universal health care, but was cautious enough to hope that the government would not promise ‘all sorts of impossible things’.

  Meantime, however, in April 1941, she was one of many who were struggling to meet the demands of increased income tax. Needing to economise, she decided that she could no longer afford to buy the paper she needed to keep the journal. On 18 April, the day after a long and particularly evocative entry in which she recorded a visit to London and the effects of the damage wrought by the Blitz, she put it aside.

  During the eight months for which she was silent, the war became a conflict on a truly global scale. In June, Germany invaded Russia. By late autumn, Japan was threatening both British and US interests in south-east Asia, and on 8 December, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, America entered the war.

  Connie resumed her journal on 17 December 1941, writing: ‘The news is, as I begin again, quite bad . . . We are delighted with the Libyan and the Russian front, but anxious, very anxious, about Hong Kong and even more about Singapore.’ But, she says, ‘The spirit of the people, as I find it in my little circle (stretching from the north of Scotland to the west of England) is calm and patient and unmoved. Yes, the outlook is hopeful, in spite of everything.’

  Soon, however, the tone is different, as almost immediately things grow grimmer, and two days later she writes that ‘Christmas is indeed subdued. I never remember a Christmas so sombre, and with so slight an air of festivity.’ On Christmas Day itself, hearing that Hong Kong was about to fall, she writes sadly of her great friends the Eustaces, ‘Every penny they had was invested in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He is white-haired, but will have to find a job.’

  The sense of endurance is palpable. On 3 January her friend Rachel writes, ‘I’m afraid I don’t even feel any delight in thousands of Germans being done in. We can only drift on, just snatching at passing happiness, and doing any kindness we can along the way.’ On 23 February May Sinclair writes, ‘Do you have a horrible feeling that nothing will ever be the same again? One will never just be quite pleased with life . . . Just as you are going to enjoy it, a memory of this horror will come like a cloud over the sun. More and more I feel I’d like to go and live, afterwards, somewhere that doesn’t remind me of post-war England.’ Connie herself wrote, also in February: ‘I place it on record calmly and gravely that this stage of the war is the worst that we have gone through.’

  It is easy to understand why they should have felt so pessimistic in 1942. The Germans were sweeping triumphantly across Russia. Rommel was pushing forward in the deserts of North Africa, where each hard-won Allied success was followed by a series of reverses. News from the Far East, where Japan was in the ascendent, was unremittingly bleak.

  By Thursday, 2 July, ‘one of the blackest days of the war’, Connie was close to despair, writing: ‘We have been making Crusader tanks, which are no use; we have not yet put a big anti-tank gun into production. Nor have we dive-bombers. The muddle seems ghastly. And our men are fighting what may be a decisive battle now in the Egyptian heat, under a sultry sky, out-gunned, out-tanked. I cannot think, taking it all in – the fall of Sebastopol, and the fact that we are fighting against heavy odds in Libya – that we can ever have so black a day again.’

  But even at her lowest ebb, she never loses hope. On 18 July she writes that she is ‘sick with fear . . . really shivering with vague, sharp apprehension’, and on 20 July that the news is ‘appallingly serious about Russia. They are yielding town after town’. Then on 21 July, as though to rally herself, she writes firmly: ‘I don’t think I convey enough in these pages my belief that We Shall Win.’

  Connie made no bones about how hard she and others found the war years. Yet, having stared at the prospect of defeat through those darkest months, she ends her diary on a more optimistic note. Two events in particular signified, in late 1942 and early 1943, that the balance of the war was tipping at last in the Allies’ favour: the eventual victory at El Alamein, which changed the course of the conflict in North Africa, and the epic Russian defence of Stalingrad, which not only halted the German advance but broke their aura of invincibility.

  Perhaps that was also why she stopped abruptly in April 1943, with no explanation other than that she did not want to stay in and write while the sun was shining. On some deep level, feeling more confident now of the future, she no longer felt the need to take refuge in her writing.

  She was a harsh critic of her own work. Her difficulty was that she did not know what to include in her journal and what to leave out. She herself says, ‘So much came my way.’ Overwhelmed by the weight of the events she was recording, she did not have either the time or the inclination to edit what she wrote. Consequently, when she did read over her journal, she was disappointed with it, judging it too disjointed and too full of ephemera to stand the test of time. She could not see the value of it as we can now from a distance of seventy years, or recognise what gems it contains, illuminating the mood of wartime Britain as surely and as precisely as the searchlights that ranged to and fro across the skies.

  Fortunately for those of us who now have the privilege of reading her diary, she chose despite her doubts to send it to the Imperial War Museum, adding to it a modest note in which she concludes: ‘I guess that I have done enough and said enough to show what war days were in 1939, 40, 41, 42, 43.’

  Indeed she has.

  S. V. Partington, June 2013

  List of Abbreviations

  ARP

  Air Raid Precautions

  ATS

  Auxiliary Territorial Service

  CO

  Commanding Officer

  FANY

  First Aid Nursing Yeomanry

  HAC

  Honourable Artillery Company

  IRA />
  Irish Republican Army

  LCC

  London County Council

  NAAFI

  Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes

  NCO

  on-Commissioned Officer

  RA

  Royal Artillery

  RAF

  Royal Air Force

  RAMC

  Royal Army Medical Corps

  RASC

  Royal Army Service Corps

  RE

  Royal Engineers

  VC

  Victoria Cross

  WAAF

  Women’s Auxiliary Air Force

  WRNS

  Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens)

  WVS

  Women’s Voluntary Service

  Constance Miles, circa 1920

  Photograph courtesy of Mary Wetherell

  Springfield

  Shere

  nr Guildford

  October 1947

  This journal was kept by Constance Miles, wife of retired Major Elystan Miles, late RA, living in their own house, in the top of two flats, downstairs the Misses Davidsons, friends and tenants, who went off to Scotland for a time. Mrs Miles is a professional journalist; daughter of the famous editor the late Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who founded the British Weekly and The Bookman among other periodicals and was in close touch with many well known people of his time. Mrs Miles originally wrote the journal for the benefit of her two children, one of whom, Harry, lives in Rhodesia, invalided out of the Regular Army (Loyals), and Dr Basil Miles, medical officer in the war, of the Royal Engineers and eventually the Scots Greys, dangerously wounded at El Alamein, where the Greys were in the forefront of the battle. This copy of the journal is offered to the Imperial War Museum, with the reminder that the writer was aged fifty-eight, a housewife in a pretty Surrey village. May it be of some use some day!