Mrs Miles's Diary

by S. V. Partington

  Wednesday, 3 February

  No wire about the date and place of John Andrews’ funeral. In any case I decide not to leave, as I am not satisfied at all about Basil’s condition.

  Wednesday, 17 February

  I have been in bed a wretched fortnight with tonsilitis and a bad reaction to M and B,233 which made me feel as ill as I have ever been. Thank God a reassuring cable ‘Much improved’ came at last from Basil. It had been held up seventeen days (the last cable took three!). No wonder I thought the operation had been a failure, as there was this long silence.

  Dr Lankster told me my heart was going far too fast, and he was going to give me digitalis.

  While I have been in bed, the Russians have taken Rostov and Kharkov.234

  Thursday, 18 February

  So February goes by, and I feel better and the lines under my eyes are not so black, and I have crumpled up the cables I have just found in my pocket on dressing again, saying that ‘John has crashed and been killed’.

  The House of Commons seems to have behaved very absurdly indeed over the Beveridge Report. Labour member after Labour member demanding it in full, and having no sympathy for fat, true, tedious Kingsley Wood when he said we really must examine our finances to see what we could do, and also that that was hard, as we did not know how much more the war would cost us.

  Nobody grasps how magnificent these proposals are – they actually mean to tackle the medical profession about universal free medical service. This point alone is worth many columns in our press, but is ignored entirely.

  Saturday, 20 February

  ‘According to returns compiled by Ley’s German Labour Front and by the great insurance companies, the total losses of the German Armed Forces up to December 31, 1942, in killed, permanently disabled, and prisoners, amounted to about 4,800,000. To this figure must be added the losses suffered during January, including those at Stalingrad, which were about 600,000 or 700,000.

  How terrible it is for any woman to read this!

  There was a dreadful tragedy at Farnham last week. At a Home Guard meeting in the Drill Hall, a demonstration of loading a trench mortar was being given. A dummy bomb was being used, but the fact that there was a live cartridge in the mortar was overlooked. A sergeant pulled the trigger to explain to his class how it worked, and the bomb shot straight out, and killed the Manager of Lloyds Bank. He was such a nice man and universally popular. Everyone was feeling very shocked and sad.

  Wednesday, 24 February

  Out again, thank goodness, after a weary month indoors.

  The twins are learning to plough.

  Tuesday, 2 March

  Have been too tired and occupied to write. Today, to our enormous relief, Basil writes (17 February) that he really is very much better, and hopeful of being sent to Pietermaritzburg or Johannesburg; he hopes the latter. We are to write care of Harry for a time. He will cable when he arrives. What bliss if he really does get away this month. I feel so happy, nothing else seems to matter.

  Robin is gazing at the map of South Africa, seeing where Johannesburg and Pietermartizburg are. Two tiny pies from the Co-op are rapidly being heated in the oven for dinner, supported by heraldic leeks, and tiny potatoes in brown skins.

  The Home Guard has tiresomely requisitioned our two garages and apple loft, after many weeks of dithering.

  Friday, 5 March

  To the communal kitchen. Miss B. back from town very mysterious about the shocking tube disaster in London. She knew quite well where it took place, but would not say.235

  A much more normal letter from Basil, all impatient to get a boat: ‘It may be two days or may be six weeks’.

  Robin is convinced that there will be a big push very soon.

  Saturday, 6 March

  Into Guildford after many, many weeks.

  I made friends in the bus with a teacher in the East End of London. She informed me that it was at Bethnal Green, the tube acccident. (I knew I should hear by today: why withhold it?)

  She said she lived near Elstree, and had to come in to work by tube, and was quite terrified in the dark winter mornings very often, of the crowds plunging down the very ill-lit staircases, barging together with suitcases and bundles. She perfectly understood what had happened on those steps in the darkness with the awesome barrage of London thundering outside. ‘If anyone called “Hold back!” you couldn’t have heard, you see.’

  Monday, 8 March

  Last night Mr Brook banged on the bedroom door and said, ‘There are bombs falling!’

  Today we hear this was at Haslemere.

  I rang up Kitty Eustace and found she was staying in a different part of Haslemere, with her daughter, Betsy, who has two little children, Rosamond and Mary Rose, five and three.

  In order not to frighten the children, Betsy woke them and told them that guns were firing and planes flying about on practice, and that they must practice by hiding under the dining-room table; and perhaps Grandpa, who, poor man, is a warden, might call with a prize.

  Presently, (really this is a rather a nice story – and perfectly true) the local warden – they were not in Grandpa’s beat – called out, ‘Are you all right, Mrs Ferguson?’ Betsy, who is quick as lightning, replied, ‘Oh do come in,’ and rapidly confided in him what she was doing – she knows him.

  In comes the warden in his tin hat, while outside the banging and muttering of guns continued; he peeps under the table, sees the two beaming fairies, and says, ‘Very good, you are practising very well indeed, and the prize will come tomorrow morning.’ (He had apologised for having nothing on him, for the little girls, in the hall.)

  The children went off to bed highly pleased, and not a bit alarmed.

  And next day, two fresh eggs, each wrapped in red paper arrived, for Miss Ferguson and Miss Mary Rose Ferguson as prizes for good practice!

  Kitty, who is brave as a lion, confessed that she was nervous and had determined if a bomb came on the cottage that she ‘would throw herself on the babies’. An acquaintance of hers, an ATS, aged forty, sole support of her aged Lancashire parents, not very happily placed in Haslemere, was out with an ambulance and was killed. What will the poor parents do, they are quite old and can’t do their own housework.

  I hear Exmouth has had a very bad raid again; also Cockington and Torquay. The restaurant in Exmouth where the Brooks used to have lunch has gone, also the newspaper shop. Bit by bit the Hun is ruining the coast towns of England.

  Wednesday, 10 March

  Met poor Kitty B., who for the first time gave way to tears over the fact that she had not yet heard whether her husband was prisoner of war or not in Singapore. ‘And fancy the Japs sending through all the names of the British officer prisoners first! Just as if they wanted to upset the lower deck!’

  Robin met a mechanic here today who talked about the Beveridge Report. ‘We must have it: or there will be a revolution in this country.’ Robin mildly said that life in this country after the war will not be Paradise. ‘Oh, it must be Paradise,’ was the rejoinder.

  I do pray that our leading statesmen may not promise the people all sorts of impossible things after the war.

  Monday, 22 March

  I have got hopelessly behind with the journal, but I have had perpetual callers. Our thoughts are very much with General Montgomery and the Eighth Army which, as Churchill told us at the end of his speech last night, has begun the battle.236

  To Guildford, where Robin and I underwent the severe ordeal of the Lyons lunch, ‘What do I do now?’ resounding plaintively in my ears. I noticed that the habituées walked along shoving the heavy trays along the slipway easily and giving their orders to the manner born.237

  Then to Desert Victory, a most wonderful, skilful rendering of the El Alamein battle. The preliminary bombardment, which our Basil must have shared with the Scots Greys, must have been a real inferno.

  Even on the screen, with its very modified form of noises, I disliked looking at it. The waste of sand, the arid plains, the now
crouching, now rushing soldiery with their rifles, the huge tanks, the smoke and shells and planes and bombs, made one feel that it was hell. We saw the flash of the German guns’ deadly aim – a splinter from one of them caught Basil in the right side and nearly ended his life. I would never go myself to such a film again, unless it was directly concerned with my son. I was very, very glad when the film was over.

  Guildford’s cobbled High Street looks much the same as it does today, except that here the famous Guildhall clock has been taken down and in its place is the round plaque announcing ‘Salute the Soldiers Week’.

  Photograph © IWM D25183

  Monday, 29 March

  In the evening we heard the marvellous news that the Mareth Line had been breached. The whole nation is rejoicing. We were all dismayed to hear that we had lost the initial bridgehead gained; and hated to read of the rain which made the dreadful marsh more awful still for our sappers to cope with. It sucked under its black waters all the brushwood and girders thrown on it for hours while the sappers worked on in withering fire.

  I am listening to the wireless, hearing how our patrols have entered Gabés. More good news. Robin is very pleased, and so am I.

  I have just read in the Evening Standard that the Church of England is short of 1,000 parsons. ‘There are too many already,’ gloomily replies Robin.

  Sunday, 4 April

  Found a shady spot by the hedge and read again the first of the Winter Tales by Karen Blixen,238 that were smuggled out of Denmark through the Red Cross. Why does she write in English? She does it beautifully. I love the first tale about the Lapp people, who travelled disguised as birds, often as falcons.

  The war seems to be going a little faster. Montgomery is preparing for his next spring.

  It is said that a group of Japanese captured at some Pacific isle sang to their British captors the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’, bowing at the end. Could they really have learned this especially hard dialect song? If so, it is one of the funniest episodes of the war.

  Joy came yesterday, looking very pale, and to my great delight she told me she had acquired an allotment with the friend who lives with her, and there they will toil at the weekends. Both girls are at the BBC, and Joy says she must now work every other Saturday as an ordinary day.

  There is a huge amount of war work going on in Britain.

  Monday, 5 April

  From Rosemary, working in the great factory at Derby, about a friend of hers, very young, killed in the air: ‘The plane crashed in Somerset after operations and all the crew were killed. The casualties in the RAF are very high, specially for air gunners, who aren’t reckoned to last more than about eight flights.

  ‘I am an analytical assistant in the research lab now. We analyse alum castings. The atmosphere is hot and stifling, the window doesn’t open because of the dirt from the foundry, and there is usually a colossal row going on. We have to listen to ‘Music While You Work’ twice a day, till we are all browned off with it.’239

  Poor Rose. How will she settle down after the war?

  Went to luncheon at the hall. A lady informed me that in a recent raid in Brighton, a young couple she knew were killed, but their baby who was out in the garden at the time was blown up into a tree and alive.

  Basil asks if the war is not to be long? I fear it is: and all this long struggle to secure North Africa means that Europe will plunge into blacker chaos, while waiting to hear the sound of British boots coming along the roads.

  Tuesday, 6 April

  Audrey A. on the telephone told me that her nephew had been killed in the RAF.240

  Poor Clive. He apparently made what observers say was ‘a perfect landing’ in mid-Channel but the machine sank in the water and Clive never reappeared.

  I asked Audrey whether her sister, Clive’s mother, was coming south from Berwick to see her, but she answered no, that the affair had made the poor father ill and his wife, herself broken-hearted, is looking after him.

  Wednesday, 7 April

  Peter writes from Tunisia, 25 March: ‘All my old friends are gone – Norman, Tony and Ronald were killed the other day . . . We are all in very good heart and our spirits rise every day. We have seen the Germans running and glad to be captured, and we have enjoyed it. The Surreys have accounted for many a German. They know their hour has come, they have seen the writing on the wall.’

  Thursday, 8 April

  What do Women’s Institutes amuse themselves with these days? There had been a speaker on ‘Stretching Your Rations’, which meant literally pulling one’s rashers of bacon so as to make them longer. Heaven knows what will have to be done with the rinds of bacon! They ought to work hard to flop in and out of soup. To hang in and out of basins, and to appear in the middle of suet puddings, etc.

  Thankful I missed all this, as I have not the capacity.

  The news is absolutely marvellous. Montgomery pressing on and the meeting of the Americans and ourselves accomplished at last.

  Friday, 9 April

  Into Guildford. Just as I was looking across at the entrance of the British Restaurant, suddenly a cloud of cyclists, obviously a club out on a spree, arrived at the door, rapidly dismounted, and streamed in.

  The WVS were coping valiantly with scores and scores of customers. I was much struck by the number of helpers with snow-white hair: doctors’ wives and the rest who were slaving away, clearing dirty trays and dishes, and serving out fine hot beef and potatoes and soup.

  They go unthanked, I’m sure their old feet ache; their class is out of popularity altogether, but they do deserve gratitude. Such masses of large schoolboys, for instance, were eating the meal and getting enough for tenpence, or one shilling. Worth doing.

  Saturday, 10 April

  May Sinclair came for tea, like a great beam of sunshine. She says Evans and Lewis and other big shops are selling off old-fashioned stuff people have found pushed away on their cupboard shelves – and the public, mad to buy, go in to purchase. She was able to buy £100 worth of wooden trays for her shop by a miracle recently, ‘and the seller kindly gave me a cup of coffee and some delicious jam tarts.’

  Wednesday, 14 April

  How thrilling the papers are! With what joy do the inhabitants of the Tunisian cities greet the British! Says one correspondent, ‘The people of Kairouan were dancing for joy as I drove through the shimmering heat haze into the city yesterday morning.

  ‘I saw the yellow Star of David which the Germans had forced the Jews to wear as soon as they occupied the city. They were told to take them off, and I saw dozens of the yellow stars being trampled in the streets as the Jews replaced them with V for Victory signs, which they improvised from anything they could find.’

  Thursday, 15 April

  Suddenly resolved, as I want to be out of doors a good deal this summer, to close the journal, at any rate for the moment. I simply hate to stay in and write it when the sun shines.

  It closes when the Eighth Army is forging boldly on; as are the 1st Army and the Americans. Thus the curtain will go up on another and strange scene.

  Editor’s note: Thursday, 15 April 1943 is the last entry in the journal. In March, 1944, Connie added this typed comment to the final page:

  The reason why I stopped writing was partly because there was so much that came my way (quiet though I am in a country village and cut off like all others from visiting London and my friends) that I thought my work would become too long and tiresome to wade through in time to come. I guess that I have done enough and said enough to show what war days were in 1939, 40, 41, 42, 43.

  Connie in later years with her granddaughter Mary.

  Photograph courtesy of Mary Wetherell

  Postscript

  Basil recovered fully from the injuries he received at El Alamein, and was posted to Italy, where he spent the remainder of the war. In Naples he met and married his wife, Sadie, who was working as a nurse. After the war he returned to St Thomas’s Hospital to complete his medical training, and in 1954 he left Lond
on for the Welsh border country of Hereford and Radnor, where he embarked on a long and distinguished career as a consultant physician to the Hereford Group of Hospitals.

  Harry remained in Rhodesia, where he joined the civil service. He and Jennie were later divorced.

  Connie and Elystan lived in Shere until 1954, when they sold Springfield and moved to Herefordshire to be closer to Basil. Elystan died aged seventy-eight in 1956 and Connie six years later in 1962, aged eighty.

  The War Diaries series, produced in association with Imperial War Museums, brings fascinating new perspectives to famous conflicts as experienced by ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Read on for details of three further titles published by Simon and Schuster . . .

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  A NURSE AT THE FRONT

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  ‘Calm day yesterday. My ill boy is holding his own, but that is all. If there is a bit of lead near his heart, has he a chance?’

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