Daughter of Empire

by Pamela Hicks

  Patricia returned from America that June and came down to see me at school. She was eighteen and seemed very grown up to me. It was such a comfort to have her back – I was jittery from having witnessed a low-flying aircraft drag a man tangled up in his parachute, who was later found dead in Poole Harbour – and I felt reassured by her presence. She immediately caught on that I was the only girl not wearing a Sunday dress, and when I admitted that I was indeed the only girl who didn’t own a Sunday dress, she had one sent to me by the time the next Sunday came around. I was pretty self-sufficient, having had to rely on myself for so long, but it was always a relief to know Patricia was there for me.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what my parents’ work really involved. I could imagine my mother improving conditions for Londoners at the mercy of the bombings but had never seen her at work outside of Southampton. The precise details of my father’s responsibilities were necessarily secret, and although his name came up on the news broadcasts that I watched with my classmates, I was not aware that he was overseeing plans for the invasion of Europe. When I learned that there had been a ‘big Commando raid on Dieppe’ I could only guess at my father’s involvement.

  On her return, Patricia had joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, qualifying soon after as a signals rating. She was positioned at the Combined Operations Base HMS Tormentor at Warsash, just east of Southampton, and during my next visit home, I jumped on the bus with my bike then cycled down – as quickly as I could, she had saved me a Mars bar! – to see her. I was almost as excited by the prospect of the chocolate bar as I was by that of seeing my beloved sister, but when the moment came, we discovered a mouse had nibbled half of it away. Later I was pleased to report back to Hanky, who was missing Patricia deeply, that the remaining half was definitely worth the journey.

  At thirteen and home for the summer holidays, I needed to play my part in the war effort too. My grandmother had given me a lovely black-and-white pony and together we managed to get hold of an old dogcart which, with a new coat of paint and some varnish, was soon restored to its former glory. Chiquita and I were thereafter purposefully employed, running errands and proudly circumventing the fuel shortage. We picked people up from the station and took flowers to the St John’s shop in Romsey to help raise funds. Our route often took us by the local prisoner-of-war camp, known as ‘Ganger Camp’, which housed Italian and German POWs. The camp’s Nissen huts were well defended behind tall wire fences with gun batteries and a machine-gun post, and when the prisoners were out working on the local farms, they were watched over by a soldier with a gun. On one occasion, I noticed a Tommy reach into his pocket for a light. Fumbling a little, he passed his gun to a prisoner to hold for him while he lit his cigarette. He took a long, relaxed puff, then stuck out his arm and his gun was gently handed back.

  After I had been making the daily journey into Romsey for a couple of weeks, a young Italian hailed me from a field. To my utter surprise he presented me with a ring made out of shiny metal. I felt my cheeks heat up as I stammered a thank-you in my best Italian. It was the first ring I had ever been given, and when I examined it in the privacy of my room, I was amazed to see how intricate it was, how the man had somehow carved a little pattern on it. I never saw him again but I wore the ring proudly.

  Every prisoner could work if he so wished. Most helped on local farms, hedging, ditching and doing seasonal chores, and they became very much part of the landscape, as our farm workers were away at war. That August, 1943, it was all hands to the pump as Grandmama and I worked with them to bring in the harvest. Even my mother came down to lend a hand for three days. As the workhorses drew the harvester across the hundred-acre field, trailing long uneven lines of hay in its wake, we walked behind gathering the hay into stooks and securing them with string. Grandmama was an old lady, yet she insisted on being involved, though she couldn’t tie the string as her fingers were stiff and swollen with chilblains. I tied hers for her. The Italian men watched us and I wondered whether the presence of my grandmother made them think of their own families; whether my glamorous-looking mother in her corduroy slacks and scarf fixed decorously over her hair made them think of the women they had left behind. I hoped they didn’t notice me – my prickled legs and bleeding forearms made me feel distinctly less than glamorous.

  Putting my pony trap to good use and helping bring in the harvest gave me huge satisfaction, and I felt useful and productive from spending so much time outdoors. The war showed no sign of abating and tragedy struck when my godfather, the Duke of Kent, was killed in an air accident. He had been on his way – in thick fog – to Iceland on an RAF mission, when the Sunderland flying boat in which he was being flown crashed into a Scottish hillside in Caithness. I was very shocked by this news – he and his ADC, Michael Strutt, had stayed with us only two weeks earlier and now both men had been killed. This was what was meant by the fragility of life, I thought, and I prayed that such a fate would not befall my father.

  When the British and American forces invaded French North Africa, I recorded optimistically in my diary: ‘The war news is wonderful – about Libya and Egypt. Our Forces have driven the Germans back over the Egyptian border. We hope that the war over there is almost over.’ This hope was echoed by Winston Churchill in his dramatic speech the following day, words I turned over and over in my mind: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Allied success in Egypt did mean that a week later church bells rang all over the country for twenty minutes. Hearing them at St Giles made me realise that I had never heard the sound of bells at Broadlands, as they’d been silenced at the beginning of the war under strict instruction that they should be rung only in the event of an invasion. That Sunday I felt optimistic, at least that the tide was turning. But waking the next morning to learn that ‘hit-and-run’ raids had been carried out in twenty towns across southern England brought the harsh reality crashing back.

  We had to get on as best we could. When, at Christmas, my mother was so preoccupied guarding a precious ham that General Marshall had given her she left all our presents on the train, I didn’t complain. Actually, even if I had, no one would have listened: the loss of the presents paled into insignificance when my mother realised her nearly completed five-year diary was also still on the train. Both my parents were left worrying that we would come to see its contents in print and this sparked some lively conversations around the dinner table. My mother, always enterprising, paid a flying visit to London in a frantic search for replacement presents.

  As a result of her tireless work my mother was made a CBE in the New Year Honours; Patricia was now a fully fledged Wren and my father was at the heart of Britain’s war strategy. In fact, owing to overwork, he had recently succumbed to jaundice and pneumonia, worrying us all. He was well enough to discuss strategy with General Eisenhower but was unusually anxious that the visit should go smoothly. So it was with alarm that we watched as the great man’s huge Cadillac veered off the drive and stopped dead in the ditch, trying to negotiate the awkward angle of the garden gates, which had now become our front entrance.

  As well as being a hospital annexe, Broadlands became a training encampment for the US troops of the Fourth Division. Even though this was the division’s ‘Laundry Unit’, many of these soldiers became front-line troops soon enough, going to their untimely deaths in France. Then yet more Americans were billeted at the end of the drive, when Lee Park House was given over to the Pioneer Corps. My parents invited them up to the house. Despite my time in America, I was astounded by the relaxed attitude of the soldiers to their superiors – being used to the rigid naval forms of ‘Yes, sir’, ‘No, sir’, I found their way of addressing their commanding officer as ‘Colonel Jack’ or just ‘Jack’ shocking. They were fun to have around, though, and were fascinated to see inside Broadlands, asking endless questions. When I was asked who had painted the eighteenth-century panels depicting classical scenes on the ceiling of the drawing ro
om, I answered ‘Helena Rubinstein’. The effect was electric. ‘Say, is that so?!’ exclaimed my impressed audience. ‘We had no idea she did that sort of thing. Joe, come take a look – gee, who’d have guessed it was Helena Rubinstein!’ The moment I had said it, I realised my mistake, but I was too embarrassed to tell them it was of course the ubiquitous Angelica Kauffmann. One time, over in Britain to entertain the American troops, Irving Berlin accompanied the soldiers to the house. Grandmama was delighted to meet him as Grandpapa had been to a restaurant in New York when Irving Berlin was a singing waiter.

  Life in the midst of all this activity could be vexing. Security at the American encampment soon became so tight that Grandmama and Isa could not come to stay with us until we had obtained a special permit allowing them to pass through. At the time my father was away – he had been appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia, to try to reverse the disastrous gains the Japanese had made in Burma – and Bunny was also bound for the South-East Asia Command (SEAC), so my mother had to deal with all the red tape herself. This was also when poor Isa suffered another disaster. Having been sent a packet of dehydrated bananas from America, she mistook them for crystallised fruit and, nibbling one, she found it so delicious she finished most of the packet. She then needed a long drink of water. The bananas swelled up inside her and her stomach nearly exploded.

  For several months during the war, the whole area of Southampton was closed to anyone not living or working there. Broadlands was just within the fifteen-mile exclusion zone. The build-up of troops, vehicles and temporary camps in the area was enormous, and as the weather improved in the late spring there was an air of expectation. Suddenly, as quickly as they had arrived, the American soldiers left Broadlands. D-Day had finally come.

  8

  As a signals rating at HMS Tormentor, Patricia was privy to all sorts of information regarding preparations for D-Day, as all the orders and plans had passed through her office. But she knew that ‘Loose Tongues Cost Lives’, and so the rest of us didn’t know anything until Operation Overlord had taken place. On one of her monthly one-night sleep-out passes, I sat listening, electrified, as she told us about the planning and the subsequent success and horror stories.

  It transpired that in the final days before the Normandy invasion, there had been such a build-up of ships – astonishingly, around seven hundred – on the Hamble that Patricia said she could have walked from the bay beyond Southampton to the Isle of Wight without getting a foot wet. Over the past year, she and her fellow Wrens had become friendly with the soldiers based on the smaller flotillas, who had been running reconnaissance missions, so when they heard news of the impending action, they felt terribly anxious as to the fate of these young men. On 5 June they had embarked Lord Lovat from the Hamble with his famous piper and his commandos in their landing craft. Thousands of other vessels of every kind and over seven hundred warships were waiting for the signal to depart, but bad weather prevented action. On the clear morning of 6 June, however, when General Eisenhower gave the order, my sister watched as the boats disappeared in the direction of Normandy, dragging hundreds of barrage balloons with them, and with squadrons of fighter planes droning overhead. As the day progressed, the sound of bombing and gunfire from across the Channel was clearly audible and, tearfully, Patricia described her fears as she and her colleagues waited for the survivors to return. Sadly, many of the young men died in the Battle of Normandy, and as she spoke, I realised with a start that many of the young men of the ‘Laundry Unit’ would have lost their lives too.

  We all hoped that D-Day would mean the end of the war but still it dragged on, with a new type of danger now in the V-1 ‘doodlebugs’ that began to fall over England, killing hundreds of people. When I was in our London base in Chester Street, I could hear them drone slowly through the sky, high above the house. But, as I lay in bed in the darkness, I reminded myself: you are safe if you can hear them. It was when the engine cut out that you knew the bomb was about to drop. That was when it was really frightening. Anyway, I was finding it difficult to sleep wherever I was since I’d received the shocking news that Hanky had died after an operation. I was told at school, and when I burst into floods of tears, the mistress said irritably, ‘But who is Hanky?’ I felt so angry with her for asking this, because to me Hanky was nearly everything. My friends were solicitous and gathered round me protectively, but for a while I felt torn apart with grief.

  As if this weren’t enough, when Bunny was next on leave, he dropped a huge bombshell – revealing that he was engaged to my Aunt Nada and late Uncle George’s niece, Gina. My mother took the news very badly and there were times in the ensuing weeks, as she took endless dismal walks alone down the river path, when my father and my sister feared she might drown herself. It was no good bringing up Bunny’s departure with her directly – she was never open to any conversation about relationships or feelings and had trained herself as a child to be self-sufficient. Patricia wrote a short but heartfelt letter to our brittle and sensitive mother, however, and this seemed to do something to short-circuit the unbearable loneliness she was feeling. Just composing this letter, thinking about how she was suffering, made Patricia feel closer to my mother than she had ever felt before. Of course, Bunny made constant – and ultimately successful – efforts to prevent the deep friendship that existed between us from being broken. He even asked me to be a bridesmaid at his wedding. I was overjoyed as I had never been a bridesmaid before, but my mother told me firmly, without looking in her diary, that I would be at school that day and it would not be possible. The time had come for Bunny, who was so good with children, to start a family of his own.

  There was, fortunately, an endless stream of things to be dealt with, which helped to divert my mother’s attention from her deep-felt sorrow at the break-up. In October 1944 she was invited to the newly liberated Paris to investigate what help was needed, during which time she searched for and found Yola – alive and well, and living with Henri. To her amazement, on one of the tours of the city, she came across the street where, before the war, she used to get her shoes made. The little atelier was intact and she rushed in to see whether Monsieur Tetreau was still there. When the bell above the door jangled, the shoemaker looked up from the counter and a smile spread across his face. ‘Ah, Lady Louis!’ he exclaimed. ‘Vos souliers sont prêts!’

  Returning from France, she was offered an official posting to SEAC as a representative of the Joint War Organisation. This was a most welcome prospect for my father, who had been trying to get her to join him for some time. After seeing in 1945 with us, my mother left and, once again, I was alone with Grandmama at her apartment in Kensington Palace.

  Before returning to school that term, as I was now deemed old enough at fifteen to appreciate ‘serious’ drama, I went twice to see Laurence Olivier in the film Henry V and was profoundly moved by his performance. The tale of a young king’s coming of age and an army stranded on the brink of possible disaster in the face of a long-time enemy was a perfect metaphor for England at the time. When he spoke the words ‘You few, you happy few’ the audience held their breath, each word echoing our national pride and resolve.

  My mother wrote to tell us that she had travelled north-east through India to Burma. On the ‘leave train’ from Calcutta she went third class because she wished to experience first hand what the conditions were like. It was very crowded, but being so slight, she managed to swing herself up on to the luggage rack, where she slept surprisingly well through the night. Patricia was also working hard, now a cipher officer in a secret underground establishment in Chatham. To her extreme embarrassment, a succession of scruffy young men kept turning up asking to see her. It turned out they were young commandos on a training initiative test, each given ten shillings and sent off from the north of Scotland. They had to complete a number of tasks that took them all over the country. One was to obtain a naval handkerchief from a ‘Third Officer Mountbatten, Cipher, WRNS’. No further clue was given. Several tr
ainees seemed to find her very easily – although how they managed to penetrate the secret tunnel leading to the establishment without being shot was a mystery. Patricia gave the first handkerchief away gladly as it was fun to be part of such a stealthy mission, but as she had to buy further handkerchiefs with her treasured clothing coupons, it soon became less amusing.

  When the news came, in April 1945, that the Russians had attacked Berlin, I felt optimistic. Then, a few days later, Mussolini was captured and hung by Italian partisans, and the situation began to spiral. Two days later, on 30 April, Hitler killed himself in his bunker, and then the Russians succeeded in taking Berlin. On 7 May the long-awaited news finally arrived – the Germans had surrendered. At last, for many, it was over. But not so for those of us with fathers and brothers in SEAC. On 8 May, as the streets resounded with joyous cries and all England celebrated victory in Europe, I lay in bed and thought of my father somewhere out in Asia. I had been blissfully unaware of the dangers he faced at the beginning of the war but now, at fifteen, kept up to date by our weekly war briefings at school, I knew much more and longed for his safe return.

  I did have some good news for my father and I wrote to tell him that I had gained the highest marks in the school that year in the School Certificate examinations. His congratulatory telegram, ‘Expected nothing less’, was somewhat disappointing, as I had longed to surprise him. Still, it was good to know he had such faith in me. I would soon have to change schools, and under the illusion that it was a finishing school that would equip me with the necessary skills for adult life, my mother opted for Hatherop Castle School in Gloucestershire, a rather beautiful old manor house set in sumptuous grounds that had only recently been derequisitioned.

  Life was still fairly contained. I studied hard, attended early-morning communion, waded loyally through my father’s SEAC dispatches and looked forward to concerts and plays during the school holidays. I hadn’t yet been in love, much less experienced infatuation or heartbreak. I was shy, so while other girls at school were looking forward to ‘coming out’ with great excitement, I was horrified at the thought of having to stand in a room full of hundreds of people I didn’t know, sipping cocktails and trying to make polite conversation. I wasn’t even that familiar with the ‘coming out’ process as the war had put a stop to the parties.