Women on the Home Front

by Annie Groves

  ‘Oh, come on then,’ she said to Lizzie, who had now finished putting away her own stock, ‘I just hope we get a few more customers in tomorrow, otherwise I’m going to be dying of boredom. You’d have thought with all this fuss about there going to be a war on that every lad in the city would be coming in here with his girl to treat her to a bit of something, and that every woman without a chap would be coming in to get herself a lipstick so that she could get one before they all go off to war.’

  Lizzie gave Dulcie a wry look. ‘I dare say that most people will have more on their minds than buying lipstick, Dulcie.’

  ‘Such as?’ Dulcie demanded as they walked towards the staff exit to the stairs that led down to the basement-level staff cloakroom.

  ‘Such as worrying about their children being evacuated if they are young enough, and worrying about their sons going to war if they are old enough. Same thing goes for courting couples. They’ll be wanting to spend what time they’ve got together, not coming in here. Ralph and I are going looking at engagement rings tomorrow,’ she added. ‘Funny but when I was growing up I imagined that when my boy took me to buy an engagement ring it would be the most exciting and happy thing in the world but now it feels like the most frightening and upsetting, because I know that we’re getting engaged now and married at Christmas, just in case.’

  Dulcie heaved a bored sigh as they reached the cloakroom and she removed her overall and put it out for the laundry. Mr Selfridge insisted that his staff presented an immaculately clean appearance, which meant that a laundry service was provided for their overalls and uniforms. She was fed up with all this talk of war. Every night at number 13, when everyone else gathered round the wireless to listen to the news, she felt like stamping her foot and saying why didn’t they have some music on instead so that they could have a bit of a dance. Not that that suggestion would go down well with Olive. Dulcie reckoned her landlady would have her out of the house if she gave her the smallest excuse to do that. Well, she wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction. And she certainly wasn’t going to give up her comfortable room, or her big bed, and definitely not the wardrobe she had all to herself. Tilly was daft for going soft and sharing her own room with the orphan. She wouldn’t have done that, especially not with a plain dull girl like Agnes, forever creeping around in that shabby brown dress, making Olive feel sorry for her. Well, she didn’t feel sorry for her; if anything, she felt sorry for herself for having to put up with her.

  ‘So what is this blitzkrieg that everyone’s going on about?’ Dulcie demanded, the four of them – Agnes was still at the orphanage – sitting round the wireless that Olive had just switched off. Everyone apart from Dulcie herself had left their tea virtually untouched, and there was an almost palpable air of grim acceptance in the kitchen.

  ‘It means lightning war, Dulcie,’ Sally explained. ‘That’s the kind of war that Germany inflicted on Poland when the German army invaded Poland this morning.’ When it invaded Poland and swept all before it, she thought emotionally, including the brave but hopelessly outdated Polish cavalry, which still waged war on horseback. They had been utterly unable to stand against the might of the Wehrmacht force of over a million men with armoured and motorised divisions. The Luftwaffe had blown up Poland’s railways and blown its air force out of the sky. It was over: Poland’s defences lay in ruins, and Poland as an autonomous state had ceased to exist.

  Seated across the table from Sally, Olive removed a handkerchief from the sleeve of her blouse and blew her nose firmly, blinking hard as she did so.

  ‘So why should we have to bother about Poland?’ Dulcie asked, apparently unmoved by the emotion gripping Olive, Sally and Tilly.

  ‘Why should we bother?’ Sally’s normally calm tone had sharpened to real anger. ‘Why we should bother, Dulcie, is because thousands of brave men have died trying to protect their country from an unprovoked attack; even more thousands of innocent women and children have also been killed or injured or taken prisoner. Even if we weren’t honour bound by treaty to support the Poles, even if there wasn’t the fear that Hitler might decide to attack us, as human beings we should bother about the cruelty to so many innocent people. As hard as it might be for you to lift your mind from such important things as selling lipstick, I would advise that you try to do so, Dulcie, because where Poland lies defeated and bloody today, we could lie tomorrow.’

  When Tilly made a small sound of anguish Sally looked at her and apologised. ‘I’m sorry, Tilly, I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  ‘It’s best that we all know and face the truth,’ Olive answered for Tilly.

  ‘Our Government can’t ignore what has happened.’

  ‘Does that mean that we’re going to be at war with Germany?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Tilly,’ Olive answered quietly, brushing her hand over her daughter’s head. A sad smile touched her mouth when Tilly put her head on her shoulder, plainly overcome by her own emotions.

  There was no need for Sally to get on her high horse and start lecturing her, Dulcie thought crossly. And besides, lipsticks were just as important as Hitler and his blitzkrieg. At least they were to her.

  ‘When do you think we’ll hear – officially, I mean?’ Olive asked Sally.

  Somehow she had fallen into the habit of treating Sally as though they were closer in age than they actually were, finding it comforting to have Sally in the house to talk to. Secretly, in her heart, Olive was beginning to think of all of them here in her small all-female household as a sort of family. Already she felt protective of the girls – except of course Dulcie, who did not need anyone to protect her. Quite the opposite, in fact. In Olive’s opinion it was others who needed protecting from Dulcie.

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s bound to be soon,’ Sally answered.

  There had been so much talk about war in all the newspapers, so much preparation for it, what with the Government producing so many leaflets about the dangers they would all be facing, that Tilly thought she had grown used to the fear that stalked them, but now, in her mother’s warm comfortable kitchen, with the sun still shining outside, she realised that she had not and that she had not known what fear was at all really until she thought about the fate of the poor Polish people and faced for the first time the true enormity of war.

  Standing outside their church on Sunday morning, with everyone going on about the war, no one in her family would even have noticed if she hadn’t turned up this morning, Dulcie thought grumpily as she watched the worshippers leaving, all the young men in uniform grouping themselves together, passing round their cigarettes, not joking and indulging in horseplay as they had on previous Sundays, like children let out of school, but instead exchanging brusque words, spoken from the sides of their mouths, frowns replacing smiles. Even her own brother, Rick’s, normal smile was replaced by a look of determination. She hadn’t bothered going to the Palais last night after all. She hadn’t felt like it somehow.

  Moving a little away from everyone else – in part because her mother was still going on about Edith’s singing and how she’d been clapped through three encores at a local working men’s club the previous night, and in part because she liked standing out from the crowd – Dulcie caught the now familiar words being spoken grimly into the warm September air, words like ‘devastation’, ‘POWs’, and ‘blitzkrieg’, mingling with phrases like ‘it will be us next’, ‘thousands left for dead’, ‘poor bloody bastards’. . .

  Then one of the boy messengers that worked with the ARP men came cycling up full pelt, yelling out as loud as he could, ‘It’s happened. We’re at war. Mr Chamberlain has just said.’

  Of course, uproar followed, with the ARP lot grabbing hold of the boy and hauling him off to question him, whilst the lads in uniform followed after them. Wives and mothers, sisters and sweethearts, clung together, whilst the older men, including her father, looked smaller and shrunken somehow.

  ‘Well, that’s all I need, isn’t it?’ Dulcie could hear Edith complaining.
‘A war, just when my singing career is looking like taking off.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry too much. Perhaps you’ll be able to sing to Hitler. Course, you’ll have to learn German first,’ Dulcie taunted her.

  ‘Dulcie, that’s enough of that,’ her mother stopped her, giving her an angry look. ‘There’s no need to go upsetting people more than they need to be upset.’ She looked across to where Rick was standing with a now much larger group of men.

  A shiver of foreboding went through Dulcie. Thousands the soldiers had killed in Poland, thousands of young men just like her brother. For the first time since all the talk of war had started Dulcie felt its ice-cold fingers clutch at her heart and grip it painfully hard. She might argue with her brother, she might mock him and taunt him, but of all her family it was Rick to whom she was the closest, Rick who she secretly thought was the best brother that any girl could have, with his handsome looks and his easy-going charm, his way of somehow always being there to calm things down when she felt hard done by. Rick might look so tall and manly and indestructible in his army uniform, but he wasn’t indestructible, he was human flesh and blood, and vulnerable. A huge lump blocked her throat, feelings and thoughts she had never had to worry about before swarming through her head like wasps provoked by someone deliberately stirring up their nest.

  ‘The next thing we know, the ruddy Germans will be bombing us out of our houses and gassing us all to death,’ one elderly woman was screeching. ‘I can remember what it was like the last time, our lads coming back from the trenches with their lungs rotting from the Germans gassing them.’

  Dulcie looked down at her own side. She’d tossed her gas mask to the back of her wardrobe, but of course Edith had hers and was now clutching the strap of its box tightly.

  Rick came over. ‘Forget about dinner for me, Ma. Me and some of the other lads are going to see what we can find out. Sid Winters – you know, him whose cousin is a regular in the army – reckons that those who’ve already done their training will be shipped out to France pdq, and that our training will be rushed through now.’

  Her brother seemed excited now that the initial shock of the announcement had faded, Dulcie recognised, her earlier concern changing to resentment that he could look so pleased when she was worrying herself sick about him. Her mother’s pinched expression became even more strained but she didn’t say anything, simply nodding and then turning to put her arm round Edith and draw her close to her in a manner similar to which Olive had drawn Tilly close the previous evening.

  Mothers fussing over their favourites – well, let them, Dulcie thought acidly; she didn’t care.

  ‘I’ll have my dinner at Article Row,’ she told her mother tersely, turning on her heel without waiting for her to respond.

  ‘So it’s happened then?’ Olive found that she was automatically speaking in a lower voice as she asked the vicar’s wife the question to which she already knew the answer.

  ‘Yes. The Prime Minister has already made a formal announcement. I expect we’ll be able to hear what he said on the news at twelve o’clock.’ The two women exchanged tense white-faced looks.

  The news that Britain was now formally at war with Germany hadn’t come out of the blue but it was still shocking, making the heart race and the stomach tense.

  ‘So many of our young men are already in uniform,’ Mrs Windle continued with a nod in the direction of the young men standing together outside the church in their khaki, their Royal Navy dark blue and their RAF blue serge. ‘And now thousands more will be joining them.’

  Their small, well-attended church had been built at the same time as Article Row, by the same philanthropist, and stood on the site of a much older church, along with a neat little rectory, a church hall, and the orphanage, the congregation coming from Article Row and the surrounding area. Olive’s husband and in-laws were buried in its graveyard, and on the anniversaries of their deaths and at Christmas, Olive always made a special point of placing fresh flowers on their graves. She could see the graveyard from where she was standing, sunlight dappling through the shade of the yew trees standing sentinel over the dead. Her heart lurched, a shiver striking through her as she looked from the graveyard to the eager young men in their uniforms.

  ‘We lost so many in the last war, I can’t believe there’s to be another,’ she said sadly. ‘Look at them. They’re all standing so tall and proud, so determined to do their bit, but they’re so young.’

  And so many of them would die, was what Olive was thinking but could not say, especially when one of those young men in air-force blue was Mrs Windle’s own nephew.

  At her mother’s side, Tilly held on tightly to her gas mask in its smart box, which she and her mother had covered with some scraps of lace to make it look more attractive, a fashion that many young women in the country were adopting, according to Woman’s Weekly.

  ‘Everywhere is so quiet without the children,’ Tilly commented as they walked home together.

  ‘Their poor mothers were besides themselves with grief last week when they sent them away, but I dare say now that they will be feeling that they have done the right thing. Hitler is bound to target London.’

  ‘If you’re going to say that you wish that I’d been young enough to be evacuated, then please don’t,’ Tilly begged her mother. ‘I want to be here with you, Mum.’

  As they passed the ARP station on the corner, Sergeant Dawson was standing outside it smoking a cigarette.

  ‘You’ll have heard the news, I expect?’ he asked.

  ‘That we’re at war? Yes.’ Olive shivered a little despite the warmth of the sun flooding between the buildings at the entrance to Article Row.

  ‘I never thought I’d say this, but right now I’m sort of glad that our lad’s already been taken,’ the sergeant told Olive quietly. ‘There’s many a young lad I’ve seen this morning proud to wear his uniform and do his bit for this country. It’s different for those of us who saw something of the last war. I was only in it for the last few weeks, but that was enough.’

  ‘Yes,’ Olive agreed, thinking of her own husband, his bravery and his death.

  On Article Row, the leaves on the clipped privet hedges standing sentry between the low walls at the boundary of each front garden were beginning to look dusty and tired after a summer of exposure to London’s sooty air. Soon it would be autumn and the leaves would die and fall, just like so many of the young men who today were full of vigour and life. Tears blurred Olive’s vision.

  A troop from the local Boys’ Brigade marched past the end of the road, their young faces shining with excitement and anticipation. For them war was something to excite them, whilst for those who had lived through the last war, it was something to fear.

  ‘Come on,’ she told Tilly firmly, increasing her pace as they headed down Article Row after saying goodbye to Sergeant Dawson. ‘I’ve got that joint in the oven that will need seeing to, and —’ Olive stopped speaking to stare up in horrified disbelief at the clear blue sky in response to the wave of sound that was rising to a deafening warning wail.

  For a second neither she nor Tilly could move, simply standing staring at one another until Tilly broke their stillness by grabbing hold of Olive’s arm and yelling, ‘Mum, it’s the air-raid siren. Come on we need to get in the shelter.’

  They were four doors away from number 13. Holding on to her mother’s arm and almost pulling her along, Tilly started to run, her heart thudding with dread, the wail of the air-raid alarm sending its warning to every part of her terrified body.

  Dulcie heard the air-raid siren when she was walking along High Holborn and got caught up in the frantic rush of people reacting to its sound, the panic of the growing crowd as some ran one way and others another, squeezing her up against the sandbags protecting the walls of one of the buildings. The rasp of the sandbags against her legs made her feel grateful for the fact that she wasn’t wearing her precious stockings, but that relief gave way to fear as the crowd swelled and she was
pushed again, this time half losing her balance in her high heels. She would have fallen if it hadn’t been for the male hand reaching out to grasp her arm, its owner hauling her to her feet and insisting, ‘The shelter’s this way.’ He was running so fast, his hand still holding her arm, that she was lifted off her feet.

  ‘Stop, I’m losing my shoes!’

  ‘Better that than losing your life,’ was his response, as he slowed his pace just enough for her to get her feet back in her shoes, before tugging her along again to where a crowd of people were trying to push their way into the concrete air-raid shelter she had walked past so often, deriding its presence and its ugliness, but which now had never been a more welcome sight. Not that she was going to admit it. Even as she edged inside, Dulcie was sniffing disdainfully as the scent of stale concrete, male sweat and female anxiety filled the air, ignoring the ARP warden’s instruction to, ‘Move down inside, miss. We don’t want people blocking up the entrance.’

  ‘Hitler hasn’t wasted much time, has he?’ a woman standing close to her observed in a cockney accent, causing several others to give way to the relief of shaky laughter.

  Now that they were inside the shelter and safe, Dulcie had an opportunity to look at her rescuer properly for the first time. Around her brother’s age, and of middle height and square muscular build, and wearing an army uniform, he had mid-brown curly hair, hazel eyes and a plain but kind face. Not the kind of male looks to set a girl’s heart beating with excitement, Dulcie decided ungratefully, not like David James-Thompson. Now there was someone she would much rather have been rescued by.

  In their Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden, Olive and Tilly sat opposite one another on the garden chairs they’d put in there, along with an old card table, a pack of cards in its drawer, which stuck now because of the damp. Olive had lit the paraffin lamp, which had been on the list of ‘essentials’ Woman’s Weekly had advised all well-prepared housewives to have inside their Anderson. Spare bedding, warm clothes and food were things that should be kept close to hand in the home, ready to be carried into the shelter when needed, but the paraffin stove, matches, wrapped in a piece of waterproof material, and a waterproof box containing games, a couple of favourite books and some candles could be safely left in the shelter.