by Mary Soames
Precious times to remember for me were those spent alone with my father. One such was an evening at the theatre recorded in my diary on 3 February 1944:
I have just come back from an evening with Papa. We went a deux to see There Shall Be No Night.§ The first scene was 1938—back to Munich. In the interval I said ‘It takes one back a bit—we’ve come such a long way since then.’ Papa said ‘I knew what would happen then—and I don’t now—that is the difference.’ The last few times I’ve seen Papa I’ve been struck by his anxious preoccupation with the future. His uncertainty—I know he foresees so much more trouble & grief and struggling ahead of us than we can imagine.
Another prized occasion—this time with both my parents—was in April. I had been up most of the night, and then had a busy day, but went home in the evening. It had been a lovely spring day, and
Mummie & I went for a walk in Regent’s Park … It was like fairyland. Sunshine and green grass & white canvas deck chairs & pink blossoms & white blossoms & the warm evening sun … & people relaxing for a little while … Back home, we three were alone for dinner—and I felt so brimful of content & happiness & so secure in our love. Papa in very good form—Mummie too—Candlelight. A night I shall always remember …
Back at the battery, though, it was “alarms all night”; and it was with evident relief that I recorded twenty-four hours later: “Thank goodness moderately peaceful night.”
During this spring and early summer, London—indeed, all southern England—began to seem very overcrowded—for to the Commonwealth and Allied servicemen now were added ever-increasing numbers of Americans. “The Yanks” evoked mixed feelings—the less appreciative of which arose largely from unworthy jealousy at their superior-quality uniforms, higher pay, and capacity to shower their girlfriends with nylon stockings. (A common jibe was that they were “overpaid, oversexed—and over here”!) Underneath these superficial responses, however, was the graver awareness that the invasion of occupied Europe was daily more imminent.
It was during this spring that I saw a lot of a charming young Frenchman—Jean Louis de Ganay, whom I had met at an Aid to Russia dance organized by my mother. He had “disappeared” some months before from his family home at Courances (about forty miles from Paris) and “reappeared” in England—to join the British army, with which he was now serving. His mother was an Argentinian (a Bemberg), and his uncle was the Argentine ambassador in London—and it was with this uncle that Jean Louis stayed when on leave. It was a curious situation, as Argentina was neutral; despite this, I was received there with civility and kindness. Jean Louis was soon to be sent to Indo-China, but our friendship (later enhanced when he married Philippine de Mouchy and I married Christopher) was to prove enduring.
At the end of May I was sent on a messing course to Aldershot. The whole town and nearby roads were an extraordinary sight—D-plus-three-and-four-Day troops were assembled in barracks or under canvas in or near the town, with their tanks, armour-tracked vehicles, and other transport double-parked in all the roads ready to move off. The regiments were giving “farewell” parties nightly, and, girls being greatly in demand, one went from party to party, walking for what seemed like miles, and getting to bed at three or four in the morning more or less sober. It was quite difficult in the circumstances to concentrate on the subject of—for instance—how to make scrambled eggs for five hundred people with powdered egg yolks!
I managed to escape from this hectic and exhausting scene for a couple of days over the weekend of 3–4 June to join my mother at Chartwell—and catch up with some sleep. My father was away on his special train, visiting commanders and troops assembled in preparation for embarkation. My mother confided to me that D-Day was scheduled for 5 June—Monday—and I carried this fateful news clutched to me when I returned to Aldershot late on the evening of the fourth.
Owing to unsatisfactory weather conditions, the invasion was delayed by twenty-four hours: on Monday, 5 June, therefore I waited all day in a concealed fever of anxiety for the news I was expecting to hear. That evening I went to a regimental party: “Great fun—very gay. Got home [to my billet] about three-ish. I don’t think I could have been asleep very long—I suddenly awoke, rather chilly, and heard a throbbing continuous roar—and I knew D-Day was here.” I remember I seized a dressing gown and rushed down into the garden, and could just make out the forms of aircraft towing gliders thundering overhead: I fell to my knees and prayed as I had never prayed before.
We all spent the next day hanging on news bulletins and paying very little attention to our lectures. In the evening I went to a service in
huge, hideous and yet curiously impressive St. George’s church. We sang ‘Oh God our help in ages past’ and listened to that wonderful lesson ‘Only be thou strong and very courageous …’ and then we sang ‘Eternal father, strong to save’. How can one pray for those in battle? I do not pray for their safety—somehow that would seem a vain prayer. But I prayed that they may not feel forsaken or frightened or uncertain—in all that is ghastly and fearful … Early that evening we watched more than 400 planes towing gliders, lumber ponderously out. What strange & awe-inspiring days.
A morning or two later we woke to find a virtually empty Aldershot—and not a truck or tank to be seen.
* * *
* Moscow Conference of Allied foreign ministers, 18–30 October 1943.
† Victor Rothschild (1910–90), third Baron Rothschild, friend of Venetia and Judy Montagu: a scientist (Ph.D., FRS) and a hero. Worked in military intelligence; awarded George Medal 1944.
‡ Now in Jermyn Street.
§ A play written by the American Robert E. Sherwood. The play was originally set in Finland between 1938 and 1940, but in this staging, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the setting was removed to Greece.
CHAPTER 16
Doodlebugs
LIFE BACK ON THE GUN SITE WAS SOMEWHAT OF AN ANTICLIMAX: “After the excitement & atmosphere of Aldershot,” I complained to my diary on 10 June, “Hyde Park is deadly dull—and I’m nearly driven mad by all this footling barrack room competition.” However, I was not to be bored for long. One week after D-Day, Hitler launched the first of his long-promised (and anticipated by our intelligence) “secret weapons”—the flying bomb, or V1. This hateful weapon was a pilotless aircraft (about the size of the Spitfire) which carried a high-explosive warhead: flying at speeds of up to 400 mph and at heights of between 2,000 and 3,000 feet, the “doodlebugs” or “buzz bombs” (as they were quickly dubbed) presented difficult targets for anti-aircraft guns in urban areas, approaching as they did at an awkward angle: they caused many casualties and massive damage.*
It so happened that I was on duty as plotting officer on the night of 12–13 June, when the first batch reached London. That first night only four of the salvo of twenty-seven reached Greater London, and for the next two days there was an ominous lull—but from 15 June, for over two months, London was the main target for more or less continuous waves of VIS. They were exceedingly frightening and disagreeable. One could hear and see them for quite a long time before the engine suddenly cut out and the machine plunged earthwards—then there were a few anguishing moments of silence before the sickening explosion, and the slow rising of a huge cloud of dust: the blast damage was particularly severe because the bomb usually exploded before penetrating the ground. On 16 June I recorded: “All day, on & off alarms & excursions persisted. The whole life of the site is of course upside down—we are all tired but in the wildest spirits.” Two days later, “Diver (VIS) attacks continue … Rushing up & down to the gun park Molly & I boxing & coxing—people snatching meals & baths at intervals. At night the firing has been unbelievable—the whole sky a mass of lights & tracer tracks and the noise is like hell let loose.”
My parents at Chequers that weekend were naturally concerned for their daughters (Diana was an air-raid warden) in London. We were in a spell of glorious June weather, and despite this new threat from the air the streets a
nd parks were thronged with people: one evening I had telephoned my mother to tell her that we had been in action that afternoon, watched by an interested crowd who had assembled to watch an American baseball match on a pitch adjoining the gun site. However, for all the bright sunshine and people’s sturdy spirits, there were some grievous incidents.
On Sunday, 18 June,
a lovely warm, breezy day, Mummie drove all the way from Chequers to visit me—bringing roses & strawberries. Within 10 minutes of her arrival we were in action [my section was on a brief stand-down] and we together watched a plane [diver] come down—alas—we discovered it fell on the Wellington Barracks chapel [Guards’ Chapel]—packed for morning service†—O God. In the early dawn this [same morning] the Command Post had an escape—the brute actually came down in the Bayswater Rd‡—but while it was over us it seemed for us alone & Buster [an officer] & 2 spotters fell flat! The whole site spent the afternoon sleeping—an official rest period. And in the evening came the blow—we are to fire no longer—But obviously this is right.§
Work and life on the site continued much as usual, although it seemed unnatural not to be participating as batches of divers appeared well within our range—as I described in my diary, “flopping all over the place—& some quite near W5!” I also reported: “On the whole morale is excellent—but people don’t like it—& it is frightening & dangerous—I get very scared! At night it’s worst.” However, good and positive news was imminent: “On Wed (21st) came the wonderful news—we are to move South to help in the defence of London. The Major told us on a muster parade—everyone thrilled and proud.”
Our battery was to be part of a new strategy which involved the redeployment of over 400 guns to an advanced line along the North Downs—a formidable operation carried out with extraordinary speed. For our part, a few days later 481 duly packed up—bags, baggage, and guns, plus about 250 elated gunners and gunner girls. We rumbled laboriously to a map reference, which turned out to be a large field in the village of Four Elms in Kent—a mere two miles from Chartwell! Here we were established in tents, and were in constant action immediately, for we were in the area which became known as “Bomb Alley”—the highway for the flying bombs making for London. Our move from central London to the verdant countryside could be described as plunging us from one frying pan into another, and a day or two after our arrival I wrote:
Firing very often. Tonight we’ve had more than 23 engagements … It seems so strange to be encamped in battle order in the fields I remember so well from riding & walking and to lumber at dead of night in a 3 tonner down lanes last seen on picnics and school outings.—I landed up at midnight at Old Surrey Hall [on some battery business] … and Mr Anderson appeared in pyjamas & macintosh—we confronted each other—last time we wore hunting kit—this time a sleepy Home Guard commander looked at a weary ruffled AT subaltern in battle-dress!
One weekend my parents, who were at Chartwell, paid us a visit, and while they were there our guns engaged a diver. Our operational role had changed: now we had either to deflect them from their course or—best of all—cause them to explode in the air. The latter option was somewhat hazardous as “wounded birds” quite often came down very nearby—indeed, two crashed actually on our site, and we were fortunate in having only two minor casualties when one came down just in front of our guns. But a ghastly episode occurred a few miles away when a diver plunged directly onto Weald House above Crockham Hill, where evacuated children were living, causing many fatalities.
Being so near the village had (for us!) great advantages—there was the corner shop and the village church, and we had some jolly dances in the village hall, walking home across the dark fields afterwards. It was especially lovely for me when I had some hours off as I could bicycle up to Chartwell and see Nana Whyte, and cadge a bath; if I had a night off I joined her sleeping in the boiler room (converted into an air-raid shelter) up at the “big house.”
We had been at Four Elms about three weeks when, in a new development involving many batteries, we were ordered to decamp down to the coast. Here 481 found ourselves perched on a clifftop overlooking the centre of Hastings: the other ranks were accommodated in hotels along the front, and the officers were billeted in the houses immediately across the road from our gun site. Our command post was in a hastily converted public ladies’ lavatory: there was some local annoyance at the “hijacking” of this amenity.
We were on this exposed clifftop for about six weeks. The weather was glorious and our morale high—for all the anti-aircraft batteries along the coast were now equipped with new radar, new predicting equipment, and new proximity fuses to the shells, and the results were clear for all to see. Those of us off duty by day would sit and watch with relish our guns destroy the divers, and by night put our heads under our pillows to try to get some sleep. I wrote in my diary: “I’m really happy here—really happy in my work, and feeling very glad that although I was born too late for 1066 and all that—I’m not missing 1944 and all this!”
I was billeted with charming people—Mr. and Mrs. Stone—who made sure I could have a hot bath, and (although of course I had all my meals in the Mess) insisted on my joining them for high tea whenever Mr. Stone, who had a friend with a boat, had acquired some fresh fish—a great treat. Other local people abounded in kindness to us despite the noisiness of our presence—not to mention such a major dislocation as the one I recorded on Sunday, 30 July: “Lovely day. The church we were to have paraded to—we unhappily destroyed by shooting down a doodle bug down on it.”
I made a new friend when I met Ian Cowper, then a major commanding a light anti-aircraft battery stationed down the coast at Pevensey, who called on our major on some gunnery business. Thereafter he often took me out—either to dinner at some local hotel or restaurant, or, if time allowed, further afield: we went for one or two lovely excursions, a particularly enjoyable one being to Beachy Head, and those awesome cliffs. We met each other’s families, but after we both went overseas we lost touch—only to meet again by chance some years later, after I was married, in Westerham High Street. Over sixty years later, we still see each other from time to time.
Sarah came down and stayed two nights (I think the kind Stones put her up)—a wonderful opportunity to catch up. We went to a battery dance at the Queen’s Hotel where many of the girls were living; Ian came too, and although Sarah “went to bed earlyish, I rather forgot about bed—and came ‘home’ at 0600 hrs! … I felt so sleepy all Monday [the next day]—but it was well worth it. There is something rather special about talking the stars out and watching the grey, chilly dawn come.”
On my short spells of leave in London or Chequers a major priority was to catch up with some sleep, as well as to pack in people and pleasures. On one occasion
I arrived home [the Annexe] about 10.30—Mummie so welcoming. Papa sitting up in bed in his beautiful & brilliant bedjacket—he gave me a peach off his tray. Changed into my own clothes, dripped with pearls (more or less) & felt a good deal better. Went shopping with Mama till lunch time. Papa lunched with the King, so Mummie and I were alone. Slept after lunch for an hour. Fitted at Molyneux. Saw This Happy Breed‖—very, very good. Changed into my turquoise print [and went] to Diana’s birthday party. Mummie, Papa, Duncan, Sarah arrived late looking lovely. Diana radiant & peach-like. Such a lovely party. Mrs Landemare had made a luscious cake. Candlelight—and the family—and for me it worked its spell as always.
During those summer weeks I made the resolve during inactive periods when I was on duty at the command post to learn a Shakespeare sonnet or some other piece of poetry. I copied some of them down in my diary—and I find I remember most of them still.
TOWARDS THE END of August my father went on an extensive tour of the battlefront in Italy—his code name for this journey was “Colonel Kent”—and it was from there that I received the following message on 24 August: “Following from Colonel Kent to Subaltern Mary Churchill: Begins. Please send me a telegram through my Private Office te
lling me about your affairs. I follow the triumph of your guns with lively pleasure. PAPA. ENDS.”1
The following day I replied:
PRIVATE OFFICE. 10 DOWNING STREET LONDON.
Please would you send this message to Papa for me. Thank you very much for your message. The Battle of Hastings proceeds according to plan. We are busy and in good heart and proud of our increased usefulness. Hope you’re having a pleasant journey. How glorious the news is. Tender love Darling Papa from YOUR DOODLE GUNNER—MARY.2
For operational reasons I cannot now fathom (even if I did then), 481 Battery had been abruptly moved in the last week of August from the relative fleshpots of Hastings a few miles eastwards along the coast to Fairlight Cove—where once more we were all under canvas. “The new site is bloody”—I fumed to my diary—“but the view is beautiful. It is dirty, isolated, muddy (clay), roadless, waterless & completely exposed.… Actually the next few days … have fled by with duty & work & flapping around. The papers tell me Papa is home. Thank God. One more safe homecoming.”
I was due for twenty-four hours’ leave on 31 August (Thursday), but I was so tired and harassed by getting all my girls settled in our new site that I decided not to go home, and slept like a log until midafternoon. Then, on going to collect my mail in the Mess, I found a long letter from
Mummie about Papa being ill again. It was such a shock. Everything seemed to reel & go black. Also there was a [subsequent] telegram saying ‘Ring me—urgent.’ With failing heart I rang up. Thank God—O thank God—M said he is all right—but could I go up tomorrow. Yes—of course. Stan & Mollie sweet about it.
