Youth at the Gate: A young woman’s memoir of life during the First World War

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Of course it is! No modern war could last for four years, I suppose he wants to be on the safe side and it doesn’t mean a thing, so why worry?’

  Those young men eagerly growing their first moustaches and only too anxious to fight, found the going pretty rough. Many of them died on Salisbury Plain where they were drilling with sticks for rifles, and insufficient kit. Too many had joined too quickly, and nothing was ready. Frequently rations did not turn up, and the authorities were puzzled as to what to do next, but the men wore their patriotic urge like some religious fervour and it carried them through. It was our war, and we would fight it. If somebody had caught us bending, what-ho when we got up again!

  On August the ninth the King had published a message to the Army:

  You are leaving home to fight for the safety and honour of my Empire. Belgium, whose country we are pledged to defend, has been attacked, and France is about to be attacked by the same powerful foe.

  I have implicit confidence in you, my soldiers. Duty is your watchword, and I know your duty will be nobly done. I shall follow your every movement with deepest interest and mark with eager satisfaction your daily progress. Indeed your welfare will be never from my thoughts.

  I pray God to bless you and guard you and bring you back victorious.

  GEORGE R.I.

  That was the hour when we felt that the King must have inspired his men, but it was not followed up by good news. Brussels was to fall on the very day that Pope Pius X died, August the twenty-first. The news in the papers was not convincing, there seemed to be something of a hitch, and what it could be we could not imagine. After all nobody could afford to attack us. If it came to kicking, we were the kickers.

  Every morning in the Daily Mail we read George Curnock’s despatches, and every time a picture of the French came on the screen at the White Palace, I played the ‘Marseillaise’ and everybody stood up to sing it. Soldiers had begun to filter into the audience (admitted free), and old ladies, spotting them, sent for Teddy and paid for chocolates to be handed to them. One of the usherettes told me that a young man got so many that he intended to take them round to the local shop and make money on them by re-selling them.

  ‘You see, in any case he doesn’t eat chocolates,’ she explained.

  The cinema audiences filled up again, because after a time troop trains get boring. We gave them the latest news on the slides as we received it. Montie having gone, Mr. Clements and I managed together as best we could. I locked up the chocolates at night, checked them and gave them out when I arrived. I put the wages into envelopes and signed for them. I ordered the films in advance for the shows, and saw the bill-posters, which meant getting there by an earlier train. I received no higher pay for this, would not have dared to ask in case it meant the sack, and anyway would not have expected it.

  It was now known as ‘doing my bit’.

  The Herts. R.F.A. left for some mysterious destination, where they would go into training. The rumour was that they would be going to the east of England, but so many rumours kept flying about one could never be sure, and it had come to the stage when one doubted everything. Now all men were in uniform, it was an indignity to be out of it, and the white feather enterprise had started, and bands of girls and old ladies gave youths in mufti (and that was a new name, to me anyway) white feathers to show they had no guts. There was one story going the rounds that a local Boer War V.C., quite young, was on leave, and went round in flannel bags to the shop for the papers. There an old lady presented him with a white feather for his pains!

  Mother and I waited to wave the column goodbye as they marched past our house at the end of August. A naval victory in the North Sea had been reported, with two cruisers and two destroyers down, and a third cruiser sinking. We were said to have lost exactly nothing, which was something.

  We had word that the column would be passing our house about nine o’clock in the morning, so I got up and there we were waiting under the rowan tree, where we were doomed to wait, until at one o’clock I had to go off to the cinema. By then both of us realized that something must have gone wrong. I never knew what it was until I got home after midnight, where Mother was sitting up in bed knitting socks for my brother, her face swollen with crying.

  The column had not begun to pass the house until four in the afternoon, and the hitch had been due to the hold-up of rations. The men had been served with their breakfasts as usual, but being expected to be on the march at eight, no midday meal had been arranged and none ever appeared. The horses had caused the delay. Some had been commandeered from the racing stables of Mr. Joel who lived on the Harpenden road. Becoming unmanageable, they savaged a couple of men, one of whom died in the dust outside the Riding School, and the other man who had been taken to hospital was not expected to live. The horses had broken several arms and legs of the pals who went to their aid, and when they did not kick, they bit ferociously, determined to do the thing properly. They had then bucketed the bottoms out of a couple of gun-carriages.

  The scenes which ensued had been something like a minor battle and many of the young gentlemen had turned queasy.

  It was two o’clock when they started, unfed and faint from hunger and the shock of it all. When ultimately they came jangling down the Hatfield road, my mother saw Joscelyn sitting on a gun-carriage and looking like a ghost. (‘Thank goodness he had a gun-carriage to sit on,’ I commented.) Acting on the spur of the moment she flew back into the house, snatched up bread and any available food there was, and rushed into the street to run beside the gun-carriage and hand it over as she went. Fortunately she was an athletic woman, and when other women saw what she was doing they copied her. They had luck in this, for every little while the column had to halt because more men had fainted and had fallen as they went, so they had to pause, pick them up, and put them on to a gun-carriage. In the end it looked as if every gun-carriage had its own corpses.

  ‘Montie?’ I said. ‘What about Montie?’

  Mother had not thought about him, only about her own son, which I suppose was natural. The column had gone, and we were aghast, for somehow we had never thought that they would not be fed. We heard a week later that they were at Livermere, near Thetford, where they would spend the winter.

  We were off to Yarmouth in September, and I was getting worn out with the work at the cinema and longing for the break. The news was muddling. There was a lot of talk about the German giant howitzers and the atrocities, and although the newspapers assured us that life was still going on as usual and there was no need for alarm, in our hearts we were getting alarmed.

  When were we going to start winning the war?

  On August the thirty-first, the leading article in the Daily Mail was warning:

  The heroic British Expeditionary Force has been forced slowly back but it has covered itself with fresh glory. We know from Mr. Asquith’s statement on Friday that last week it was attacked by a German force outnumbering it by odds of more than three to one …

  But on September the second:

  THE ALLIES FIGHTING EVERY YARD

  PREPARING PARIS FOR DEFENCE

  Undoubtedly something had gone wrong.

  Meanwhile the first of the military aeroplanes had gone up into the sky, in truth their lives in their hands. They were not fitted with guns, but went up armed with pistols with which it was intended they should come close and take pot shots at the enemy. This was the way the Germans were flying over Belgium, and although of course nobody said a word about it, save Mother, who could not hold her tongue, the time would come when they flew over us also.

  Two days before we took our scanty holiday (without pay) at Great Yarmouth, Lord Kitchener himself reviewed the troops at St. Albans in a field above Verulamium.

  ‘We must go,’ said Mother, who loved a jaunt of this kind. ‘Whatever happens we could not possibly miss this, for he is the greatest man of our time, and this is the big chance to see him.’

  So we went.

  We felt a little annoyed
with Lord Kitchener predicting that this would be a four-year war which everybody who knew was sure it could not be! Financially no country could stand such a drag on its resources and manpower for a day longer than three months. 1914 would see the end of it.

  That was a hot fine day, and everybody had bought penny flags (made in Japan) to wave at Lord Kitchener; when he came along he looked considerably smaller than I had thought. It is true that he had the face of a sphinx, but if we had hoped that he would appear to be optimistic, how wrong we were! At that moment he seemed to be in the last stages of a grim despair.

  Walking back Mother and I talked about it. We had some doubts which we felt to be shameful, but it all seemed rather peculiar that the Huns could be coming through Belgium and Northern France and so far our forces had apparently not been able to beat them back. Casualty lists had begun in the morning papers, they were longer than we had expected, and growing longer still.

  ‘It’ll settle,’ said Mother, ‘we shall win given a chance; we’ve just got to find our feet.’

  I was not optimistic. We, the young, had been so sure. Was it that England was not as mighty as she thought she was?

  I let myself into the house whilst Mother went round to the grocer’s to buy an egg for my tea. A letter lay on the mat; it was from Montie at Livermere.

  Since the column had marched away Montie had written to me twice a week. He objected to the R.F.A. as much as Joscelyn did, but said less, for all the young men who were not the white feather brand were determined to face hardship to win this war.

  I had an ominous feeling about this letter as I sat down on our weary old sofa, which had outlived its usefulness before it ever came to us, and I read it with despair. Montie felt that our engagement had been in jeopardy for some time. He knew Mother disliked it, and did not suppose she would ever change her mind. He realized that because I loved her so much, it could only make for difficulties ahead, and he had had some time to think about it. Perhaps if the war had never come we might have continued, but we couldn’t as things were.

  Mother had always said this would happen. It made me little happier that it was happening. For a moment I did not know what to do, then, anxious for him, for he must have been horribly worried to write the letter, I scribbled a schoolgirlish note before Mother came back.

  Dear Montie,

  It’s all right. I understand. But please write to me sometimes.

  URSULA

  ‘I’ve got the egg,’ said Mother coming in.

  I didn’t want it.

  I could not eat my tea and I got up. ‘I’m catching an earlier train,’ I told Mother, then from the doorway: ‘Montie has broken off the engagement. Please let me go. I ‒ I want it this way.’

  She came out to the gate, I felt her watching me as I went up the Granville Road. I don’t think I knew quite how I felt.

  That evening, Teddy bringing me a bar of chocolate found me crying as I played ‘Invitation to the Waltz’. He brought my favourite usherette, and perhaps she caught me off my guard, for I told her what had happened. Her argument was that she had never liked Montie anyway, and thought I was well out of it. With a war on there was opportunity for everyone, I might even get the chance to marry an officer, so why worry?

  In a daze I checked the chocolates that night, locked up and walked alone to the station. The darkness had ceased to frighten me. I waited in that dark place, remembering the grey-blueness of his eyes, and the gentle way his hand had held mine. His kind moods (he was a very kind young man) and the way he had always given me lilies-of-the-valley when he had the money ‒ very often he hadn’t any money. I cried a little, all forlornly, like a lost child.

  Later I let myself into my home, and tip-toed to the room. Mother was asleep, or I thought she was. By my bed was the Ovaltine, a little sponge cake of the kind I liked best, and a tiny bunch of roses. It was the contribution of the woman who understood me better than anybody else in the world, and now, trying not to cry and perhaps wake her, I realized how much I loved her. So very much.

  Chapter 5

  Brussels fell.

  We had started on our holiday and had come to Great Yarmouth. The place was fairly empty, for the thought of the east coast where invasion could come (though of course it wouldn’t), terrified most people. Originally in the Edwardian days when we had come here it had been to apartments, then ‘the thing’ for people like ourselves, for only the very rich went to hotels. We had stayed in rooms at the Wellington Pier end (the more select and at all costs one must be select!), and an old lady always kept the rooms, and saw after us. I remember all the landladies had beaded bodices, sparse hair, and absurd little caps perched on them (never washed), and smelt strongly of perspiration and of gin.

  But by 1914 apartments were no longer correct, and although the private hotel was unborn, the boarding-house was de rigeur. All nice people went to boarding-houses. The rest of the family were staying in the house they had always gone to since the year dot. My great-aunt Sarah was a foxy old lady, and Uncle Alfred her husband (the nicest of them all) was not considered to be quite the thing because he had not been born a Bloom. Uncle Alfred had lived a half-way life, not admitted to the family sanctums save if they were in a tolerant mood, and never asked for advice. The elder son, my cousin Francis, a seven-month child, and even that story did not help him much because he arrived two months after the secret wedding which had sent the family into such a state of jitters, had been born a cripple. He was a J.P., supposed to be a genius. His sister, my cousin Maud, was a large creature with the worst taste in hats I have ever known, but a kind heart.

  Others of the family who came to Yarmouth were my great-aunt Augusta Frederica, unhappily named after her godfather the royal Duke of Sussex, and my great-aunt Fenella from Woodbridge, a powerful hirsute creature, a Jacobite and a Rechabite and most alarming.

  We stayed in a boarding-house near the Arcade; it had sep. tabs., drawing-room tea, and serviettes. That was the era when serviettes and napkins meant something very different.

  They fed one well in spite of rising prices, and if the bedrooms were small and the landing tank was a bit noisy, one put up with it gladly, because the boarding-house was it. I played the piano in the evening for them, and the proprietress offered me a glass of stout for my pains. This horrified Mother. ‘She has never tasted stout in her life,’ said she, outraged.

  ‘Time she started. She’ll have to one day. They always give it to nursing mothers,’ giggled the proprietress’s husband, who, so the gossip of the boarding-house had it, was ‘no good’.

  We were staying there on the pruned savings of an entire year and it had come at a time when the war was in a bad patch. The burning of Louvain had upset Mother, who as a girl had known it. Then Brussels. On September the eleventh the Daily Mail was melancholy.

  THE GREAT RETREAT

  It is an amazing story which Sir John French has to tell in the great despatch, and it is told magnificently, with a soldier’s restraint and simplicity. We doubt if any army in any war has ever achieved such a feat as the retreat in good order from Mons, before an enemy of this fighting quality, supported in the ratio of at least two to one.

  There was great agitation on ‘should the clergy fight?’ and people were getting angry about it, just as angry as they were about their white feathers and their spies.

  ‘I suppose we shall win the war?’ I asked Francis. It was the day my great-aunt Fenella was coming over from Woodbridge, bringing with her her rectorial husband Charlie Ratcliffe, looked upon by the family as yet another sop. The Blooms never took very kindly to husbands.

  ‘Of course we shall win it,’ he said.

  ‘It would be awful if we lost.’

  ‘But, Ursula, how could we lose?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said quickly, ‘of course not.’

  Field postcards from the front had come into being and were accepted with interest. (‘Oh, have you had one of those too? I shall keep mine for ever as a memento.’) Lat
er they were detested for the very little news they supplied, and of course this applied also to the censored letters.

  One afternoon I walked alone up the sand dunes which lie beyond Yarmouth to where the Yar flows out. I sat down by the river, still wretched about Montie, and there was no one I could tell, for the family would not have been sympathetic. A gunboat came from the harbour to the sea, moving faster than I had ever thought she could, and a bluejacket smiled and waved his hand. In but a few moments she was just a speck, then I saw a flash on the horizon and heard a dull deep report. A second gunboat came down the harbour to the sea, and later that evening we knew that the first one had been sunk with heavy casualties.

  A deep feeling of disquiet came. We had retreated. Paris was threatened. Apparently tragedy had come to Mons where we had been going to win so great a victory. Mother and I had the good sense to realize that the one hope was that Joscelyn was safe where he was at Livermere. Montie was trying to become batman to an officer (this got a man out of gruelling route marches and other irksome duties), and Joscelyn, terrified of the horses which had been such a trial, was trying to get a job in the saddlers’ shop with a sergeant friend called Harold, which would keep him agreeably in the background of the picture.

  Those few days in Yarmouth helped us both, I think. The place had always been attractive, particularly the area round St. Nicholas’s church. I had always heard that the organ had been washed up on the beach, though how that could have happened I cannot imagine. The ‘rows’ were wonderful; insanitary, of course, though nobody in those days complained; they were the width of a net, originally arranged that way with the intention of net-drying from house to house.

  That was the time when villages and towns had a certain personality of their own which had been preserved. That area of Yarmouth was of the fisherman himself, with the market on the quay beyond, and the gateway to the Broads at the far end. Just as the sea end of the town was all entertainment, Britannia Pier ending Regent Road, with the Roman Catholic church half-way, where in my seedier grandmamma’s lifetime, the waves had actually broken on the steps. But now the sea had receded so far that it was out of earshot. The shops which sold pink rock, dirty postcards, cheap flashy jewellery (‘gems from the East’), were all jostled together in a rather ugly profusion. There were innumerable shops where postcard photographs were taken, or ladies told one’s fortune for sixpence, the oriental flavour of the parlour being marred by the presence of blowsy seer and accompanying aspidistra!