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

by Ursula Bloom

  It had all suffered a jar from the war and half the shops were already closing. It was now difficult to buy those delicious milk cheeses on their little straw mats, a Norfolk delicacy; the greengages were over, and the briny smell of bloater-curing was in the air.

  ‘It’s been a bad season,’ said our proprietress at the last drawing-room tea, she in her best frock, and with seven-for-sixpence cakes, whole lettuces in case anyone wanted extra nourishment, and a glass bowl of shrimps. It seemed a peculiar drawing-room tea, but none of us went without, though I hated the shrimps. Francis, who was something of a tease, had told me of a sailor washed up dead, whose ears had been bitten off by shrimps, and I have never fancied them since.

  As we got home, the Battle of the Aisne was beginning. The papers reported ‘Allies’ terrific shelling of the Germans on the hills’, which was heartening. I had found an article on Twilight Sleep (just beginning to make itself known) in a paper which Mother did not know I had got, and I read it all the way home with great zest. The Battle of the Aisne was nothing compared with the entrancing article on Twilight Sleep.

  Mother read Ward Price’s dispatches, and was amused by the suggestion that young ladies with comfortable allowances should order parcels to be sent to the front, or articles of real interest to the soldiers. It was proposed that they should send

  Six pipes at 6d. each

  Six threepenny boxes of Boracic Ointment for sore feet

  Six tins of Vaseline to soften hard boots

  ½ lb. coarse cut tobacco

  3 or 4 parcels of unsweetened chocolate in tins

  6 pencils with covers.

  I could hardly say that I had a ‘comfortable allowance’, it was as much as I could do to make my thirty shillings a week keep us going, so I did not feel any of this referred to me.

  As soon as I got home I opened a letter from Stratford to find that a boy I had known there had been killed at Mons. I could not believe it was true. He had been at school with my brother, and he and Rex Warneford (later to win a V.C.) used to come to tea in the rectory days. People were trying to convince themselves that this was a ‘Holy War’, and that the Huns were the Blond Beast who loved evil, and the English were fighting a crusade. It did not seem to matter much what you called it, for it all amounted to the same thing in the long run.

  I went to the cinema the first night house, the days shortening and winter at hand. I shrank from the walk alone across the common, and the wait at the station, but a soldier was in the waiting-room and we got talking. He was a ‘regular’ and he thought that he was very lucky to have got back. I asked him what had happened at Mons, for it was all something of a mystery still.

  ‘I was there,’ he said, then: ‘The ground was scarlet with blood. Like poppies. You could smell it in the air.’

  I tried to conceal my own natural horror, and murmured something about his good fortune in getting away alive.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but that was the angels,’ and he lifted a bandaged hand which moved uneasily.

  ‘You’ve hurt your hand?’

  ‘That was shrapnel.’

  ‘What is that?’ I asked him.

  ‘Bits of shell. The doctors got it out, and I’m all right, it’s just a bit difficult at times, that’s all.’

  ‘What was it about the angels?’ I asked.

  ‘You won’t believe me if I tell you.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  He said: ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening. We were fighting on, just waiting to be killed, because that was what it meant. There was a gap in the lines, then, when I looked again, there was no gap, for the angels were there. They fought with swords, I saw the light on them. Lovely they looked. Like a phantom host! We cheered them. Then the order to retreat came, and I thought the Huns would shoot us down as we went. They didn’t. The angels stopped that.’

  The train came in.

  In 1919 when I was working as a V.A.D. at the Convalescent Home at Turret Lodge, Frinton, under Miss Phyllis Holman, a hoary old war-scarred major spoke of them, too. I had been talking to him when I took him his tea, and I said, ‘The angels of Mons were gun-smoke, or mirage, weren’t they?’

  He turned on me, and he said: ‘Nobody shall ever say that in my presence, my girl. The angels of Mons saved my life. I saw them.’

  Perhaps it is easy when listening to their story to mistrust the truth. I believe the angels were.

  A new operator had now taken Lovering’s place at the cinema, and the messages which I had to scratch on the slides became wearyingly disastrous. Already I was sick of the beastly war. The continual changing of our frontline was perplexing, nobody knew what was happening, and Mother with her Daily Mail war map (price sixpence) was in a continual dither not knowing where to put the next flag. There was a rumour that von Kluck’s First Army was almost outside the fortifications of Paris.

  ‘We simply can’t put that on the slide,’ I told Mr. Clements, ‘it’ll upset everybody and do no good.’

  ‘They’ll have to know some time or another.’

  ‘But ‒ but what shall we do if France falls?’

  ‘It will fall,’ he said, ‘the sooner they realize it the better it will be.’

  We had a comedy film coming on immediately after the war slides, and I knew this would ruin the big picture for everybody, but I put it on, to be received in icy silence. ‘We’ve got the Navy,’ I kept telling myself, ‘something unexpected will happen. And anyway, soon it’ll be Christmas, and then it’ll all be over.’

  We had plunged into October but we seemed to be no nearer the end. If only we could have got a clear picture! But that was impossible.

  Paper money was issued and we felt this to be a positive insult to the Crown. Although other nations had used rather dirty little bits of paper money for years, we had thought of it as being common (anyway they couldn’t afford anything better!) and most un-English. Yet here it was in our midst! It fluttered uneasily out of the purse given half a chance, and those of us who were not careful lost it. The penny bloater now changed to twopence-half-penny, and bang went a good breakfast! Butter and margarine kept rising. Already the war had come as an excuse for shoddiness. My old winter coat would have to do, for whatever happened one must not spend any unnecessary money, and the papers kept preaching economy. More frugal food, and heaven knows ours had always been sparse enough. We had to go nearer the bone.

  Three bombs had been dropped on us. The Zepps came over. The old trouble of the spies had blazed up, and there had been mob scenes here and there. On the 19th, this was mentioned in the Daily Mail:

  THE ENEMY IN OUR MIDST

  We have no sympathy whatever with the violent attacks that have been made in Deptford and elsewhere upon shops whose proprietors bear German names. Mob law is detestable, if only because it is utterly incapable of discrimination, and hits out blindly and without even the practice of an enquiry.

  England seemed to have changed. Robert Blatchford was writing for the Weekly Dispatch and every Sunday we bought it only to read what he had to say, though he told us little. ‘No price is too great for Calais’ was the cry.

  It seemed strange in the midst of a convulsive country that Pauline Chase, the first Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up (we had rather felt the actress was the same), got married on October the 24th. I read about it with affection. Yet as I glanced across the news-sheet I became horrified to read that Conan Doyle (another great pet of mine) was accused of pro-enemy leanings, for he had contributed to funds for the Committee for Assistance to Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in distress.

  We seemed to be pretty pitiless in a blind urge for justice, and where were we getting? Nowhere. Prince Louis of Battenberg resigned from his position as First Sea Lord on October the thirtieth, and the headline was ‘Birth an ineradicable difficulty’. Churchill praised him, and he would receive honours from the King, but under it all lay the fact that at this particular time hatred seemed so dominant. One must not be a German at any co
st.

  I was feeling dreadfully ill. The breaking off of my engagement had not helped, and I dared not let Mother know how easily I became tired, and how every little duty was a labour.

  The man whom I should marry in 1916, Arthur Denham-Cookes, was having great trials with his own mother. She was a neurotic lady who enjoyed being an invalid, and kept imploring him to do nothing dangerous or she would have another attack.

  The big house, No. 6 Prince’s Gate, was busy with entertainment for the troops. Tea-parties were given. Amateur society belles sang or played the piano, or tried to be amusing. Arthur and the General attended some of these parties, he horrified, the General stony, and in the end they always tore themselves away from the entertainment in the drawing-room with the tommies sitting on spidery-legged gilt chairs, and went to the dining-room (where forty could dine with ease), armed with the key to the tantalus.

  The man who was going to be my second husband was having an exacting time at sea. In the September he had written:

  September the 2nd. At Sea

  The ship mooning about all day doing nothing in particular. General Quarters in the afternoon. Had quite an exciting middle watch this morning. All kinds of ships were stopped and searched; we had to chase one ourselves.

  September the 10th. At Sea

  We had quite an exciting day. We got down to within about forty miles of Heligoland at 6.30 a.m., still going S.E. Went to action stations at 7 as a squadron of German cruisers were supposed to be knocking around. However, we missed them in a very thick fog which came down. At noon we were attacked by submarines, one of which we sank and got no damage ourselves. We then turned back to Scapa. Had the second part of the first watch last night.

  Sea, Friday the 11th

  On our way back to Scapa all day. There was a bit of entertainment in the afternoon when we found we had steamed right into the middle of a field of floating mines. We all had to stop and send away boats to pick them up. Rotten day. Had the second part of the middle [watch] last night.

  October was a dreary month which trailed on and on. We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere on the front, and all manner of alarming stories kept going the rounds, but the spy bother in England seemed to be the great worry. Suddenly the papers spoke of Carl Hans Lody, convicted of espionage by court martial, and shot on Guy Fawkes Day in the Tower.

  ‘Serve him right!’ said everybody.

  I don’t know why, but this was something of a shock to me. I hated the thought of anybody being shot. It was bad enough in battle, where they took their chance side by side, but it seemed all wrong in cold blood.

  ‘Darling, you really are quite dotty,’ said Mother.

  Two nights later, just as the evening programme was ending, I felt odd, and the tin clock began to smudge on the top of the piano. I managed to get through the King, and knew no more.

  I had fainted across the keyboard.

  Everything happened surprisingly quickly. It seemed to be within only a few days. Mother made a great decision. She saw that I was nearing a breakdown, doing far too much, and she called in Dr. Kinloch who was a darling. He thought that St. Albans was too closely associated with my broken engagement, and suggested that we should get away, right away if possible. Mother had some hazy idea of going to the east coast. The war scare had meant that one could get one’s pick of houses there, dozens were going for a song, and rents down to nothing, which was just what we could afford.

  Also when we thought about it, we realized that next year perhaps we could turn the house into a money-making concern. We could take P.G.s, because by 1915 the war was bound to be over. Whilst I finished up at the cinema, with some regrets I must say, Mother made one or two expeditions to the coast and finally took a Queen Anne house in Saville Street at Walton-on-the-Naze. It had seven bedrooms, a rather dubious bathroom, a big sitting-room, and small back dining-room, at the rent of twenty- five pounds a year! Rates seven!

  I handed in my resignation. I wept because I had enjoyed working at the White Palace, even those pathetic times when for an extra exciting picture we engaged a ’cellist and a violinist and I had to write out band parts. The whole of the week-end would be occupied with doing this, and half Monday morning in rehearsal. Then for a week we three played. The gentlemen who lent stringed assistance would wander off during the supporting programme into the local, and come back smelling of beer, and in such an amiably benign mood, or so chatty, that I was horrified. I was too young to cope with this, and did not know what to do. It is difficult to shut up the obstreperous person when the music has to go on. I would bang away at the ‘Caliph of Baghdad’, and mutter ‘Stop it. Stop it,’ as fiercely as I could, but it was not much good.

  I played ‘the King’ for the last time. I had already said goodbye to Mr. Clements, wondering whether after all I had done there would be something extra in my pay envelope. But I had already hoped that for a couple of Christmases, and threepence had been the extra, which was hardly inspiring. I locked up and came away for the last time, to go up to the station with the evening paper. Lord Roberts had died suddenly in France. I don’t know why, but that worried me. As a very small child I had remembered the tremendous inspiration of ‘Bobs’, somebody had given me a khaki sugar soldier (said to be Bobs) and I was torn between the greedy desire to eat it, and the patriotic burning to keep it for ever. Lord Roberts would be buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s, where Nelson lay, and his death did bring a personal feeling of loss to us all, I am sure.

  The recruiting offices took a cue from it. Out came the new poster to force white-livered young gentlemen to enlist.

  He did his Duty

  Will you do Yours?

  Only ten days later we went down to Walton-by-the-Naze. The furniture would come along in a horse van, it would take a week and cost eleven pounds, which we thought wildly expensive, but it had to be met. We got to Walton about seven in the evening, and seemed to be entering a new world. There was the eternal music of the sea, at that time I thought it was always like that, not realizing what it could do. Mother when she married my father had gone with him to his curacy at Harwich and knew better.

  ‘You can never trust the sea,’ she said.

  Everyone was arranging and rearranging blackout curtains because the streets were shadowed by ‘Specials’ who came round bawling, ‘Light showing!’ ‘Put that light out!’ We went into rooms next door, very comfortable and friendly they were, and next morning for the first time I saw the house where we were going to live. I loved it. It was spacious, and had great comfort, and whereas the back looked out across the backwater, then with windmills, and the old Dutch mill sparkling in the vivid autumn sun, the front looked over bare open ground to the shore. There was bleached grass, and surf and sand.

  ‘I shall like this,’ I said.

  That very night the sea got up. The noise of the waves breaking on the open ground before the house was like gunfire, and even though the windows were all closed, the place got full of blown sand and smelt brackish for days. We were exhausted from moving in, until I fixed on the happy idea of putting everything about which we were not sure into one of the bedrooms, and locking the door. I had trouble with getting curtains fixed, for the windows were very tall.

  The sea, who was a stranger to me, did alarm me. The noise it made being new to me, I could not sleep in my room at the back of the house, and thinking Mother might be awake, I sneaked out. There was a streak of light under her door, and I went in. She was sitting up in bed looking very haggard, her eyes receded into dark sockets.

  ‘Is ‒ is something the matter?’ I asked.

  When she could speak, she said: ‘I didn’t want to tell you till the morning, but there’s a lump. It’s come back.’

  I gave a little gasp, then pulled myself together. ‘It may be nothing. It’s easy to imagine things, one never knows.’

  That seemed to help her, though heaven knows why.

  She said she thought that her outworn corsets had grated and could have caus
ed it. I got into her bed, my work-basket with me. I removed the steel busks for her, replacing them with hooks and eyes. I had forgotten the noise the sea was making, I felt sick, not myself at all, but however I felt she must not know. From three that morning both of us played a game pretending that it was the storm that had disturbed us.

  A rocket spat into the sky. Quickly the lifeboat went out into a raging sea which now broke high over the ground before the house, and with morning we knew that there had been a wreck at Harwich. Thirty men on leave, and one officer, had gone back to their ship, and the boat had gone down. With the jaundiced light of a sallow new day Mother said: ‘You’ll get a doctor, then we’ll know. Anyway that will be something.’

  ‘I’m going right now,’ I promised her.

  The milkman had told me where the doctor lived, and I went out. With morning the open sea was pale green, churned into ugly hills and dales, growling as it broke. The tide had gone out. A coastguard stopped me at the end of the road, where it joined the esplanade.

  ‘I’d keep off the front, miss,’ he said.

  ‘I have to go for the doctor.’

  ‘The beach is no place for a young lady this morning. The picket-boat from H.M.S. Conquest was wrecked off the Naze in the storm and the chaps are coming in. It isn’t right for you, miss.’

  As he said it a horse and cart clopped along past me, a Sea Scout leading it, and a coastguard with a bearded face marching beside it. A Union Jack was flung over a lump in the back of the cart, and from under it there stuck out a bluejacket’s stiff leg, dripping with water. It seemed to me that the dark line of water along the road marked his brief life, and I guessed that he would have been very little older than I was.