by Ursula Bloom
The sand makes my eczema bad. Do send me some more thirst quenchers from Selfridge’s, and never again send jelly that you have made for me, because the heat melts it and it mucks up everything else in the parcel. You are such an idiot.
Love from JOS.
The queues were lengthening, and all the time the food was becoming much more difficult, whilst all of us were wondering when Lord Rhondda was going to introduce meat rationing which might solve the problem. Although prices were going up, clothes seemed to stay surprisingly cheap, and Harrods were advertising an ‘approved outfit’ for ladies who were working on the land. The outfit had a Norfolk jacket reaching to just below the hips with two large pockets, shirt blouse, and knickers, all in khaki drabette, guaranteed strong and durable, at twenty-eight and nine.
On Christmas Eve Arthur and I dined at the R.A.C. which managed to produce a quite merry atmosphere. We were joined by my grandmother-in-law, the dowager Lady Lurgan, who sat down at the table in the gayest mood and was the very antithesis of her daughter. Before long it occurred to me that there was something a little peculiar about Grandmamma. Her voice was high-pitched and extremely loud, and she started to tell us stories which were definitely unsuitable, not to say unexpected, from her. We could only surmise that she had no idea what the words meant.
After a while it seemed to upset the people round us, and Arthur persuaded her to go out with him, then he took her home in the car and handed her over to her personal maid, who was not in the least surprised. ‘It’s just that her ladyship’s been keeping Christmas,’ said the maid, and perhaps that was exactly what it was.
The baby was baptized on Boxing Day at Emmanuel Church, almost opposite the house, and not one of his father’s family came to the christening, for a titanic row had boiled up and nobody was on speaking terms. Arthur, just returned cured from Craiglockhart, had taken considerable exception to my mother-in-law’s method of address when she wrote to him. She had the Victorian habit of abbreviating words, and always began her letters ‘My Dt. Artie’ (she always called him Artie). He did not want to be a D.T. Artie, and said so. There had been another of those unpleasant scenes, with the butler holding Arthur back, and him brandishing the Colt, scenes to which I was becoming strangely reconciled, and after that nobody spoke.
As the year died we understood that an announcement would soon be made about rationing, and early in February it would be introduced.
I had now taken a small house down at Frinton, most unfortunately called Poona, and with the wretched word carved into the stone so that nothing in the world could set us free from it, but to Poona would we go before January died.
Ma had been threatening to stop Arthur’s allowance, and he was depressed beyond words about it; also her silence gave us no clue as to what was really happening, so that when she suddenly wrote to him, he was overjoyed.
6, Prince’s Gate, S.W.
January 2nd, 1918
My Dt Artie,
I cannot enter into anything in writing, and am not well enough, but I hope that when you are this way you will let me know and come to see me? It is far easier to speak than write. I conclude from gazette that you get Hon. rank of Captain. Army rules are queer these days.
Ever with love,
Your loving
MA
The beginning and the end of the letter provoked much blasphemous comment from my husband, but recovering he rang her up and said he would go to see her. He would ask himself to lunch, always a mistake at Prince’s Gate where there was an enormous parade of silver dishes, and only the minutest portions sitting in them.
Several hours later the butler rang me up. Would I please go and fetch my husband home? I drove up in a state of the gravest apprehension, aggravated by the fact that I was immediately admitted, and the moment I saw Arthur I knew what had happened. Someone had given him the key of the tantalus and he was in another coma. I and the chauffeur carried him out to the car between us, the old butler almost in tears, my mother-in-law standing with an ear trumpet poised like a fan on her stomach, in the attitude of the unamused Queen Victoria. From the doorway I looked back at her, it was the last time I was to see her for some years, and although there was a lot I could have said, somehow or other it just didn’t come.
We drove home.
We immediately went down to Frinton, lashed by the cold east wind of the turn of the year. The new regiment had wired the front so that it was difficult to walk on the greensward at all, and everywhere conditions had worsened. Although every shop displayed ‘Business as usual’ placards, business was not at all as usual. My pet butcher had been called up. All the strings I had once pulled seemed suddenly to have snapped. The Sunday joint had gone west and new-laid eggs were four shillings a dozen, which we felt to be a wicked price.
By February two cards were issued to us for rationing, a meat card and a food card. The weekly rates per person were 15 oz. beef or mutton, lamb or pork, 5 oz. bacon, and 4 oz. butter or margarine. The mainstay of life seemed to be sausages. One learnt the hour at which they would be delivered, and lined up at the butcher’s with high hope in the heart. When one got the sausages they weren’t much, and I cannot imagine what went into them, save all the gristle in the world (Arthur detested it), and occasionally the odd nail that had been swept up with the floor sweepings and popped into the sausage for weight.
Unfortunately wines and spirits were becoming very scarce, and Arthur was again at that stage when whisky was a vital necessity to him. People became well aware of his need; they knew that he was reputed to be ‘free with his money’, and relied on this, bringing a bottle round at a fancy price. I was for ever finding this happening, for mysterious bottles arrived in his study, sometimes hidden in odd places, and I once found one in the lavatory cistern. ‘An original little fellow when you get to know me!’ said Arthur.
We were right back where we had begun. It was an illness, one to which the doctors were in those days severely indifferent. One turned helplessly for help, and got none. I dare not encourage friends to the house lest they should discover too much, or lest he, in his changing moods, should produce the Colt which seemed always to be with him. One day a tragedy would happen, I began to see its shadow ahead of me, and did not know what to do to avert it.
It made matters worse that with the March of 1918 the whole future of the war became so dangerous. On the twenty-first the Germans made the big push and caught us unawares. They came on ahead at speed, and on the twenty-third of the month Paris was once more being shelled, which we had thought we had put behind us for good.
Paris had survived for so long that we had come foolishly to the conclusion that it would keep its present position. Suddenly the enemy was again at its gate, and through that April and the May we expected every day to hear that Paris had fallen. If this happened, there was that vague and secret threat, something we dared not mention, that we might after all lose the war.
On the verandah of Poona, the garden clustering with wallflowers, and the baby in his pram, Arthur said, ‘You know, I believe we are going to lose it.’
‘What happens to us then?’ I asked.
‘We bolt to the U.S.A.’
‘To get submarined going over! Remember the Lusitania.’
‘It would be worse to get to the States and all become jolly little Yanks,’ he told me.
The morning papers were worrying. The suspense seemed to last for weeks, then suddenly it was announced that the tanks had gone in. This was something new in warfare, the secret of the tanks had been closely guarded, and just at first we could not believe that it was true. They were the great caterpillar vehicles which could go everywhere and conquer everything, even that detestable liquid fire which the Germans so loved using against us.
This meant that the second battle of the Marne had begun. Dare we celebrate on a couple of sausages ‒ if we could get them ‒ and a bar of gritty chocolate? Had we at last rounded the corner? We had.
For some time now I had been taking in
dressmaking without Arthur knowing. Something had to be done to save for the education of the baby, for as we were going the money would disappear, and the big income in which my mother-in-law had a life interest would not be ours for some time yet. I never imagined that she would die, although Arthur was for ever putting his shirt on the fact that she was weaker than she used to be, but I never saw it.
I was always sewing so that he saw no new method behind this and asked me no questions. That was satisfactory. Bit by bit I was accumulating a little wad of notes locked away in a dressing-case and in my mind marked Prep., Eton, when the hour comes, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. But surely by that time something would have happened and we could do better?
At the start of every night Arthur slept heavily, and I would sit up in bed stitching away at orders for war brides, whose number was legion; for ladies requiring chic camisoles, and modern young women who sought the Paisley silk pyjama!
We both worked on shifts at the Y.M.C.A. canteen. It was a big hut in the middle of Connaught Avenue, a spacious room with a tin roof which made it very hot in summer and icy in winter. My services had been solicited by Edith Horton, the married daughter of the old lady next door, one of those women who could never think an unkind thought or speak a hard word. I worked on her shift three hours a night and was ready to be called for an ‘emergency shift’, for troops departed unexpectedly overseas and wanted food before they left. Then the canteen would brim over, and additional staff had to go on duty.
We wore blue cotton overalls with the badge on our pockets and always kept our hats on. Nobody could possibly go on duty without a hat, it would have been considered most improper.
Arthur worked in the post office there and got into constant predicaments over the change. The ‘nice little fellow when you got to know him’ was at a complete loss when it came to arithmetic, and the soldiers soon rumbled this and made merry on it.
‘Look here, sir, two and two’s five, isn’t it? And you’ve only given me fourpence, sir. See, sir? It isn’t right, sir.’
Privately I reckoned that it cost him ten shillings a night to put his errors right, but it kept him busy, and an interest of this sort was what he needed. He had always been so wildly patriotic that he asked to serve in some small way. The fact that as a soldier his father had done so well and he himself had done so badly, was ever to the front of his mind, but his father had never been menaced with the horror of that deformed hand, which Arthur magnified out of all perspective, and which I have always thought was the destiny which was to shape his life in the long run.
In the Y.M.C.A. we had no labour-saving equipment. The washing-up had to be done in big bowls, with no detergents, and with soaking tea-towels on which we wiped up, and our only amenity was the bread-cutting machine, which, since one of us had taken a finger-tip off in it, none of the girls were allowed to use.
We washed up in the room behind the selling counter where the two urns mixed their appalling smells of too strong tea and too sour coffee. Along the shelf behind us we had sandwiches of tinned salmon, always the most popular and expensive, the bully beef ones which nobody wanted, the sardine and the potted meat kind. The most expensive drink was café-au-lait at twopence-halfpenny, and as a special favour the purchaser was allowed a spoon with it. We had plum cake in slices, and a plain cake that looked like sawdust gummed together, and we also sold cheap sweets, writing-pads, pencils, studs, and buttons, with not much of a sale for any of these.
If you were new on the counter, soldiers would arrive looking pitiful, and offer a penny-halfpenny saying plaintively that they hadn’t got any more. Then they would stand looking at the tinned-salmon sandwiches (twopence-halfpenny) and smacking their lips. If this failed, they explained that it did not really matter, for anyway they would be in the trenches by next week. Edith Horton caught me falling for this. She had the angelic temperament which loves every sinner, but she said:
‘You mustn’t do it, dear, really you mustn’t. It will only get us all into trouble, and some of these poor boys are so very naughty. I do wish they wouldn’t.’
Then there were the drunks.
One night there was a particularly noisy one, and I was sent along to try to shut him up. We were fussy about this, always sending a married woman instead of one of the girls, which was the rule of the canteen. I failed to stop him and he was using very bad language, so up came Edith Horton.
‘You shouldn’t do this,’ she said to the man. ‘What do you suppose your mother would think?’
In no uncertain terms he told us what his mother would think, and what he had always thought of his mother. I should not have expected Edith Horton to understand his language, she was far too nice a woman ever to know anything of this sort, but she accepted it with superb calm, though in the end she had to call up one of the more robust sergeants to throw him out.
Before this started she said to the man: ‘It isn’t right to say things like that here, or anywhere else. I know you don’t really mean it, but all I can do is to have you put out because you go on in this manner. I am so sorry.’
The robust sergeant took it much more sternly than she or I had intended, for he pitched the drunk into a rose bush which we had fondly planted there only the previous week ‘to look nice’. It was a Dorothy Perkins which I had brought in a pot to fulfil this obligation, and I was furious.
‘Oh, look what he’s done!’ I gasped. ‘My rose bush.’
Edith Horton went to the sergeant. ‘How naughty you are!’ she said, and when he explained that the man was too drunk to feel a thing: ‘Yes, I know, but all the same you shouldn’t be rough with him. I don’t like it and it’s my shift. Anyway you’ve spoilt our rose bush, and if you behave like this you’ll have to go as well.’
He grinned, knowing she would never do it. It was her way of running a shift and everybody loved her.
But if the Y.M.C.A. had an amusing side it also had a tragic one. There were those heartbreaking evenings when a draft was off to France, and the casualty lists (whole pages of them in the papers daily) warned us what the chances of survival were.
The men would come into the hut with all their equipment, jingling with Tommy’s cookers, tin mugs, and plates, and this would be stacked into the corner amongst bulging bags and stocky-looking rifles. The men had shiny gaunt faces, all of them were trying to pretend that this was just what they wanted, though we knew what sheer hell it must have been to them.
At first those who had laughed too much had deceived me into believing that they did not care. Experience changed my reactions, and now the sound of their laughter was quite sickening. In those hours, it was hard to forget what lay ahead for them.
There were men who gave us last-minute letters to post, ‘For my old mum, please, miss,’ and there was a new glassiness in their eyes. At the back of every mind there was the memory of those casualty lists, those awful casualty lists.
A sergeant would call them to attention outside, and they would be lined up to march to the station. Idiotically we would run out with flowers from the canteen tables, ‘for luck’, and would take little packets of biscuits to press on them ‘to eat in the train’. We spent pounds this way. But whatever we did the white-faced were still white-faced and the hysterical still laughed.
One night I remember a young boy moaning and I went to him; he had been sick. I said: ‘It isn’t as bad as all that. Quite a lot of them do come back, you know.’
He said: ‘What if there was another of these wars? It’d be worse. I’m nineteen, I could live through another ruddy war.’
‘There’ll never be another,’ I promised him, and I thought I spoke the truth. ‘What you do today means that my son will never have to fight. There can’t be another.’ We clung together, then the whistle blew and the young man picked up his gear and marched to his place in the line with all the equipment chattering like the ‘rough music’ which the village at home had given to neighbours they disliked. One of the sergeants later gave me his name, and on hi
s way across to France the boat was torpedoed.
He was missing before he ever got there.
Still with it all the spy obsession flourished, and although one would have thought that with the war people would have learnt to think more clearly, they thought more cruelly. I felt particularly horrified over the spy mania, for I had suffered so much, although I had been anything but a spy.
The bitterness never died. That was an era when perhaps we were less aware of conscience, less awake to understanding of humanity as a whole. Other people’s sufferings were a matter of some indifference, and I, coming from the rectory, had always been astounded at the Denham-Cookes family who were quite blind to the feelings of others. Save Arthur, who was supremely kind, for I never saw him pass a beggar by; even in his most violent tempers he was never hard to someone who was sick.
Now with the summer waning, and the Huns moving back before our forces, it almost seemed that peace was in sight. We were already making plans. We’d go abroad. We’d visit Ireland, of course, and go to St. Jean de Luz which Arthur loved, to Biarritz and to Nice.
Four years ago we had thought, ‘It’s bound to be over by Christmas’. Four years on we were now convinced of it. At last! It would be the most exciting autumn that we had ever had, and rumour had it that Austria would be the first to collapse. It had come to that.
Whilst we were thinking about it, and almost unable to realize what it would be like to live again without the terrible fear which war nurtured in our hearts, young Gower Robinson now a lieutenant in Hong Kong made a certain entry in his diary. At the time it must have seemed to be quite insignificant, and unimportant to us in England, yet straws show which way the wind blows. Until this hour all our apprehensions and fears and longings had seemed to be for ever across the seas on the fronts, praying that the men would live and return. Now, as the war went further and further from us, it would seem our same apprehensions would be focused back here on England, on ourselves, praying that we should live.
