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

by Ursula Bloom

  Later in this very year the entry of a young lieutenant in his diary would be infinitely significant to us all.

  Hong Kong. Monday, June the 10th, 1918

  There is a mysterious epidemic touring the coast ports of China, and it has just arrived here today. There are only 700 men in the dockyard in lieu of 2,400.

  That epidemic was called ‘’flu’.

  I read of it in the newspapers later in the summer, on the day that a mine was washed up on Frinton beach, and to cheer myself I went to have a look at it. The casualness with which the people of the First World War treated mines was unbelievable. There it lay on the beach, apparently harmless, round as a globe and quite innocent as far as one could see. A trawler came along from Harwich, and they put off a boatload of sailors who came running up the beach. It amazed me that none of them wore shoes or socks, and that their ‘bell bottoms’ turned up so beautifully neatly. I was far more interested in the fascinating sailors than I was in any personal danger, for the mine could easily have blown up on us all, but it was a happy matinee entertainment, we felt.

  I could not make out what they actually did to it. Whatever they took out of the mine seemed to be extremely difficult to get, and when they had done this they put a chain round the thing, and with deftness got it back into the sea and towed it out to the waiting trawler.

  I had taken the baby along in the pram so that he should get an idea of what mines were like; when we got home I told Arthur what fun it had been, and he said that he thought I had been rather silly.

  ‘Mines,’ said he, ‘are invented with only the one idea, which is to go off.’

  I knew that missiles fired which did not go off could be alarming, for the Huns were now dropping a new device on London which we called ‘aerial torpedoes’. One had come down in Moorgate and had not exploded, which had made it infinitely terrifying. It had lain in the gutter for an hour and a half, nobody knowing what to do with it, whilst women fainted and strong men disappeared. None of the Second World War promptitude which came along with a label ‘Unexploded bomb’ with the area cordoned off, ever applied to the original war. People could come and have a look at it if they wished, and if it went off that was just too bad. We had been attacked by, and were incapable of tackling, a modern form of warfare which was still new to us, and it is amazing that we did not pay more dearly for our ignorance.

  In the end the Moorgate aerial torpedo went along to Hackney Marshes which was prepared to receive unpleasant gifts of this nature ‒ so they said, I don’t know if it was true.

  That autumn I went up to London to shop, and London was showing signs of war strain. It was changed. Too many had spent their nights sleeping in cellars and were tired out. The four years were telling. Yet I had a horrid intuition that we still had not faced the worst to come to England. How right I was. In his diary the young naval lieutenant had mentioned it quite casually as people did. It was the epidemic called ’flu.

  Chapter 14

  All pathways by His feet are worn,

  His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,

  His cross of thorns is twined with every thorn,

  His cross is every tree.

  JOSEPH PLUNKETT

  Executed, 1916

  Deep depression was now part of poor Arthur’s illness, and the tensed atmosphere between himself and his mother did not help. I had no one to whom I could turn, and much as I needed help could not find it. I just sewed on to swell the fund which would ensure the baby going to the right school. Not for the world would I have let anybody know that I was doing this, because I felt it was ‘common’ of me, and Arthur’s family would have said: ‘There! What did we tell you?’

  I was playing the game of ‘let’s pretend’ with myself, the childish game too many of us play. Something would happen to put things right. I believed in the happy ending.

  I hoped for the happy ending. I had a private feeling that life could not be quite as mean as it was apparently trying to be. One day ‒ perhaps tomorrow ‒ everything would come right.

  That summer Arthur’s college friend Hermon Rogers-Tillstone came down to stay with us. He was a doctor who had had a breakdown, and was now living in Norwich, doing a simple job there which did not strain him too much. It was better for Arthur to have a companion with him, and these days the war seemed to be going further and further away, so that we could relax a little.

  ‘Arthur is very ill, you know,’ Hermon told me one day when we were walking on the greensward together.

  ‘I know, but what can we do?’

  ‘Very little, I’m afraid. I thought you ought to know.’

  ‘You don’t mean it is anything dangerous?’

  ‘In a way it could be dangerous. His father being over seventy when Arthur was born did not give him stamina. His mother being such an old fool; then that hand. Well, perhaps something will turn up, one never knows.’

  I had lived in the hope of that for almost two years. Perhaps it is a joyous thing when one is young enough to believe that somewhere round the next corner there must be happiness.

  Hermon and Arthur were great friends, they enjoyed being together, discussing old times, what they intended to do when the war ended, and now in the September it did seem that it must end soon.

  Joscelyn wrote:

  Gaza.

  August the 31st, 1918

  Dear Ursula,

  All the Gyppos say that the war will be over in a couple of months. As they always know everything this ought to be something. I shall be glad to get back, though in some ways I have half a mind to stop on here with the army. I’m getting used to it. Who would have thought that possible four years ago?

  My Tommy’s cooker has gone west; is there any chance of getting another one sent out to me? The post caught up with me and there were thirty-two magazines you had sent me. Now the whole camp’s reading. Heat awful. And how camels smell!

  As ever,

  JOS.

  Somehow now that things were better, and the war horror drifting from us, a lethargy had spread over us. Almost as if we did not care any more.

  ‘Something will happen to stir us out of it,’ Hermon said the night before he went back.

  It was the very night when after we had gone to bed Arthur thought he heard burglars getting into the house and went down with the Colt. Hermon also, each going a different way round the house and so running into each other in the shrubberies under my window, where the Colt went off. Arthur had mistaken Hermon for a burglar. It seemed a dreadful thought that, after having constantly threatened to shoot somebody all this time, he had now probably shot his best friend! The echo seemed to go on for ever. Perhaps this would be the end. All the same nobody had been hurt, and although the servants were paralysed with fright, we survived.

  Arthur was very irritable, he had deep fits of depression, something which the doctors did not help, for from the first they had been horribly unsympathetic. There seemed little we could do, and we just went on always hoping for a miracle.

  In the summer Spanish ’flu had been about but it did not come our way. Early in October with the war approaching its end, the front page of The Times became alarming. We were accustomed to shocking casualty lists, but the death columns were now enormous and crammed with the names of young people, both men and women, who had died here in England. Their ages seemed always to be between eighteen and thirty-two.

  We were a weakened nation. Food had been abominable, nobody had heard of vitamin pills for chemistry was far behind the chemistry of the Second World War, and we had starved because it was patriotic. The bread was vile, and milk difficult to get for the feeding of stock demanded too much. The gristly sausage, full of anything but pig, might have proved itself to be the backbone of the hungry nation, but the backbone had little marrow in it.

  The first incident which brought home the realization that something strange was happening came when I walked into a local shop and bought some ribbon from a young assistant there. As I found that I
had insufficient I went again in the afternoon. A small apprentice looked at me with pink eyes; the girl who had served me in the morning had collapsed behind the counter soon after I had left, and she was dead.

  ‘But she can’t be!’ I gasped. ‘Was it heart?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the little apprentice, ‘not heart at all, just the influenza.’

  Frankly I did not believe that this could happen. I did not realize that this particular ’flu bug developed into a malignant pneumonia at lightning speed. It was a killer which had become violently active in our midst, and the doctors could only use the remedies they had to hand, ones which were already dying of senility.

  People continued to die, and so terribly quickly, and all of them were the young. It would almost seem as though it had some association with the great plague of London, yet of course that could not be.

  The epidemic accrued at a mighty speed.

  Every time I went out more windows had their ragged blinds drawn, ragged from the war and the fact that this last year all thought of repairs had had to go by the board.

  My Venetian blinds hung in limp slats bunched together where the binding had given way; the webbing had gone off the market, and had we been able to buy it there was no one left who could have put it on to the tattered blinds for us. Yet houses drew their shabby blinds out of respect for the dead who lay behind their doors, for the Victorian era was still with us in homage to death, in deep mourning, and in respect.

  It was the baby’s little nursemaid ‘Woolly’ who contracted it first. She ran a high temperature and I took the baby’s cot into my room; by morning the cook had developed it. Mrs. Fanthorpe had a weak heart, something which had always worried us, and the doctor took a serious view of her condition.

  He stood in the hall fingering his hat. ‘This is a most unpleasant form of influenza,’ he said. ‘It runs through a house and there is nothing that we can do to stop it.’

  I asked if we all should get it, and he said seeing our ages he thought we should, for apparently it hit at the young. When we said goodbye on the step, with the melancholy autumnal garden beyond, he apologized for being so depressed. He had been up all night, and had seen four young people die during that night, two of whom he had brought into the world.

  ‘I have the feeling that this wretched thing never goes through a house without leaving a corpse behind it,’ he said.

  I wished we had not talked. Arthur on the other hand did not care, he thought that the doctor was a fool anyway, and did not believe a word he said. Arthur had always been casual over death; it did not frighten him; I remembered the time when he and Captain Saw had been holding Holland Gat under the ‘No Retreat’ order, and how indifferent he had been. His idea was that as we all had to die some time, what was the good of bothering?

  The district nurse was a great help, but as she was wanted everywhere she herself was distracted.

  If on October the fourth Germany proposed an armistice, we hardly noticed that this even happened. It seemed amazing that we had waited for this moment for four agonizing years, yet when it came we had got past concerning ourselves with it, for the epidemic was increasing at such a speed that we could think of nothing else.

  Next to the doctors the parish grave-digger was the hardest-worked man in the place. Whenever I passed the churchyard, at this time of year misty with autumn, and full of the withering lime leaves, I could see one burial service finishing whilst another funeral waited patiently to begin.

  I had the ’flu slightly, and was so busy nursing the cook that I did not even go to bed. Indeed, I must have been stronger than I thought. Arthur became ill. His temperature stayed low, far lower than Mrs. Fanthorpe’s or Woolly’s, had done, but he was desperately restless. When the doctor came next day I hoped that he would say that Arthur’s was just a bad cold, but he didn’t. He recognized something that I had missed.

  ‘But it certainly isn’t a serious condition yet,’ he told me.

  From that moment things became difficult.

  I and the parlourmaid were the only two left, and because Woolly was ill wherever I went I had to carry the baby with me. He was a heavy child, almost a year old, and although a very amenable baby his weight tired me out.

  All through that day restlessness disturbed Arthur; it was midnight when he started a haemorrhage. The doctor came but had to leave later, and when I returned from seeing him out, Arthur was violently delirious. We could get no nurses, the military police came for short shifts, and an old man once an orderly at Netley Hospital. I stayed with Arthur lest the strangers made him afraid.

  At the end of three days I think I had forgotten how one slept. My mother-in-law refused to take any message though in the end I got the doctor to speak to her. That night a large stout nurse came down to us. She was a nice woman, only too anxious to help. Arthur lay unconscious in one room, the cook frailly convalescent in another, Woolly just able to sit up in bed, whilst I could recognize a rapidly approaching breakdown in myself, for the dress which had fitted me last week hung now in folds.

  In the end Hermon arrived. He walked into the house one dreary morning when I was at the end of my tether and dizzy for the want of sleep. I saw him coming in at the gate where the ‘red-hot pokers’ dripped dew in the border, against their spiky white leaves which the frost had shattered.

  ‘The war’s ending, it may even be over now,’ said Hermon.

  He was terribly good to me; very kind. He gave me brandy, and for the first time in my life I did not recoil from it, for the simple reason that I hardly tasted it.

  That night Arthur died.

  After the funeral I went with Hermon to Norwich to stay for a week. He thought it would be better for me than staying on here where everything had happened. They lived in lodgings, so I had to have a room out, and it was one of those poverty-stricken rooms of my childhood, with thready carpets and draughts everywhere. I had to lay my clothes on my dressing-case when I went to bed, for there was no chair. I had a desperate longing for comfort and there was no comfort here, but it had been kind of Hermon to bring me away, and perhaps I was better in Norwich than I should have been at home.

  Hermon told me that Austria had accepted the unconditional peace, that the Kaiser had abdicated and had fled, nobody knew where. Peace was coming.

  I got up next day feeling very ill indeed. The papers said that ten millions had died in this war and probably another twenty millions had died through the events the war had caused. I dressed slowly, somehow fatigue and general collapse had made me ridiculously slow. I wore a black dress, with widow’s bands at the wrist, and the bonnet with weeds which my mother-in-law had said was the right thing. She had not communicated with me since Arthur had died, but the old butler had come down to the funeral, and had been kindness itself.

  I walked out into the street that chilly November day in Norwich. A soldier’s funeral was coming down the road, with a Union Jack flung over the shallow coffin, as once a Jack had been flung across a cart trundling up the High Street at Walton to a similar destination.

  Could that have been only four years ago?

  At that moment a maroon exploded somewhere in the city. Oh, not another air-raid! I gasped to myself. It could be nothing else, surely?

  I never knew that it was the armistice.

  I went back to the wretched lodgings because I had nowhere to go, and I was unutterably alone. The paper had the headlines:

  GERMANY SURRENDERS

  ALLIES TO ACCEPT THE RHINELAND

  FLEET GIVEN UP OR DISARMED

  The leading article was headed, ‘A Glorious End’, and under it was the couplet:

  What have we gained? The whole world’s praise,

  Friendship and trust, as it stands at gaze.

  It was over; or wasn’t it?

  THE END

  You can read more by Ursula Bloom, find out more about her life, and be the first to know about upcoming releases at her official website www.ursulabloom.com

  Wonder C
ruise by Ursula Bloom

  A witty, heartwarming read with great romantic and comic characters. This warm, feel-good tale will make you smile, and you’ll be rooting for Ann to find lasting love and happiness. A moving portrait of an unforgettable 1930’s woman; Ann Clements will stay with you long after the last page.

  Ann Clements is thirty-five and single, and believes nothing exciting will ever happen to her. Then, she wins a large sum of money in a sweepstake and suddenly can dare to dream of a more adventurous life. She buys a ticket for a Mediterranean cruise, against the wishes of her stern brother, the Rev. Cuthbert, who has other ideas about how she should spend her windfall. Anne steps out of the shadows of her mundane life into the heat of the Mediterranean sun. Travelling to Gibraltar, Marseilles, Naples, Malta and Venice, Anne’s eyes are opened to people and experiences far removed from her sheltered existence in the offices at Henrietta Street, and Mrs. Puddock’s lodging house. As Anne blossoms, discovering love and passion for the very first time, the biggest question is, can there be any going back?

  ‘Brightly told and very readable.’ Woman’s Journal

  ‘… with every book she adds something to her reputation … related with all Miss Bloom’s liveliness and easy skill.’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Ursula Bloom writes in a delightful way, with a deep understanding of human nature and a quick eye for the humorous things in life. Wonder Cruise … is one of the most entertaining novels we have read for a long time.’ Cambridge Daily News

  ‘Vividly entrancing.’ Scotsman

  ‘She has always been able to tell a story … Miss Bloom is to be heartily congratulated.’ Everyman

  Now available as an ebook and paperback on Amazon.

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