In a small provincial town in wartime life resumed some semblance of normality.
Went to the pictures for the first time since the war started. Took gas masks but felt rather silly.
Budget out. Cigarettes up – Players 1/ 1½d – and income tax. All drawing in our horns.
Put in some hyacinth bulbs. Reading a biography of Caroline of Brunswick. Band Waggon. This is a war diary but this seems to be our life.
There were some excitements:
Postcard from Don Liddell to say that Jock, Henry and Elsie are leaving Finland. Flight from the Bolsheviks in an open boat. Somehow, though it’s serious, I can’t help laughing.
But everyday life supervened:
Made 16/- by selling old clothes to Mrs Ramage.
All this time she was writing steadily and conscientiously:
I did a little writing – it is getting involved and I don’t quite know what I am driving at. That’s the worst of a plot.
After supper I did some writing which quells my restlessness – that is how I must succeed.
She had already, in 1938, completed Civil to Strangers and a novel with a Finnish setting, half jokingly based on Henry’s life there (both unpublished). During 1940 she wrote the first draft of a novel with a wartime setting, which she called ‘my spy novel’, which was more remarkable for its observation and humour than for its plot.
When one is tired one gets strange fancies. On one occasion when we had the evacuees I fancied I smelled rabbit cooking in church and the altar looked like some celestial Aga.
I like to see that all lights are put out and never trust anyone but myself to do it. Also it has become doubly important since the war as our Air Raid Warden is the grocer with whom I am not registered.
During 1940 and part of 1941 she worked in the YMCA canteen at the local military camp:
Did my nails with Pink Clover but later, doing the money at the camp, it all peeled off.
A Scotsman called me ‘a wee smasher’ but what he meant is rather obscure.
Busy poaching eggs in little machines.
A ravishingly handsome Second Lieutenant poured into an exquisitely tailored overcoat came in, but he studied his book of Gas Drill rather than me.
But there were quite a number of soldiers only too happy to flirt with her a little. One of them, a Scot, inspired her to start learning Gaelic, as she had learned German for Friedbert and Finnish for Henry.
She also helped at the baby clinic in the town:
I’m learning quite a lot about babies and their feeding. I am gradually learning to pick up a baby with a nonchalant air.
And at the First Aid Post:
Long First Aid lecture. Shall I ever grasp the circulation of the blood?
In the evening an anti-gas lecture. Went into the tear-gas van – a snouted figure – got my badge.
Like all women in civilian life she was busy with housework, making over her old clothes now that there was clothes rationing, and constantly preoccupied with food:
Links managed to get a 7lb jar of marmalade – such are the joys of going without. Not even love is so passionately longed for.
She did not have to brave the perils of air raids though enemy planes passed over:
A big bang in the night, reputed to be a bomb at Bagley.
And the sirens went most nights:
Had a bath after tea in case the sirens should go.
We have a rota at the First Aid post now and if I hear the siren I don’t have to go tonight. It went at 12. All clear 4 a. m.
In October 1941 she had to register for war service and after various suggestions (‘Had a phone call asking me if I’d be interested in apolitical intelligence job in the country’) she was offered a job in the censorship at Bristol, censoring civilian letters, mostly to Southern Ireland.
Hilary was already working as a secretary in the BBC Schools Department at Bristol, living in a large house called The Coppice in Clifton, a suburb of Bristol, overlooking the Suspension Bridge. Barbara joined her there in December 1941.
Barbara compared life at The Coppice to a play by Tchekov and certainly the inhabitants, all working for the BBC and living in close proximity, were an interesting collection of personalities, and there was a very Tchekovian mixture of comedy and tears. They were: Dick Palmer with his wife Mary, their three children, Liz, Gill and Sally, and Tamara, a Polish friend; Flora Meaden; Hilary, and Honor Wyatt with her two children Julian and Prue. Honor had separated from her husband, the writer and broadcaster C. Gordon Glover, when she got her BBC job, and moved to Bristol taking the children with her. Gordon was based in London on the staff of the Radio Times but was living at Arkesden in Essex. He used to visit Bristol to see the children, since the separation had been amicable with no bitterness.
Barbara fell in love with Gordon and they had a love affair, very serious on her part, perhaps less so on his. There is no written record of this period in her life, apart from a few letters to the Harveys, since Barbara burned her diaries for this year (see her notebook entry for 17 February 1976), but she started writing a kind of narrative which she called After Christmas in 1943 after she and Gordon had parted.
It was a strange, ironic situation, to be living in the same house as Gordon’s wife Honor, to whom she was deeply attached, following with sympathy and anxiety Honor’s love affair with George Ellidge (whom Honor later married), then on active sevice in North Africa, and the progress of her divorce from Gordon. The interrelationships and emotional undertones were complicated and painful and in July 1943, to make a break in an impossible situation, she wrenched herself away from the warmth and familiarity of The Coppice and joined the WRNS.
She served as a rating at HMS Westcliff and was then promoted to Third Officer and worked in naval censorship. A testimonial from Director of WRNS on her demobilisation described her as ‘an intelligent and adaptable censor officer with a keen interest in her work’. But Barbara could never quite believe that she was part of service life.
Gradually people will begin to discover what a fake I am — how phoney is my Wrennish façade.
She did, however, find herself immersed in social life, especially when she was stationed at Southampton:
There is plenty of social life whether you like it or not, because most of the invasion forces, both English and American, are concentrated in the South-West and there are always far more men than women at dances. The Wrens get so many invitations they hardly know which to accept.
In 1944 she was posted to Naples where social activity was even more hectic:
In the evening went to a party at Admiral Morse’s villa, quite enjoyable but I am never at my ease there, feeling Jane Eyre-ish and socially unsuccessful. Danced with Flags and Astley-Jones, both doing their stuff – charm etc. How artificial it all is. I wonder if they feel it.
She returned to England in June 1945 and went to Oswestry to be with her mother who was very ill and who died in September.
A fellow Third Officer, Frances Kendrick, introduced Barbara to her aunt, Beatrice Wyatt, then Secretary of the International African Institute in London and it was arranged that Barbara should work there as an Editorial Assistant.
H.H.