In 1936, Michael was sent to Bryanston, the progressive boarding school. He arranged to come home as seldom as possible, and when he did, he reacted to the domestic tensions by locking himself in his bedroom with a book. Eve developed an acute sensitivity to negativity of any sort and reacted by becoming the joker of the family. As none of the Devon schools offered an outlet for her drama and dance interests, Dock, determined to fulfil her daughter’s ambition of a life on the stage, sent her fourteen-year-old daughter to Heatherton House, a boarding school in London that took promising young dancers. Eve was never to live at home again.
As Ted was knitting his way towards life in the army, Rupert was recalled to Woolwich as garrison adjutant. On Sundays he’d take Eve to a tea dance at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane and tried to temper her ambitions by pouring practical sense onto her dreams of becoming an actress. He also hoped that by restricting her allowance, he would tempt her back to Devon once she had finished her studies.
Eve left school when she was seventeen, her last two terms having been spent in Shamley Green, the sleepy village in Surrey that Heatherton House had moved to because of safety concerns. She was too young to join up for military service, but eager to start working. Wartime London was an exciting place for an adventure-hungry young girl – everything was so vital, and everyone was friendly and supportive. Eve moved into a ‘ladies club’ at Lancaster Gate with around forty other girls, who all shared an enormous dormitory with only dividing curtains affording some privacy. Each girl had to take a two-hour duty shift, standing on the roof as a fire watcher. Those hours spent in the cold London air, watching the powerful searchlights crisscross the black sky, the silence punctuated by the odd cry of a fox or the singing of a drunk stumbling home, were manna from heaven for Eve’s fertile imagination. With her senses heightened by the need for vigilance and the ever-present fear of an imminent ‘doodlebug’ explosion, she would spend her watch inventing grisly dramas taking place beneath the roofs around her.
The only qualification Eve gained on leaving school was her Royal Academy of Dance Diploma. The reason for her lack of academic success wasn’t simply the dismal formal schooling she received at the dance academy. Passing exams simply wasn’t in her DNA, for like Ted, she too was dyslexic. She had an agile, inquisitive mind but was unable to process information from the classroom blackboard and put it on paper. In many ways, this gene has been the making of our family – being unable to gain academic qualifications has meant that none of us has been conventionally employable, and explains our entrepreneurial drive.
Eve’s school had an agency that placed its young alumni in various stage shows. With her impish energy and ability at mime and dance, Eve was cast in most of the roles she auditioned for. Being involved in big West End productions, with all the camaraderie, glamour and drama that it involved, was Eve’s dream come true. She was in her element. But all was not so happy at Higher Leigh, where Eve’s younger sister Clare was leading a solitary life, with the family maid her only companion. When I talked to Clare about her childhood, she could only recall one happy memory – lying on her back under the cider barrel with her mouth wide open, catching the drips as they seeped through the old wooden tap. With no brother and sister at home – Michael was training to be a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School – she craved love and warmth from her mother but Dock, now virtually a single parent with Rupert posted to London for weeks on end, had taken a job as a secretary at a local boys’ prep school.
Clare’s parents, thinking that she would be happier living with other children, sent her, aged just six, to boarding school, but the little girl was miserable there. On more than one occasion, Dock received a call from the headmistress telling her that Clare had run away. Dock would then search the Devon lanes until she spotted a diminutive figure plodding determinedly homeward. She’d scoop up her daughter and drive her back up the long gravel drive before depositing her, kicking and screaming, in the strong arms of matron and fleeing for home.
Last year, while clearing out Aunt Clare’s desk after her death, I found a bundle of letters written in childish script, tucked away at the back of her filing cabinet.
Darling Daddy
PLEASE PLEASE come down and take me out this Sunday, the 17th. PLEASE PLEASE, if you cannot come could you tell Eve to come and take me out instead?
PLEASE come its very urgent, send a postcard please saying when you will arrive and when you will go. I shall die if you don’t come. Tons of love. Clare
The image of a miserable little girl making a bid for freedom still breaks my heart. Talking to my much-loved but tough and eccentric eighty-five-year-old aunt, I tried to sympathise, saying that I understood how it felt to be brought up in a family as an ‘afterthought’.
‘Ha!’ she spluttered. ‘It’s OK for you. I wasn’t just the afterthought – I was the mistake.’
I paused for a while, unsure of what to say in the face of this awful truth. ‘Did you think Granny was unkind or cruel in any way?’ I ventured.
‘No, she was never cruel,’ Clare replied. ‘She just wasn’t at all maternal.’
During the school holidays, Clare and her mother spent their days at Thurlestone Golf Club. Clare would skip around the players as they sat having their tea in the sun, while waiting for her mother to return from her round. Thurlestone was to become the venue of a life-changing encounter for Clare, for it was here, at the age of fourteen, that she was to meet Douglas Bader, the real-life hero of Reach for the Sky and the love of her life. He was in his late thirties when they met, but it was the beginning of an extraordinary relationship that lasted until his death in 1982. To this day we speculate about its nature, but the sparkle in her eyes whenever his name was mentioned certainly hinted at intimacy.
Born in 1910, Bader was a keen sportsman who went on to be a famous flying ace during the Second World War. It has been suggested that his swaggering confidence and daredevil personality were amplified by his wartime experiences and that his fame encouraged an innate sense of superiority and a tendency to bully those less capable than himself. However, his eccentricity gave Clare a new confidence and freedom.
I learned a wonderful story about Douglas that may have related to Clare’s invitation to him to give a talk at her secondary boarding school, Cranborne Chase. Bader was not one to temper his language, and when he was invited to give a talk at a smart girls’ school, he began, ‘So there were two of the fuckers behind me, three fuckers to my right, another fucker on the left . . .’
At this point the headmistress blanched and interjected: ‘Ladies, the Fokker was a German aircraft.’
‘That may be, madam,’ Bader replied, ‘but these fuckers were in Messerschmitts.’
Meanwhile in London, Eve was falling in love with a young fighter pilot called John Roper, whom she had met through a friend at the theatre. When he was on leave, they would go dancing at the Milroy Nightclub or the 400 Club. The intensity of wartime relationships was summed up in the way they spent their evenings: full of gaiety and laughter on meeting and then, as the evenings drew to a close and they grew aware of the danger their partners would imminently face, the dances would become slower and slower until they were dancing what they called the ‘goodnight shuffle’, doing nothing more than clinging to each other and taking the odd step. Mum describes kissing John goodnight one evening, then never hearing from him again.
Barely a family was left untouched by the war, and with each ghastly blow came the resolve of rising to the spirit of the age. It was the ‘stiff upper lip’, the ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ sort of spirit – layer upon layer of emotional pain buried under platitudes to encourage you to get back in the saddle.
Eve worked with Morecambe and Wise, who were in 1942 just beginning to form their unique double act. She remembers going to the pub with them after every show and listening as they cut their teeth, performing for their stage mates. Her final foray on the West End stage was in Sir Alan Herbert’s production, Bless the Bride.
While London was under threat, dressing up for the stage night after night began to feel unfulfilling to Eve. Being surrounded by so much excitement satisfied her passion for drama, but her life needed purpose. Being too young to sign up to one of the services, she looked for other sources of adventure. It was at this time that someone told her that the Air Training Corps were looking for people to train cadets to fly gliders. I can’t begin to understand how she thought she would be qualified for such a job – not least because the position was only open to men. But yet again, her charm shone through and she managed to convince the recruiting officer that she was capable of taking on such a role. She had turned up to the interview at the glider training centre in Heston in Middlesex wearing baggy khaki trousers, a roll-neck sweater and with her hair tucked into a cap. She may not have been disguised as a man, but she was certainly playing down her femininity. When asked if she had any experience, she explained that she had none at all but would love to learn and help out in any way she could.
The officer in charge agreed to take her on as an ‘instructor under instruction’, as long as she kept on dressing as a boy; as he explained, headquarters certainly wouldn’t sanction employing a woman in such a dangerous sport.
Stories of my mother’s days at Heston echoed through our own childhood. Whenever she was encouraging us to leap off cliffs into freezing seas or to climb to the top of trees, her own bravery in the face or fear would encourage us to push on. She loved working with the young boys, teaching them how a glider catches the thermals and showing them the simple instruments that kept the craft stable. She was in her element chanting the mantras of strict safety drills and giving the cadets the confidence to climb into the tiny solo cockpit, lifting their spirits as she strapped them in.
‘Don’t worry Charlie,’ she would sing. ‘You know you can do it!’ She would then give the boy a hearty slap on his shoulder and a kiss on the forehead before the glider was winched three hundred feet into the air and cast adrift into the clouds. With the trace of her kiss on his skin and her encouraging words still ringing in his ears, he would happily swirl over the fields, coming down with a bumpy landing ten minutes later. And there Eve would be, whooping with joy as he struggled out of the bucket seat, his arms raised in triumph. He would give her a hug in gratitude, for Eve had shown him that he could turn fear, full-body-stress fear, into pure, adrenalin-pumping excitement.
Then it was her turn. All the cadets and officers had turned out to watch this ‘maiden voyage’. Amid good-natured banter and proud salutes from her fellow instructors, the young tomboy settled into the cockpit. She gave a cheery wave to the crowd and off she went, winched higher and higher, but at the critical point she forgot the vital instruction that she had drilled into her young cadets: never release the nose from the winch cable while the glider is pointing skyward. She released the glider and it promptly stalled and began spiralling towards the ground. She remembers feeling dizzy and sick, as complete terror caused her to momentarily freeze. At the last moment, self-preservation clicked in and she managed to pull the joystick back just in time to bring the glider to a haphazard landing. Her audience ran to her as she emerged from the cockpit, shaking. She began to take off her flying helmet, but her excitable students chanted, ‘Again! Again!’
The idea of going back up into the clouds made her palms sweat. ‘Come on, Evie, my girl,’ she muttered to herself as she forced a smile, ‘you can do it.’ With a victorious twirl of her helmet and to a roar from the crowd, she twanged her goggles back over her eyes, snapped on her seatbelt and was winched skyward again. Up and up she flew, counting to a hundred to settle her nerves. This time she calmly waited for the glider to straighten up before she pulled the release lever, its head down. She gave the cheering cadets a fly-past, blew them a kiss and followed through with a near-perfect landing. She never went up in a glider again.
In 1943, when Eve was nineteen, she applied to become a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Every girl dreamed of becoming a Wren, and she was no exception – the lure of the sea, the boats, the outdoors and the saucy uniform were too much to resist. With virtually no preparation for the interview, Eve puffed up her chest and walked into the recruitment office to ask for a job. Once again, her audacity paid off, and they offered this uneducated, dyslexic girl a job as a visual signaller on the spot.
Visual signallers, sometimes known as ‘bunting tossers’ or ‘flashers’, were instructed to communicate in Morse code, either with hand-held Aldis lamps or a larger, fixed ten-inch lamp. Semaphore flags were used for signalling in daylight. After four months of training, eight young Wrens were posted to the Black Isle, a peninsula on the bitterly cold east coast of Scotland. Much of the Allied fleet was based there and the girls felt responsible for the safety of every ship.
After the majority of the ships left Scotland for the south, their next posting was at Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight. The island was in virtual lockdown, with civilians unable to enter or leave without special permission. This created a true feeling of community and although rationing was strict, with no meat, eggs or fish available, the girls were well looked after. Not a day went by when the friendly publican or a neighbour didn’t take pity on them and slip them a freshly laid egg or other treat of some sort.
Mum gives a slightly guilty grin when she describes her year in Yarmouth as being ‘one of the best of her life,’ but I can easily imagine it to be true. She and her seven colleagues had by this time become real friends, and they were all billeted together above a chemist shop at the end of their signalling pier. Yarmouth is still a charming village, with its colourful cottages surrounding the harbour, and the young Wrens felt safe in this tight-knit community, yet proud to be playing their part in the war effort. Mum loved to walk to the end of the pier, dressed in her navy duffle coat, to her wooden signalling hut, with its wood-burning stove and where a steaming mug of cocoa awaited her. The fact that the island was swarming with fit young servicemen didn’t go unnoticed, either.
Eve’s dreadful spelling didn’t have much effect on the outcome of the war, but it led to some good laughs. On one occasion she was happily flashing an instruction to a Motor Torpedo Boat. ‘B-I-R-T-H-H-E-R-E’ she signalled, to which the captain’s response was, ‘W-H-A-T-A-R-E-Y-O-U-G-O-I-N-G-T-O-D-O-A-B-O-U-T-I-T?’
Another time, a sailor tied his dinghy to her jetty and walked into her hut. ‘Little Wren,’ he said. ‘It seems you’re having trouble with your Morse code. I’ll teach you a secret and I guarantee that you’ll never forget it.’ Thereupon this kind man proceeded to write the alphabet out in capitals, before demonstrating the dots and dashes and marking each letter accordingly. This way, she was able to visualise each letter according to its Morse code equivalent. In five minutes he had taught her what navy school had been attempting to do for months, and she has remembered Morse code to this day.
There was romance on the pier, too. Mum remembers looking through her telescope and spotting a good-looking lieutenant commander, dressed in a white naval sweater and standing on the deck of a motor torpedo boat. Without giving it too much thought, she flashed him an unintelligible message. His response was to question what on earth the message was about. She then sent another message back, slowly and clearly. ‘Would you come alongside?’
He immediately brought his boat alongside the pier and was surprised to be offered a mug of cocoa. The next day, Eve was thrilled to receive a parcel wrapped in brown paper, hand-delivered by a sailor who stood waiting for a reply. As she untied the string, her heart lifted; there was the woolly jumper that had caught her eye the night before. So began another moving wartime relationship, of private moments grabbed during shore leave, silent seaside walks, intense conversations and final urgent kisses, before she waved her loved one off as he steamed away into the unknown.
When Germany finally surrendered on 8 May 1945, the young Wren was homeless and broke. Her old friend Brenda, a dancer with the Ballet Rambert, was going on a tour of Germany to entertain the British troops there, and suggested that Eve join them. The idea was preposterous: after years away from the world of classical dance, the prospect of her doing a respectable plié was dubious, let alone dancing in a full ballet show. The tour was to be sponsored by the Entertainments National Services Association, and the charming naivety of the time is highlighted in the thought that sending a ballet company to keep up the troops’ morale with performances of Swan Lake was regarded as a good idea.
Eve made an appointment for an audition with Madame Rambert herself. Mim, as she was known to all who worked with her, must have had a sense of humour, for she roared with laughter as Eve appeared from the wings dressed in her uniform of bell-bottoms and a sailor’s hat and proceeded to dance and mime her way through a prepared piece about life in the navy. Mim hired her. ‘At least you’ll keep the troops amused,’ she said, ‘but please don’t expect to have a job with us on your return.’
‘Adventure out of adversity’ was Eve’s mantra during the next two months. She had no sense of entitlement and never expected the weather to be perfect, her accommodation to be comfortable or the food to be wholesome. In truth, the harsher the conditions, the better the story. This attitude lifted the spirits of other dancers in the troupe, who laughed and joked their way through the devastation that was Germany in November 1945.
I can’t imagine what the wretched, starving, humiliated Germans made of this group of young dancers. The girls walked among the rubble as the vanquished population picked away at their pitiful cities. They were spat upon by children and hugged by the elderly, who looked them directly in the eye, a plea for understanding. It was bitterly cold. Compassion was the only emotion that rang true during those two months, alongside the pleasure of being adored by an audience of four hundred men every night.
Eve’s imagination could have been getting a little fanciful when she included the following story in her memoir, Mum’s the Word. ‘I have one lovely memory from those days,’ she writes. ‘Just outside Berlin, a young, handsome British general invited me to go riding with him and lent me a thoroughbred Army horse. We went galloping through the forest, playing hide-and-seek as we wove in and out through the trees. It was thrilling, but perhaps a bit risky for a working ballet dancer!’
I don’t believe for a minute that Mum has ever been on a horse in her life, but reading this story tells me so much about her all the same. Reading this extract, I wonder if it ever crossed her mind that she might have passed her future husband as she visited the army stables, for he too was posted in Berlin at this time.
Post-war Britain was a dreary place. Once the end-of-fighting euphoria was over, a depressing reality struck home. Emergency laws were passed, including the rationing of food, fuel and material. This was not a life that Eve had envisioned for herself after the adventures of being in the Wrens. She decided to become an air hostess, a ‘Star Girl’ on British South American Airways, flying from London to Santiago in Chile, a twenty-day return trip requiring six stopovers.
After some basic training in how to ditch the plane in an emergency and in serving food, Eve was fitted out with a uniform that had been designed by Norman Hartnell to emphasise the girls’ curves. They were issued with silk seamed stockings and told that they were allowed to wear flat black shoes while flying but should be elegantly shod at all other times.
Eve’s first flight took off on 26 March 1947. She was not allocated a seat and during her breaks she would lie down on the mailbags in the hold. The planes only flew at ten thousand feet and at 250 knots per hour, their engines emitting an ear-splitting drone as they were buffeted by every gust in their path.
Their first stopover was in Lisbon. The next, after an eight-hour flight, was in Dakar in Senegal, West Africa. Mum graphically describes the effects of the gruelling flight: the nausea, the swollen ankles and intermingling smells of Jeyes Fluid and vomit. A glorious two-day stopover in a dilapidated hotel called the Majestic followed, with eccentric fellow guests, sandy beaches and warm, clear seas. After Dakar came a terrifying nine-hour flight over the Atlantic to Natal in north-east Brazil, and from there another seven hours to Rio and a two-day stopover. Finally they flew to Montevideo and on to Buenos Aires, a world away from grey post-war Britain before landing in Chile.
In August 1947, an Avro Lancastrian airliner named Star Dust disappeared while flying over the Andes. Eve had been scheduled to be on the next flight of that very plane. The tragedy was followed by another in January 1948, when the Star Tiger disappeared between Santa Maria in the Azores and Bermuda. Then the Star Ariel disappeared between Bermuda and Cuba, giving rise to the legend of the ‘Bermuda Triangle.’ The reason for the planes’ sudden disappearances was a faulty pressurisation system that caused them to disintegrate in mid-air.
Even so, this Star Girl carried on flying – when weighing up the odds between personal safety and adventure, there was really no contest; adventure won out every time. Thankfully British South American Airways were to be taken over by the British Overseas Airways Corporation and they switched to the pressurised Avro Tudor airliner, but by this time Eve was embarking on another chapter altogether.