By the time of her death, aged 89, my mother had achieved her lifelong ambition: to be a respected member of the academic community. Recognised as the world’s expert on Arab chests and Swahili culture, following the publication of her book The Arab Chest (Arabian Publishing, 2006), she had been invited to lecture at conferences and symposia and basked in the late recognition of her talents. It was an extraordinary achievement for a Norfolk girl whose education finished with the Higher School Certificate and a secretarial course.
But what was it that transformed her from a gauche, air-headed and rather vain, even if clever, young girl, into an intrepid adventurer, archaeologist and a collector of African artefacts, who travelled solo around India, the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia in the 1960s and ’70s, like her heroine Freya Stark?
The Second World War proved to be a life-changing event for many young women, and for Sheila it was no exception. This collection of letters charts her rite of passage from childhood into womanhood. The letters sparkle with humour and observation, and paint vivid portraits of the hectic wartime social life – parties, riding, sailing, dancing – juxtaposed with gruelling night watches in both Egypt and Germany. Underlying this gaiety are undercurrents of mortality, combined with feelings of guilt at the forces’ opulent lifestyle, and her passion for her work, for instance her pride in helping to plan the invasion of Sicily under Admiral Ramsay, a man she held in the highest esteem. Her first-hand accounts of ‘The Flap’, the sinking of the Medway and the Belsen Trials offer insights from a rare personal perspective.
Finding love and a husband seem to have been a major preoccupation – she had at least three admirers on the go at any one time – and her 1946 whirlwind love affair and marriage to my father, a young Czech-born intelligence officer in the RNVR, also based in Kiel, underscores the desperation of many young women to emerge from the war with a ring on their finger, negating a return to a home life of suburban values and bourgeois boredom. The final letters on the subject of the wedding fascinatingly reveal the often hinted-at ambivalence of her relationship with her domineering and critical mother.
Sheila’s mother, Grace, the recipient of these letters, was one of ten children born to a middle-class Norfolk farmer, William Kemp Proctor Sexton (1847–1946). The family grew up in Downham Market; Grace, unlike her other sisters, did not marry immediately and, as was the way, became a governess/companion, to Canon Harris’s two children, Monica and Jack, from Appleby in Westmorland. The fate of her first fiancé is unclear, although I was always told that she sued him for breach of promise.
At some point, while travelling with the Harrises in Scotland, she became engaged to a quiet and well-educated Scottish captain from the Royal Engineers, who had been awarded the Military Cross in the First World War, but who had been heavily gassed. Invalided out of the army in 1922, he had the greatest of difficulty in finding a job – he sold dictionaries and vacuum cleaners among other things, much to his wife’s chagrin. Eventually they moved to Durham in 1938, where he was Deputy Controller of the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) and, later, secretary to the Durham County Hospital. As my aunt Rosemary said, ‘Daddy was never brought up to earn money.’ Indeed he was rumoured to be an illegitimate grandchild of the Sackville-West family, the most likely candidate being Lionel, 2nd Lord Sackville, who had a string of children with his Spanish mistress, Pepita, among them Victoria Sackville-West (b.1862), Vita’s mother.
This is quite possible: his father was born in Worthing in 1858 to Harriet Mills, and baptised William Thomas Greenland (Greenland being the name or, more likely, pseudonym, for his father). Sergeant Major William Mills married Helen Horn Findlay from Rhynie, Aberdeen, and together they moved with the army: first to Malta, where my grandfather Percival Findlay Mills was born in 1890. From there they set sail to join the regiment in Hong Kong, but William Mills died at sea two days out of Malta and was buried at Port Said (this strange coincidence was not lost on my mother when she discovered this fact in the 1990s). Helen and the young Findlay, as my grandfather was known, returned to Scotland, where a mysterious benefactor paid for his education at Edinburgh High School, before he joined the Royal Engineers as an officer. Quite an achievement for the son of a poor widow – unless he received help.
If you look at the photograph of him you will notice a great likeness to Vita Sackville-West, who was born only a couple of years later than him, in 1892. The mystery will never be solved, according to my mother, who spent years trying to track down her forebears. ‘I can only comment that he physically resembled Vita Sackville-West, quite strikingly so, and was tall, with a long face and large high-bridged nose. He was tall quiet and reclusive, and certainly no match for mother who was overbearing and strong-willed. No wonder he didn’t talk of his origins, which is annoying to us.’
Grace was a bossy, social-climbing bridge player, and in order to make ends meet she ran a boarding house in Glebe Avenue, Hunstanton (it had seven bedrooms and a live-in servant girl) which catered for summer visitors. During these months the girls were packed off to rich relatives. Two of Grace’s sisters had married well: one, Aunt Rose, was childless and was keen to adopt Sheila (but Grace refused to agree as it was not the done thing), and the other aunt, Dorothy, had three children and would take the two young sisters on holiday with them to Skegness, Scotland and, once, to Jersey. Sheila was very close to her cousin Hazel as they were exactly the same age; Hazel told me that Grace had a ‘terrible temper’ and used to hit Sheila, but never Rosemary. I believe Rosemary was jealous of this friendship.
Sheila adored her father, who was bullied mercilessly by his wife. Before the First World War he had been an employee of the Crown Agents and had travelled widely, including to Iraq and West Africa. He was an intellectual and I think she felt a great empathy for him and a solidarity born out of their shared victim status. Her occasional letters to him are warm, loving and more considered than those to her mother.
Both girls were bright, and attended Rhianver College; some of Sheila’s schoolbooks survive, showing a talent for painting and art – something that she was to return to in later life and, indeed, in the occasional sketches contained in her letters – in the beautifully executed and coloured drawings of historical and Shakespearean figures amid the copperplate writing. Both girls won scholarships to St James’s Secretarial College in London, where they went just before the outbreak of war to earn a living. Sheila excelled at shorthand and won the top prize of 140wpm, something she remained proud of for the rest of her life. Rosemary became secretary to the head of the department store Bourne & Hollingsworth.
Unwanted and unloved by her mother, bullied by her sister – Rosemary was pampered and adored – the sisters were never close. Sheila is frequently disparaging about Rosemary’s tardiness at joining up and loose behaviour: perhaps she was trying to get her own back? Little wonder she escaped and joined up as soon as she was old enough, just after finishing college and a month after her 18th birthday.
Knowing this, I wonder why she devotedly wrote to her mother every week until the mid 1970s: Sheila certainly never forgave her for her unhappy childhood and, later, for taking my father’s side in their messy divorce. This latent antipathy towards her mother surfaces occasionally as she chastises her for gossiping and not reading her letters properly. Her marriage to an idealist with no social standing in Britain may well have been a subconscious put-down for her mother’s snobbery.
And yet Sheila confides in her mother and seeks her advice, perhaps out of a particularly British wartime sense of duty that we find hard to understand today. Maybe the sight of all her fellow Wrens devotedly writing to their parents influenced her notion of ‘home’ during the six years she was away, and undoubtedly she wanted to make her mother proud of her, to prove that she was the more worthwhile daughter. She is homesick too, frequently reminiscing about England and the countryside, contrasting the heat and dust of Egypt with the cool, green fields of home.
And, like many members of the forces posted overseas, there was a real sense of guilt at escaping the privations of the war at home. Ever the dutiful daughter and feeling ashamed about the abundance and excess of food, fabrics, cosmetics and all sorts of items scarce in England, she devotes hours to buying basics and packaging up parcels home. Given the ferocity of the naval battles raging in the Mediterranean, and the frequent sinking of the convoys carrying supplies and mail, there are frequent anxious mentions of letters and parcels going astray.
There are small hints of her future social conscience and liberal ideas – she visits injured sailors in hospital and is horrified by the extent of the destruction and suffering of the civilians in post-war conditions in Germany. Her letters demonstrate a growing fascination with archaeology and gift for travel-writing. She paints vivid portraits of the Musky in Cairo, of visits to the citadel, the pyramids, the City of the Dead, its mosques and ancient houses, and of her excursions to Beirut, Damascus and Palestine.
I believe this whetted her appetite for her later forays into the early Islamic culture of the Swahili coast, where she participated in several archeological digs, and her lifelong quest to discover the origins of the Arab chest.
Her rather unhappy childhood explains her yearning to be loved and to be happy, and the dominance of affairs of the heart in the letters often seem to put her work in the shade. But careful reading shows that she took her work and the war extremely seriously and was proud of her contribution. Censorship will have prevented her from writing much of the detail of her work, but there is a real sense of the long hours and the exhaustion, juxtaposed with absolute necessity of living every moment.
To the memory of my feisty mother, Sheila, and my equally spirited daughter, Louise.
❖
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I have kept to Sheila’s spelling and punctuation, changing absolutely nothing. Sometimes this gives rise to inconsistency or some political incorrectness, but I wished to retain the letters’ charm and authenticity. Obviously I had to cut the letters down by about two thirds, nevertheless I think what remains gives a real flavour of Sheila’s war.