Britain now stood isolated. Surviving on this island depended on importing foodstuffs – the role of the Merchant Navy. But from summer 1940 the U-boat threat to naval vessels in the Atlantic began to grow.
From the moment she first met the merchant seaman Harry O’Dwyer, Helen Forrester was under no illusions regarding the danger of his occupation. She knew that the submarines were out in the bay, ‘like cats waiting at a mousehole’. Merchant shipping had to be protected by convoys of freighters. But sinkings were frequent, and there was huge loss of life. ‘Allow five weeks, OK?’ Harry had said to her when they parted. During his absence she was consumed with anxiety. Through her job, Helen knew at first hand what it was like for the women mourning their lost menfolk. She also had access to more information than most girls had about their sailor boyfriends. At that time there was a news embargo on British losses at sea, but next of kin were informed. If Harry’s ship had gone to the bottom, Helen would have heard about it when the relatives came to her Bootle office to claim a pension. So when six weeks passed without a word from Harry, Helen became increasingly moody and despondent. Whatever had possessed her to trust a sailor?
And then, at last, he called. ‘We’ve just berthed … wait for me if I’m late.’ Helen took the call in her office, rapidly agreed to meet in Ma Ambleton’s café at 7.30, then rushed downstairs to the cobwebby basement and burst into huge sobs of relief.
At 8 he finally appeared. ‘I was all curled up inside with pure joy. I wanted to hug him.’ Harry was exhausted and hungry. Over ravenous mouthfuls of steak and kidney pie, Harry let her know that his ship had got separated from the escorting convoy – ‘Been chasing all over the bloody Atlantic, if you’ll pardon the language.’ Listening to him, Helen had a horrible premonition:
Suddenly I felt the icy Atlantic waters with its surface mist drifting over struggling men.
‘Do you have to do another voyage? Can’t you stay ashore – do something else?’ …
I was in love.
After Harry had eaten, they walked down to the Mersey and boarded the ferry. Helen tucked herself under the curve of his arm, and they talked, crossing and recrossing the stretch of dark water in the blackout. Harry told her about his family. His mother had never forgiven him for quitting the seminary, and now he never went home. But he had been saving money and had put enough by for a house – would she come and help him look at some small properties in Allerton? ‘My mind leaped ahead with all kinds of wild hopes.’
In her hungry, sad life, Helen had never known such happiness. She met Harry the next day at Norm and Doris’s, and there they waltzed to the old wind-up gramophone. Her steps were as light as her heart, and when the music stopped it seemed far too soon. Harry took her back in his arms, and they swayed in gentle rhythm down the pavement; halfway along the avenue he stopped and kissed her, passionately.
Love, I know this is too quick. But I want to marry you, if you’ll have me – soon as I can get a house ready to put you in safe and sound. Be my girl – I’ll never let you down, I promise.
The Liverpool mist was swirling about them. Helen barely knew him, they were from different classes, different religions too; but even with the short time they had had together, she knew that Harry’s offer meant the chance of something she had never dared hope for: a future. And she loved him. There and then, afloat in gratitude, Helen agreed. ‘I’ll try to be a good wife – I know how to keep house – and, oh, Harry, I want to make you happy.’
*
Love was in the air in 1940, and war often favoured romance in the most unexpected quarters.
Perhaps it was something in the water in Liverpool that year. Sonia Wilcox, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of an amiable Merseyside shipping pilot, might have been doomed to remain at home for all her adult life had it not been for the outbreak of war. Sonia was squashed by her recalcitrant and unloving mother, who stamped on all her ambitions. But in 1939 Mrs Wilcox ran out of excuses. Sonia went to work for an all-female team of censors who examined the documents and papers of travellers who might be suspected of passing information to the enemy – everything from personal correspondence to bibles, maps and recipe books. One morning a set of marine engravings came under Sonia’s scrutiny, the property of a man claiming to be a Jewish refugee travelling to New York. Something about these engravings made Sonia linger over them – surely, between the cross-hatchings, she could detect minute lines of text? She took them up to the intelligence officers and asked for a second opinion. Lieutenant Keates, a handsome, educated-sounding young man, was dismissive. ‘Nothing there. Waste of my time,’ he said. Sonia, however, believed in her hunch and told the lieutenant that she would not go away until he had examined the engravings under an ultra-violet lamp. This time he was away for a considerable time, returning eventually to inform her that the cross-hatchings had, indeed, concealed information, in German, regarding shipping movements in and out of British ports, and that the so-called ‘refugee’ had been detained for questioning. ‘You’re rather a clever girl, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Patronising so-and-so’ was Sonia’s private reaction, before returning to her office. An hour later she found Lieutenant Keates waiting for her outside, with tickets for a performance at the Liverpool Playhouse.
After that Sonia met Basil Keates every night for a week, saying nothing to her parents, who were accustomed to her working long hours and catching the late ferry home across the Mersey. Love blossomed. Basil Keates turned out not only to have a captivating sense of humour, but also beautiful ankles. On the sixth day Basil appeared long-faced and told her that he was about to be posted to Iceland. They passed the evening together and he saw her to the quay. As the ferry gates clanked back and Sonia turned to depart he stopped her: ‘Will you marry me, darling?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered, and stepped aboard. The ferry pulled out into the great river, and suddenly Sonia realised that another vessel was churning up the water beside them, with none other than her father, its pilot, up on the top deck. Perhaps it was the radiance of her expression, or perhaps it was simply extraordinary fatherly intuition, but William Wilcox immediately guessed that his daughter had met the love of her life.
In February 1940 Basil managed to get leave, and the pair were married.*
Shirley Hook’s wedding plans dominate her Mass Observation diary towards the end of the year. At that time she was working in the office of an engineering works. There was the excitement of showing off her engagement ring to her colleagues, followed by the announcement that she was leaving to get married. It was, however, a low-key wedding, in keeping with the times. On the day, she and Jack Goodhart were married in Leicester, ‘most informally by an agreeable registrar’, then went for a ‘very good’ two-and-sixpenny lunch at the Empire Café. It poured with rain, so they decided not to go away for the weekend. Shirley proudly headed her next diary entry ‘Mrs Goodhart, Housewife, age 25’.
Marriage gave a sense of direction to Verily Bruce’s otherwise meandering existence. The Sussex rector’s daughter had always wanted to be a writer, but it would take another twenty years for her name to appear on a published book. Insouciant, funny and loveable, she found herself adrift in her early twenties.
Joining the FANYs in 1938 had helped. ‘Somebody else does your thinking for you in the army, and even your feeling.’ But despite being under orders she didn’t find enough to keep her occupied. A dance band tune popular in spring 1940 seemed to reflect her sense of futility: ‘I’m nothing but a nothing. I’m not a thing at all’. And work in the Corps held few attractions by comparison with the charming and debonair love of her life, writer Donald Anderson, whom she had met playing ping-pong with friends in 1936. More than seventy years later, Verily sighs romantically as she recalls their momentous first encounter:
Ah, God sent him I think.
On that occasion the sight of a large hole in his otherwise smart socks stirred something deep inside her:
By 1940 Donald was working in London in the Ministry of Information. Verily, now aged twenty-five, was based at a FANY depot in the Midlands. One afternoon that July her sergeant called her to the telephone, telling her to keep it quick. It was Donald, calling to ask her size in wedding rings.
‘I don’t know, darling. Why? Are we going to be married?’
‘That’s what I should like. Can you get leave?’
‘Of course, darling.’
‘What about tomorrow?’
It was time to hang up.
‘All right, darling. Of course.’
Duty called. So much for leave and browsing round ring shops. Verily was promptly detailed to pick up a captain at the depot and drive him to Birmingham. She drove the 30 miles in dreamy silence; once there, she took the first opportunity to park the vehicle outside a jeweller’s. Courteously and quickly the assistant measured her wedding finger. It was P. Verily hastened to the nearest post office and drafted a telegram: ‘P DARLING STOP YOUR ADORING V’.
Back at the depot she requested forty-eight hours’ leave. It was refused, but, noting that Verily’s fluffy blonde hair was infringing the ‘not-below-the-collar’ regulations, the CO granted permission for two hours’ grace to buy a hair-net. Barely pausing, she jumped on a bus to her Aunt Evie’s, who lived near by. Aunt Evie took one look at her niece’s excited, nervous pallor, banned her from returning to spend the night in a camp-bed, and that was the end of her association with the FANYs. Would she be shot at dawn for desertion? Unlikely. Next morning cousin Beryl dropped her at the railway station. She was still in uniform, and here the real difficulties started. A single ticket to London? Didn’t she realise there was a state of emergency? No unauthorised travel was permitted to members of the services. She went to a nearby hotel to think things over. At that moment a young man climbed out of a large sports car and strolled into the bar looking for a cocktail. Verily took a calculated risk – ‘Weren’t you at school with my brother?’ – and pulled it off. Extraordinarily, it turned out that he had been and soon he had agreed to drive her to London, leaving the next morning. She took a room in the hotel and telephoned Donald. He was prepared, with the ring bought, the licence secured and honeymoon booked.
The next day her suave chauffeur arrived at the agreed hour. The sports car, it turned out, was entirely unreliable. Gasping, exploding and coughing smoke, it needed regular stops to replenish oil and have the engine tinkered with. At 8 o’clock that evening they arrived in Piccadilly in a cloud of blue fumes. ‘ “Hallo, darling,” said Donald, kissing me as though I had just got off a number 9 bus.’
The marriage would take place at two o’clock the following day. At the last minute Verily decided to telephone her parents and invite them. Donald, impoverished and far older than his bride-to-be, was not a popular choice, and the news didn’t go down well with Mrs Bruce, who, having threatened to stop her daughter’s pocket money, banged down the receiver. ‘Yes, this was love all right,’ concluded Verily.
And so, in August 1940, at Christ Church, Mayfair, as the Battle of Britain was getting under way, Verily Bruce became Verily Anderson. It was in every way a consummation:
That was when I looked back. Selfish, frivolous, and unreliable, I vowed to do better now that I had some real aim in life.
Their daughter Marian was to be born exactly nine months and three days later, closely followed by Rachel, Eddie, Janie and Alexandra. Not for a moment did Verily consider that her contribution as a FANY might have had more value to the war effort than cooking shepherd’s pie for a Ministry official and having his babies. The possible penalties of her desertion from the army held no fears for her. Marriage and motherhood made sense of things. And it is reasonable to assume that countless wives would have viewed things in the same light. The Andersons honeymooned at a quaint Sussex inn, unruffled by fighter planes sparring in the blue skies above. Lounging in the pub garden, Verily had no qualms. Everything added up. Being a good wife was more than a subsidiary condition, it was a form of national service in itself. There was no irony in her emphatic defence of the married state:
As for the FANYs – they didn’t really want her back, but to keep the bureaucrats happy she was required to produce a medical certificate stating that she was unfit for service. This was easily procured through a doctor friend of a friend, and the deed was done. Then as now, it helped to have influential contacts.
Helen Forrester and Harry O’Dwyer kept their engagement secret from their families. Harry’s mother had still not forgiven him for abandoning his priestly vocation. And, despite the fact that the Forresters had fallen on hard times and were living in a slum, the class divisions ran deep. They retained their cultured accents. Harry was unquestionably ‘beneath’ Helen; also, he was a Catholic. Helen knew she would never gain her parents’ approval of such a match. The couple decided to marry as soon as possible after she was twenty-one, once the little house Harry had bought was ready, and when their consent would no longer be required. Throughout spring 1940 they lived for their reunions. Harry’s short spells on shore were times of joy and intimacy, as Harry coaxed and reassured his fearful young fiancée that she really was his girl, his one and only. For her part, she loved him with all her being.
But the fear never entirely left her. She knew that while he was at sea he was in constant danger. And in August 1940 she received the news that he was lost.
Cruelly, she only found out through the unluckiest of circumstances. Employed by a small social work charity in Bootle, Helen’s job was to assist bereaved wives and the relatives of missing or drowned sailors claiming pensions. That morning there was the usual queue of widows in the waiting room, and Helen saw them one by one. Eventually it was the turn of an older woman, who explained her business; her son Harry, a merchant seaman, had gone missing with his ship in the Atlantic, and she now wished to make a claim so that at least she would benefit by his death. She gave her name as Mrs Maureen O’Dwyer.
Helen quickly referred Mrs O’Dwyer to a colleague and fled to the building’s basement.
In the clammy grime of a disused coal cellar, I stood shivering helplessly, so filled with shock that I hardly knew where I was.
Convulsed, but as yet dry-eyed, Helen was still just sufficiently composed to be sickened by the woman who could throw out her own son, yet still try to gain financially by his death. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that would make sense of her loss, or bring reconciliation. To have held out a hand to Mrs O’Dwyer would have seemed a betrayal, while to speak to her own parents would have subjected her to outright derision. How could she bear to have Harry scorned by them? He was a sailor, but he was the man she had loved. She stayed silent.
It took Helen superhuman efforts to contain the grief which now threatened to overwhelm her; unarticulated, it worked away like a poison, ravaging her from within. Ill health, hunger, parental neglect, poverty and fear had already wrought great damage; now the blow of Harry’s death took away the one prospect of happiness in this lonely life. Out of her mind with sorrow, she sobbed through the night, her sister Fiona sleeping in tranquil contentment beside her. Walking home from work after dark, she cried in the blackout when nobody could see her tears. At her office, Helen realised she was not alone in her suffering. Death had come to Merseyside. Day after day she sat at her desk, working her way through the rows and rows of weeping wives clutching tear-stained children. Often it was her job to break the news to them. Sometimes a seaman would come to her, sobbing, sent ashore on compassionate leave to discover that his family had been killed in an air raid. Consumed by her own pain, the distress of these others was almost too great to bear. One dreadful Saturday Helen’s controls collapsed: tears sprang to her eyes as she cried out, full of pity and anger, ‘It’s madness to send men to certain death like this!’ Rage possessed her. What right did Harry have to die? Why had he left her? Why had he got himself killed? ‘We could have been married by now.’
Part of Helen Forrester’s terrible anger stemmed from the feeling that Harry’s death had robbed her not just of love, but of the chance to escape from her home, and from her mother. Marrying Harry would have meant trading the thankless task of cleaning up after her own family for more of the same work – but at least under his roof it would have been done with love. Now, at the age of twenty-one, Helen saw her youth, her happiness stolen from her. She felt trapped for ever in her loneliness. ‘I wanted to die.’
*
Between September 1939 and May 1943 over 30,000 Allied servicemen and merchant seamen would be engulfed by the grey waves of the Atlantic. Helen Forrester’s premonition of Harry’s horrible death, of his struggle and choking by icy water, was true for thousands of individuals, forgotten among the tally of losses. For the women of the SecondWorld War, torpedoes were the intangible agents of grief and bereavement. But a few experienced them at first hand.
This is not primarily a book about heroines, but it is a book about women who rose to the demands of history, and in 1940 those demands were becoming increasingly extortionate. The story of Mary Cornish is only one example of an ordinary, frightened and unprepared woman who, at a time of extremity, responded gallantly to the calls of duty and responsibility.
As the danger of enemy attacks intensified, so did the importance of sending children to safety, and the government decided to extend its evacuation plans to enable school-age children to be received overseas as well as in far-flung areas of Britain. The Children’s Overseas Reception Board (‘CORB’) was formed, and anxious parents applied by the thousand to send their children to safety in South Africa, Australia, Canada and the USA. Known as the ‘seavacuees’, the children would be travelling without their parents, under the care of appointed guardians.
The piano teacher Mary Cornish was one woman who volunteered to work in this capacity. Mary was now forty-one, an intelligent, confident, self-sufficient spinster; until the war her job, her friends and music had been her life. She volunteered; but the summons to sail to Canada was slow in coming. While waiting to depart, Mary spent the summer holiday haymaking and fruit-picking on a Sussex farm. Finally, in late August, her instructions arrived.
On Friday 13 September 1940 a convoy of ships including the SS City of Benares set sail from Liverpool with ninety excited child evacuees and a number of such escorts on board. It was crewed by British officers and lascar seamen. Mary, along with her allocated batch of girls, was familiar with the emergency drill. After their departure the children settled into enjoying themselves. There was delicious food to eat, and a party atmosphere; the girls had started a choir and were learning to sing ‘In an English Country Garden’ for their Canadian hosts. Four days out to sea the convoy of destroyers, required elsewhere, returned to British waters. The liner was now accompanied by a motley fleet of merchant ships, incapable of giving naval protection. A storm blew up, and that day a lot of the passengers were suffering from sea-sickness, but by evening the ship was tossing less, so after dinner Mary and two of the other escorts took a stroll on the deck. They were in good spirits, and Mary – perhaps with the girls’ choir in mind – led the group singing Christmas carols and verses from ‘Greensleeves’. At about 10 o’clock she decided to go below. It was then that the torpedo struck. Aboard U-48, Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt had no idea that he had fired it at a liner carrying children.
It took just fifteen minutes for the SS City of Benares to sink. The missile had ripped a giant hole in the stern. The U-boat also sank the two ships that flanked the City of Benares, and the rest of the small fleet dispersed to avoid being sunk in their turn.
The engines died, the ship filled with the acrid smell of cordite, alarm bells rang. The children got dressed and hurried to their muster stations. Mary knew it was her job to get her group of girls into a lifeboat, but when she tried to reach their quarters she found the corridor blocked by debris; lacerating her hands, she pushed a gap through the mound, struggled through and got help to pull the children out of their cabins and up on deck. The only soothing words she could find to say to them were: ‘It’s all right, it’s only a torpedo.’ The crew started loading children into the boats. Mary returned below to see if any had been overlooked, but an officer ordered her back on deck. Having now become separated from her group of girls, she was hastily told to join a boatload of thirty lascar crewmen, a couple of British officers and six small boys; she never saw the girls again.
A long night passed; the storm was rising. Mary – like the boys, many of whom were barefoot and in pyjamas – was inadequately dressed in a short-sleeved silk blouse, a skirt, a jacket, stockings and sandals. When dawn broke over grey foam-crested waves, the occupants of lifeboat number 12 realised they were alone in the middle of the Atlantic.
Meanwhile, in West Sussex, Mary Cornish’s beloved younger sister Eileen Paterson and her husband received a letter from CORB informing them, as her next of kin, of the sinking of the City of Benares, explaining that Miss Cornish had not been reported rescued, and conveying the Board’s ‘very deep sympathy in your grievous loss’. Their daughter Elizabeth still remembers ‘finding my mother weeping in my father’s arms in the garage at the bottom of the garden … he was trying to comfort her’. Letters of sympathy poured into the Paterson family, who tried to take consolation in the thought of a valiant sister and aunt who had died carrying out her duty to the children in her care.
Far from any communication, the ordeal that played out on the cold waters of the Atlantic ocean is a tale of almost incredible endurance. The few British officers took charge, organising crew members to crank the propeller, rigging a sail and a tarpaulin to shelter the stern of the boat, distributing rations. The food they had was carefully eked out, as was the water, which was in much shorter supply. On two small beakers of water a day, everyone suffered from terrible thirst. It was cold too: September was not a time to be afloat on the Atlantic in an open boat dressed in cotton pyjamas. Mary, the only woman on board, now demonstrated unexpected fortitude, stamina and imagination. She herself was suffering as badly as the rest of them from thirst and exposure; in addition sanitary arrangements were a particular trial for her, since there was no possibility of concealing her occasional need to use the one and only bucket on board. But as day followed day, and their plight became worse, Mary’s relationship with the six young boys became the key to their survival. They relied on her not only for her kindness – she would massage the circulation back into their frostbitten feet, wrapping anything she could find round them to ease the pain – but, crucially, for her ability to raise morale. At first, while the boys were still lively enough to believe they were having a great adventure, she got them singing. ‘There’ll Always be an England’ and ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ were favourites. She invented games and boosted their sense that they were brave and plucky. But before long they came to rely on her to distract them from their misery. When spirits dropped, it was Mary who rebuked them: ‘Don’t you realise that you’re the heroes of a real adventure story? There isn’t a boy in England who wouldn’t give his eyes to be in your shoes! Did you ever hear of a hero who snivelled?’ Something in the schoolboy psyche craved such reminders, and the schoolmistress in Mary understood this. From the depths, she dredged up memories of adventure tales like The Thirty-Nine Steps and Bulldog Drummond. Every night, before the children settled for a few hours’ sleep, Mary’s tales of Captain Drummond’s exploits persuaded them to forget, for a little while, how hungry, thirsty, cold and cramped they were. Because her memory of the original stories was a little faulty, she embroidered. With his lean jaw and fearless demeanour, Captain Drummond soon found himself in danger from a Nazi spy ring, braving submarines, parachutes and fighter planes. There were hair-raising escapes and dramatic rescues from the edges of precipices. The boys loved it. Nothing else came near in giving them what they now most wanted: forgetfulness. ‘Aunty, Aunty, please go on,’ they begged, as each instalment came to an end. So, like all the best storytellers, she promised more for the next day.
On Sunday, after five days at sea, hopes of rescue suddenly soared when the crew sighted a steamer. Mary’s petticoat was commandeered, and they ran it up the mast to signal distress. With wonderful certainty now, they watched as the outline of the steamer became more distinct and swung around, growing closer till they could see the sailors on board – only to turn to shocked dismay at the last moment as the vessel slowly and decisively resumed its course in the opposite direction. Later it appeared that the ship’s skipper must have feared that the lifeboat was a German submarine decoy; this sometimes happened, luring unwary ships to their doom.
By now the occupants of lifeboat number 12 were near to exhaustion. With their water ration down to half a beaker a day, their lips and tongues were cracked and distended. On the eighth day everyone was becoming lethargic, and even Mary was too depleted to tell stories. Hopes were beginning to die; there had been disappointments and false alarms. So when one of the boys cried out ‘There’s an aeroplane!’ nobody took much notice. But this time it wasn’t a freak. The plane was a Sunderland, it had seen them, and a signal was immediately sent that it was going for help. Within an hour another Sunderland appeared and let down supplies. They were still feasting on tinned fruit when HMS Anthony was sighted. One by one, more dead than alive, the survivors were helped on to the rescue ship. Mary was almost past reason. They settled her in; her throat was so badly swollen she could barely eat, and she could not imbibe hot drinks. She was dazed, dizzy, couldn’t stand and couldn’t remember how to undress. She was obsessed with one thing: her responsibility towards the boys. What had happened to them, and were they all right?
Thirty-six hours later HMS Anthony docked in the Firth of Clyde. On 27 September, in their country home near Midhurst, the Patersons received a telegram. It read simply: MISS M C CORNISH SAFE AND WELL.
CORB looked after Mary when they arrived and brought her to a hotel, where WVS ladies arrived bearing clothes. Even in her confused state, she was aware that the garments were peculiarly ill-assorted: a pink petticoat, a purple dress, yellow gloves. Almost immediately she was surrounded by journalists desperate for her story. When they interviewed her, there was the shock of hearing that many of the children and most of her fellow escorts on board the City of Benares had not survived. She ate a little, slept a little, drank and drank again. A dozen times in the night she woke convulsed with fear lest the glass of water by her bed had been removed. Beneath her, lifeboat 12 seemed still to roll and pitch, heave and drop; as she dipped in and out of sleep, her only thought was ‘the boys – were they all right?’
Two hundred and eighty-five people died after the torpedo hit the City of Benares. Seventy-seven of the ninety children on board drowned. From then on, parents who wanted to send their children to safety had to make their own arrangements, as the operations of CORB were suspended soon afterwards. This island was becoming an ever more dangerous place to live.
On 1 August 1940 Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of Hitler’s air force, had outlined the aims of the Battle of Britain to his generals: ‘The Führer has ordered me to crush Britain with my Luftwaffe. By means of hard blows I plan to have this enemy, who has already suffered a crushing moral defeat, down on his knees in the nearest future, so that an occupation of the island by our troops can proceed without any risk!’
Throughout that summer the blue skies of southern England were criss-crossed with smoke and fire from swarms of German bombers and Spitfires. Joan Tagg, aged fifteen at the time, remembers watching them from her garden in Kingston-on-Thames: ‘They were over Kent I expect – but you can see for miles in the sky. I’d always been interested in aeroplanes, and there would be the fighters in the sky, with all their vapour trails. You can’t imagine what it was like seeing all these planes looping the loop and doing figures of eight … every movement they made there was a vapour trail. It was just so exciting – like a cinema show really.’ In London, Sheila Hails remembered the men on Primrose Hill who cashed in on this thrilling spectator sport by hiring out telescopes: ‘Penny to see the Messerschmitts come down!’
In her diary on 16 August Virginia Woolf described the experience of being underneath during an air fight. She and her husband Leonard were in their Sussex garden: ‘They came very close. We lay down under the tree. The sound was like someone sawing in the air just above us. We lay flat on our faces, hands behind head … Will it drop I asked? If so, we shall be broken together.’ The following week an enemy plane flew over the Ouse water meadows beyond their garden, low enough for Virginia to distinguish the swastika on its tail, and was shot down by British fighters. ‘They side slipped glided swooped and roared for about 5 minutes round the fallen plane as if identifying and making sure – then made off towards London … It wd have been a peaceful matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening.’
On the same day Frances Faviell and her fiancé, Richard Parker, were walking a bridle path on the Surrey downs near Guildford; for her, it was a week’s break from months of FAP and refugee duties. The view from the Hog’s Back was panoramic, with the land spread out below them like a map. Above, in the blue August sky, the unreal aeronautical displays held them spellbound – a bravura stunt show of twisting, turning, swooping, diving planes which from time to time shimmered to earth in a cascade of fire, concluding with the silent, releasing vision of a tiny parachute slipping gently towards the ground – ‘like a toy umbrella preceding the final crash’. Frances shook herself as she recalled that what she was witnessing was ‘the real thing … WAR … I was glad Richard was with me … I thought then – nothing matters if you are with the person you want to be with.’ The fights were ferocious and went on all that day. The planes had machine-guns. Richard suddenly dragged Frances into the shelter of some bushes as with a furious popping one enemy pilot swooped, firing directly at them, spattering bullets in all directions. They were unharmed, unnerved, but – in Frances’s case – seething with rage and indignation. The anger increased that night as they were wakened by sirens. Fire bombs had been dropped near by. Richard led a party to extinguish them with sand and stirrup pumps, and Frances joined in, stumbling among the flames that had caught the heathland. Nearby Croydon appeared to be blazing. They stayed another day, watching more and more dogfights. One after another, planes plummeted to earth out of the clear sky; at night, again, the sirens, and the hornet-like drone of engines signalled air raids on London, some 30 miles away. The Blitz was beginning.
On the afternoon of 7 September Frances heard the sirens from her flat in Cheyne Place, but by early evening Chelsea still seemed to be clear of bombs. The sun set – but darkness didn’t fall. Instead, a curious pale orange glow lit up the sky ‘almost like sunrise’. London’s docklands were on fire. Frances and Richard climbed up to the roof of her building and watched in stricken silence as the inferno devoured Rotherhithe, Limehouse, Wapping, Woolwich, Bermondsey, its flames fully visible 7 miles down river. All night the East End burned; 900 aircraft had attacked. From then on, for the next seventy-six nights (with only one exception, 2 November), the city was blitzed.
During the Battle of Britain, Virginia Woolf had written an essay entitled Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid. The experiences of a myriad women during the next six months of German bombardment are worth looking at in the context of her reflections:
Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are fighting each other. The defenders are men, the attackers are men. Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to defend herself. She must lie weaponless tonight. Yet if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes, or food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind.
Virginia Woolf’s essay pursues the notion that men’s and women’s deepest instincts prevail in times of war. The Second World War seemed to her an embodiment of ‘the subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men … the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave’. Her theme is that, just as womankind is motivated at the deepest level by her maternal instinct, so man has been propelled since the dawn of time by the power of his aggressive desires, his love of military glory:
We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.
One may not agree with Woolf’s allocation of apparently stereo-typical sex characteristics. There are plenty of examples of timidity among men, and we hear much today about women’s aggressiveness. It may even seem surprising to hear Virginia Woolf, a childless feminist, refer to the maternal instinct as ‘women’s glory’. But one has to remember that seventy years ago in Britain the attributes she ascribes as being innate among men and women would have been entirely accepted – indeed taken for granted – not only by the vast majority of the population but also by her intellectual readers. And if the pre-war iconography of the maternal angel endures even for Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, how much more so for Clara Milburn in the Midlands, Nella Last in Barrow, the Noble family in Lewisham, the Chadwyck-Healeys in their Somerset gentlemen’s residence? Looked at in the light of Woolf’s dissection, women’s experiences of, and writings about, the Blitz illustrate an extreme moment in history – a moment when the weaponless woman was completely at the mercy of men. But perhaps it was a moment, too, when women revealed how far the pre-war stereotype fell short. The men did not surrender their guns, and Woolf’s hope that the mind would triumph was perhaps overly optimistic. But, in 1940 and ’41, in fear of their lives, women demonstrated that they were cleverer, braver, angrier, more articulate, more enterprising, more robust and altogether more complex than even they themselves had ever guessed.
*
Charles Graves, the historian of the Women’s Voluntary Service, saw the Blitz as the moment when the great organisation created by Lady Reading fulfilled its potential: ‘Here at last was the emergency for which WVS was originally formed.’ He quoted one of their volunteers who had narrowly escaped death after an explosion had flattened an entire terrace of houses – ‘I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘now we’ve had a real bomb to show that we have not wasted time on our practices.’ There were many more examples, such as the WVS canteen crew who sheltered under their vehicle while an aerodrome was being bombed, emerging ‘dusty but undaunted’ to serve hot drinks to the RAF; the fearless WVS bicycle messengers maintaining communications by pedal-power after an army telephone service was destroyed by a falling aircraft; or the indefatigable volunteer who from her own tiny kitchen fed a crowd of 1,200 bombed-out citizens in Barnes, west London. These dauntless ladies, who had once poured their surplus energies into baking macaroons for church teas, now gave their all to help casualties: distributing clothing, running Rest Centres for the homeless and support systems for ARP workers and, above all, serving tea and buns. ‘Tea became the common healer in all our disaster,’ wrote one reporter of the Blitz. It was served, not as before the war, in china cups with lemon, but watery and beige from an urn, in hefty mugs stained with tannin.
Most of the ‘tea-ladies’ didn’t make the headlines. One who did – Yorkshire farmer’s wife Eveline Cardwell – became a news sensation by single-handedly capturing a German airman who had baled out by parachute over her fields. She accosted the intruder, signed to him to put his hands in the air and surrender his pistol (which he did), before delivering him to the Local Defence Volunteers. (The incident may have provided the inspiration for the film version of Jan Struther’s pre-war Times column Mrs Miniver. In the American movie, Greer Garson finds a wounded German pilot in her back garden and gives him breakfast before, with superb cool, handing him over to the police.)
Heroines cheered everyone up, and Mrs Cardwell was promptly presented with the British Empire Medal amid a blaze of publicity, ‘pour encourager les autres’.
Throughout the Blitz, women plugged gaps left by absent men: as fire-watchers, ARP workers, first-aiders, ambulance drivers, police officers, messengers, transport, demolition and repair workers. At this point in the war there was, however, no question of women taking up arms against the invading enemy. Churchill was adamantly opposed to the idea of women with guns, which would have implied a failure on the part of his sex to protect them. The Blitz, however, overturned the rules obtaining to male chivalry. It exposed the idea that the ‘weaker sex’ could be protected by the ‘stronger’ as a cruel myth. Aerial bombardment does not discriminate. There were countless examples of husbands and so-called ‘protectors’, called to relatively safe postings in outlying counties, leaving wives and children vulnerable. Albert Powell from Lewisham was one, sent with the RAF to Yorkshire. ‘I was left in London in the front line with three children,’ recalled his wife, Margaret. The civilian death toll of women and children under sixteen was 33,135, 55 per cent of the total.
Phyllis Noble decided that the only way to get through being bombed was to live for the day. Lewisham, where the Noble family lived, was on the rat-run taken by German bombers coming in over the Kentish coast towards London; the train marshalling yards at nearby Hither Green station were a frequent target for their loads. However, the acute fear that Phyllis had felt a year earlier had abated, to be replaced by a spirit of adaptation to circumstances.
I suppose an average of seven hours out of every twenty-four is spent in shelters.
Suburban, secure, settled Londoners are on familiar terms with the wail of sirens, the crash of guns, the whine of bombs, the thud of explosions. ‘Have you done the black-out?’, ‘Have you got your gas-mask?’ take the place of pre-war remarks – ‘Have you got your umbrella?’, ‘What about your hanky?’
Getting to work next day was a question of ‘if’ not ‘when’. After a night huddled in the cramped Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden Phyllis would set off for her job at the bank in Bishopsgate, vaguely optimistic that she would arrive sometime, somehow. As often as not this meant accepting a ride on the back of a lorry-load of cauliflowers or fish boxes – ‘a far more interesting start to the day than being packed tight in the train’. You banged on the back of the driver’s cab when you wanted it to stop. ‘One never knows whether on arriving at work the bank will be still & standing or down to the ground.’ Sometimes Phyllis travelled by a boat service that had been laid on to get city workers into town from Greenwich Pier; for miles, blackened carcasses along the river banks were all that was left of the once towering East End warehouses. By every route, smoking shells, ruined buildings and smashed glass, overlaid with serpentine coils of hosepipe, testified to the night’s bomb damage. ‘It was hard to believe that what I was seeing could be real. Yet, with a lump in my throat and tears welling in my eyes, I knew that it was.’
For some, the heartbreaking vision of their capital in flames was mingled with awe at the strange impersonal beauty of destruction. ‘Magnificently terrifying,’ was Madeleine Henrey’s reaction. ‘A lethal fairyland,’ wrote another woman, describing the city bathed in the milky light of thousands of incendiary bombs.
Night after night the population of London adapted to the raids by becoming subterranean. In the city’s basements and cellars they huddled, in back gardens they burrowed into their Anderson shelters, or squirmed beneath their table-top Morrisons. With the prospect of hours of danger, discomfort and sleeplessness ahead of them, the female shelterers went prepared with the essentials: money, door-keys, a torch and, of course, make-up. By now, objections to women wearing trousers were beginning to seem irrelevant; but Woman’s Own readers were advised to purchase a dressing-gown with pockets capacious enough to carry an entire beauty kit: cleansing wipes, powder cream (‘which in an instant takes off all the shine and leaves you matt and composed’), powder puff, smelling salts, sedative tablets, comb and lipstick. The message was ‘Stay lovely.’ Two young Bermondsey women made a pact that they would not be found dead with their hair in rollers. ‘If the sirens went … we took the rollers out. And put them back in when the All Clear sounded. Sometimes this could happen as many as three times a night.’
Thousands perforce herded into the damp and insanitary public shelters, but even vaster numbers queued to descend into the Underground, thronging its stairs and platforms, seething and stinking. The character of life in each shelter often depended on the marshal running it. There were quiet shelters, drunk shelters, courting shelters, fighting shelters. The indefatigable Mass Observers reported on a woman running one section of a shelter at Stepney, holding forty people. Every day this energetic lady made it her business to take all their bedding home, hang it out to air and bring it back in the evening after dinner: ‘I see to it all for ’em.’ The neighbouring section was run by a firm-handed woman who took pride in keeping the peace: ‘We ain’t had no fights here, not on my platform.’ Air-raid warden Barbara Nixon was a regular visitor to one cheerful shelter run by a Mrs Barker, who had carried her gramophone in. The noisier the raid, the louder the music, and everyone would join in uproarious choruses of ‘Roll out the Barrel’ till three or four in the morning. Since sleep was mostly impossible, singing offered a morale-boosting alternative. Fidgets and nerves were held at bay, too, by smoking and knitting, both staple activities for 1940s womankind. Prayers and psalms helped to calm the fearful. One woman nightly drank herself insensible on brandy. But Flo Mahony’s brand of downbeat fatalism was a more typical response: ‘I don’t think we ever really realised the danger. I can’t ever remember being afraid. They would say, “If there’s a bomb that’s got your name on it, you’ve had it,” you know?’
Nevertheless, incoherent distress often took hold, as recorded by Mass Observers in a public shelter during the Blitz:
‘I’m ill! I think I’m going to die!’
‘If we ever live through this night, we have the Good God above to thank for it!’
‘I don’t know if there is one, or he shouldn’t let us suffer like this.’
’I’m twenty-six. I’m more than half way to thirty! I wish I was dead!’
Such terror was not irrational. The death toll was already high, as we have seen, but the figure almost doubles if we include numbers of those wounded: 63,000 of them (48 per cent) were female. One woman had to be taken to hospital suffering from uncontrollable grief. Her husband, son, daughter and son-in-law had all been killed in one bombing raid. It was enough to drive anyone out of their mind.
While the bombers droned overhead a surreal parallel life co-existed above the huddled masses in the underground shelters. The grandes dames of society, evicted from their West End mansions, took refuge in the Dorchester. The writer Fiona MacCarthy, who had been an habituée of the hotel since childhood (it had been built, and was owned by her great-grandfather, Sir Robert McAlpine), explains:
The Dorchester was said to be impervious to bombs because of its reinforced concrete structure. It was widely believed that any bomb that hit the building would just bounce off again.
Here, a life of smart dinners and cocktail parties continued side by side with the evacuated riff-raff (tarts, commercial gentlemen, off-duty airmen) who had made their way to its once-decorous corridors in search of an impregnable refuge. The ballroom was strewn with mattresses. One of those who moved in was Lady Diana Cooper, wife of Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information. Each night she descended, carrying her treasured diamond dolphins, trembling diamond spray, £200 in cash, her passport and make-up essentials, to a cubicle in the subterranean Turkish bath and slept there (with the aid of a sleeping-pill) till the all-clear came at dawn. Then she returned to her roof-floor suite for another hour’s doze if she could get it. Service remained prompt and courteous. The staff brought in early-morning tea and The Times; flowers and messages were delivered. She would breakfast in bed, deal with phone calls and write to her twelve-year-old son John Julius, who had been evacuated to Canada (‘I wish, I wish I could see you. Send me all the snapshots you can of yourself, or I may not recognise you, darling, darling’). Then it was time to dress, and ‘buzz off to the Ritz for a drink with one or more of the boys’. At the Dorchester, the Coopers’ social life was on tap: everyone who was anyone was staying there. ‘We semi-dress for dinner much more smartly than we would in days of peace.’ Above the competitive din of the bombers, the Hyde Park guns and a cacophonous dance orchestra the Coopers and their friends dined in the luxury-liner restaurant, ‘lulled by Chianti’.
The gaiety of London’s night life defied the Blitz. ‘Restaurants and dancing had all gone underground,’ Verily Anderson recalled. The 400, the Florida and the Berkeley were humming. But in March 1941 eighty people dancing at the cavernous Café de Paris – thought to be safe, owing to its depth below Leicester Square – were killed by two 50K landmines which exploded on the dance floor. The band was playing ‘Oh, Johnny! Oh, Johnny! How you can love!’ For a second, as the bombs fell, the dancers stood immobilised; then crumpled, dead, in sprawled heaps. ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and his fellow musicians were among those killed by the blast. ‘The best swing band in London gone,’ mourned Joan Wyndham.
*
While London blazed, Mary Cornish lay in bed in a Lanarkshire nursing home. The overnight wonder of her rescue from Lifeboat 12 had started to be replaced in the papers by more pressing news. But the beauties of the Scottish scenery were restorative. Gradually, the sores on her mouth were starting to heal, and massage was helping her circulation to recover. Her sister Eileen, brother-in-law Ian and flatmate Mabel had all visited her and, fed on buttered egg, milky drinks, creamed cauliflower and chocolate pudding with cream, Mary was regaining weight and recovering in peace. In October she was able to write to her sister that she had slept ‘straight through … with no horrid boats or other nightmares, which was marvellous’. The numbed exhaustion was giving way to a renewed appetite for life: ‘Still more cheering, I’m not half so unintelligent, & perk up quite naturally from time to time … almost without effort!’ Already Miss Cornish was focusing on a return to her teaching job at Wokingham, making her base with Ian and Eileen near Midhurst. There, in the Sussex countryside, she would gently regain her fitness working on the land for a local farmer. Elizabeth, her eight-year-old niece, remembers being warned off the subject of her Aunt Mary’s terrible experiences: ‘We were told we must be very quiet and not slam doors and not on any account to talk to her about what had happened, because almost all the girls she’d been looking after had been drowned. It had been a terrible shock to her.’
In September 1940 Mary Cornish’s story competed with the air raids for front-page space.
Tough, spirited and stoical, Mary Cornish herself was reluctant to indulge in recollections of her Atlantic ordeal. Later that year she told her story to the author of a short book about the City of Benares, but after that, for better or worse, she barely ever spoke of it again.
Already, in a year of war, women had come a long way. In 1939 Frances Faviell had been painting flower pieces and portraits in Chelsea. In the autumn of 1940, during a heavy daylight raid, she and Richard Parker were married; they spent the first night of their wedded life putting out incendiaries. By November she was spending almost all of her time doling out soup to rescue workers, caring for refugees and – as a trained VAD – at her first aid post. Like many others, she was evolving.
One night of heavy air raids the trains weren’t running on Frances’s usual route home. The explosions seemed to have quieted down, so she walked home through a grid of residential streets. She was in uniform. In one of the side streets Frances passed a group of people beside a recently destroyed building; there seemed to be a crater in its basement, but it was mostly filled in with rubble. A voice called out to her, ‘Nurse!’ She stopped and went over. One of the people was a well-built woman, also in nurse’s uniform, another was a doctor, the other two were wardens. She now became aware that there was a terrible sound coming from the depths of the crater, seemingly underground; dreadful screams could be heard issuing from a crevice among the debris: ‘Someone was in mortal anguish down there.’
‘What are your hip measurements?’ said the large nurse. Frances was small and slender – ‘thirty-four inches’. Her shoulders were the same. She would fit into the hole. They could lower her head-first into it to assist the man trapped below. The doctor now instructed her. She must remove her coat, and also her dress; the fabric might catch in parts of the unsafe debris and bring the whole thing down. First, dressed in her blouse and regulation voluminous black knickers, she must descend with a torch to see whether it was possible to administer morphia. There was barely an inch of leeway either side; she must keep her arms close to her sides, her body as rigid as possible, and grip the torch in her teeth. The two wardens now seized her by the thighs, and lowered her. From below came a long, ghastly, animal screaming. ‘It was as if I was having a nightmare from which I would soon waken.’
The torch showed me that the debris lay over both arms and that the chest of the man trapped there was crushed into a bloody mess – great beams lay across the lower part of his body – and his face was so injured that it was difficult to distinguish the mouth from the rest of it – it all seemed one great gaping red mess.
Below, the hole was cavernous. Frances was able to remove the torch from her mouth and speak the soothing words she had been taught: ‘Try to keep calm – we’re working to get you out.’ But the stench was almost overpowering, and she was afraid of being sick. They pulled her up. ‘On my feet I felt violent nausea and vomited again and again.’ Once the bout had passed, the doctor explained to her what she had to do next. He gave her a small bottle of chloroform and a cotton mask; being careful not to inhale it herself, she must apply it as close as possible to the man’s nostrils – or what was left of them. They lowered her back into the hole, and she did as she had been told.
‘Breathe deeply – can you?’ A sound as from an animal – a grunt – came from the thing which had been a face. She held the pad firmly over him. ‘Breathe deeply … deeply … deeply …’ There was a small convulsive movement of revulsion … another fainter one – and then the sounds stopped.
There were other bodies in the hole; Frances couldn’t tell how many, but she could see the grisly fragments. Near to passing out with the stench and the chloroform vapour, she called out to the waiting team, who pulled her back up, gagging and retching, to vomit repeatedly on the pavement. ‘Thank you, nurse. You did very well,’ said the doctor. It was enough; she had played her part, and it was time to go home. On the way back to Chelsea she stopped to vomit at intervals until she reached her door, where her devoted housekeeper, Mrs Freeth, was waiting up, and administered brandy and tea. Little by little the uncontrollable shivering died down, but nothing could erase the memories: ‘I had never seen anything like that horror in the hole.’
The Blitz brought the atrocities of war into ghastly close-up. There were, in 1940, many men who recalled the 1914–18 slaughter. But far fewer women had had contact with the unspeakable carnage that can be inflicted by explosive projectiles. Frances Faviell seems to have been unusually unfortunate in this regard. Having studied anatomy at the Slade School of Art, she was sometimes sent out by her FAP Commandant to perform the nauseating task of piecing together bodies dismembered by blast, in preparation for burial. ‘The stench was the worst thing about it’; that, and the problem of finding all the bits and making them fit. There were almost always too many limbs, and insufficient other members, and the injuries were unspeakable. Frances told of Connie, a warden friend of hers who had had to move a man’s body with a chair leg driven right through it. The air-raid warden Barbara Nixon encountered the pitiable remains of a baby on the street after it had been blown through an upper window. It had burst open on striking the street. Images like this could never be forgotten. For Edith, an ambulance driver working in the ‘bombers’ corridor’ at Gillingham in Kent, the trivial impressions stayed with her – like a woman’s ‘sensible shoes’ protruding from a stretcher, or the purple coat of another woman found in the rubble of her bombed home; much later they located the victim’s remains under the kitchen table. Edith had them wrapped in two army blankets and carried into the ambulance – she noticed how the dead woman’s long, wavy brown hair hung over the edge of the stretcher. They took the pieces to the mortuary. The blankets were needed back, but had to be abandoned; they had been ruined by the tangle of pulped guts and crushed meat that had once been her vital organs. ‘I could not stop retching.’ In south-east London, newlywed Dianna Dobinson’s flat was destroyed by a landmine dropped by parachute. The mines caused horrifying damage: ‘people were just blown to pieces.’ Dianna saw bits of bodies that had come to rest in the branches of trees, which themselves had been stripped of leaves. Later, carts arrived to gather up the grisly fragments and take them away. Seventeen-year-old Londoner Cora Styles soon became acclimatised to such sights: ‘When I went to work in the mornings you’d see piles of brick rubble, perhaps with an arm sticking out or a leg – I got so that blood, guts and what have you didn’t have much effect on me. I knew a man who would go round with a basket collecting the bits, trying to put them together. He picked up somebody’s head and the eyes were open; it nearly landed him in the loony bin.’
Common as such gory sights became, they were not universal. But few were spared the brutal sight of homes, hearths, personal belongings, clothes, treasures and souvenirs indiscriminately wrecked and exposed by the bombs. Elizabeth Bowen emerged from an air-raid shelter to the sight of a gashed-open apartment block: ‘Up there the sun strikes a mirror over a mantelpiece; shreds of a carpet sag out over the void.’ One might see the cross-section of a bathroom, with a towel laid out ready on the tub waiting for its occupant, an assortment of stockings draped in a tree-top, remnants of dresses hooked over broken rafters, twisted light fittings at the bottom of the garden. Wedding presents, kitchen equipment, books lay scattered among the wreckage and matchwood.
Here, a woman might feel her very identity dismembered, as loved and cherished objects, things long desired and ill afforded, things hoarded, collected and enshrined were hurled from their alcoves, blasted from their cabinets and smashed to smithereens. Pre-war woman was equated and identified with the home. Part of her perceived task in life had been to embellish it, to beautify it. Hilde Marchant, a journalist who wrote an account of the Blitz in 1941, witnessed dispossessed and injured women in a hospital after their homes had been bombed:
They wanted to get back home, though their homes were damaged and broken … Though they were scarred, there was still that vivid picture of peace in their own kitchen. It is more than a sense of possession. It is more than just the female desire to protect the working husband. Home was something regular and real, home was the shape they had grown.
‘When I saw my house with the roof off and the windows blown inside out, it drew me out by the roots,’ said one of the women.
Keeping calm and carrying on – an illustration from the Fire Party Handbook showing how to put out incendiaries.
From chintz curtains to quilts, tables to teacups, every eau-de-nil interior in the land was a temple to that revered household deity, the British wife. And now her ritual objects lay scattered, exposed, broken. Could she ever be the same again?
Resilience kicked in. When Hilde Marchant’s own flat was bombed, she was able to reflect ruefully on the fate of her possessions. She had many books, but she had read them all. Her clothes had gone, but by good fortune she had gone out wearing her fur coat, so that at least was saved. Her cupboard full of clippings, photographs and souvenirs was to be regretted – ‘but all that had been important was remembered’. She was able to retrieve only a sponge bag, a dressing gown, stockings, a blouse and a pair of shoes. As she packed them, she had an insight: ‘Really, the essentials of living were very few.’ Divested of all she held dear, all that had once contributed to her composite female identity, wartime woman was having to learn a new kind of survival.
As the bombs smashed up the fabric of everyday life, so notions of property morphed and at times dissolved altogether. The scattering of belongings could seem like a gift from the gods. A woman working as a driver in London regarded perishable and damaged goods as fair game. She was called to help out at a bomb site which had once been the premises of a beautician; among all the muck and muddle and smashed beams, the demolition men salvaged some 200 boxes of high-quality face powder, ‘in good shades too’. They dug out the boxes with great eagerness, and it would have seemed churlish to refuse such largesse, just because the labels were stained.
Social distinctions seemed equally irrelevant under the falling masonry and shrapnel. Sheila Hails was coming home from a dinner party when a raid began. ‘I took shelter under a porch, only to find there was already a man in this particular doorway; however we just crouched down and threw our arms around each other. At the time it just seemed ordinary … we sort of smiled at each other. He was a milkman I think.’
What did it feel like to be faced with extinction? A nurse who survived being buried alive recalled how she began, slowly, to suffocate. Realising her end was near, she put her trust in Christ. ‘I was perfectly peaceful as I thought about death … [and] confident that very soon I would be in the presence of God.’ When rescuers arrived, she felt they had cheated her of her heavenly salvation.
There are accounts, too, of a kind of euphoria experienced during air raids; it drew, perhaps, from that realisation noted by Hilde Marchant, that one could find happiness and meaning without the accretions of cutlery and furniture, and that just being alive was enough. Mass Observation interviewed a woman whose block was hit, with her underneath. Miraculously, this woman was almost unhurt, though the ceiling was collapsing above her. Streaked with plaster dust, she emerged into the street:
‘I’ve been bombed!’ I kept saying to myself … ‘I’ve been bombed! I’ve been bombed – me!’
It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people must have been killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I experienced such pure and flawless happiness.
Some bomb victims managed to draw from even deeper within themselves, finding wells of self-belief that transcended the fear of death. As Barbara Cartland said, war could bring moments of wonder, even glory. She cited the example of a friend of hers who was buried under the ruins of her house for five hours, trapped by her legs. At first she felt terror, and desperation to get free. Time passed, and rescue didn’t arrive.
Suddenly my brain seemed to clear, and I knew that it was all unimportant. It didn’t matter – the shattered house, my imprisoned body – I was still there. I myself and alive, with a new sort of inward aliveness I can’t explain. It seems ridiculous to say it, but I was happy – happier than I’ve ever been in my life before.
This woman seemed to be discovering autonomy for the first time. As they smashed up her home, was this sense of release, of ‘inward aliveness’, the truest kind of emancipation the bombs could bring?
Transcendent moments aside, there were few compensations for the danger and anxiety that were now an inevitable part of war on the home front. Everyday life for the majority of women was now becoming a question of endurance, of simply coping. As the Blitz became ‘normal’, the sense of shock abated, leaving them bored, passive, sickened, above all deeply tired.
Throughout autumn 1940 twenty-four-year-old Anne Popham was writing to her artist lover, Graham Bell, who was training with the RAF in Blackpool. Graham, alienated and lonely among his new colleagues, was hungry for details of their ‘old’ life, but that life had changed; destruction had visited.
In September Anne and her flatmate, Ruth, were bombed out of their Brunswick Square flat. They moved in with Anne’s brother in Islington; meanwhile, Ruth’s father was killed in a raid which destroyed the government office where he worked. Anne was an educated, aware young woman, but her letters aren’t about the progress of the war, the fight against Nazism, or even her hopes for the future. They dwell instead on the minutiae of how, one at a time, she got through the difficult, dreary days, with an immediacy which helps to show what life must have been like for thousands of independent women at that time:
14th October 1940.
Darling – I must say I am having a terrible time. Bombs have been raining down ever since I got home at about quarter to eight. It is only 9 now, but it has been whizz whizz whizz all the time. Even I feel quite alarmed & unhappy for several moments at a time as I am all alone … I suppose there has been nothing very near, as the house has rattled only twice, but there must have been over 15 whistles, and there are several fires, the guns going whang all the time making the shutters shake.
23rd October.
My dearest darling Graham … I dismantled our little home with the aid of the boys … I managed to get everything out but the jam jars, one pot of my marrow jam without a lid, some shredded wheat, & the bookcases … I spent the rest of Sunday as you can imagine. Sweeping. Putting down carpets. Lifting heavy weights, arranging rooms etc etc … trudge off in the miserable rain with a dusty headache to the bank and to re-direct letters at the Post Office. Raiders overhead, shut … Rang Ruth … Her father’s body hadn’t yet been found, as more debris had fallen …
Ordered ½ ton of coke for the boiler 30/- down. Spent hours waiting in the Town Hall to register change of address &c … Came home & pushed furniture about again. Did a week’s washing up … Lay down utterly exhausted to rest my aching back, meaning to write to you any minute. Tris [her brother] had to wake me up to get me to go to bed.
Darling I suppose you have made one of your vows not to write till you hear from me. I do hope you haven’t. I depend on your being better than me & I’m sure your life is easier …
Very much love sweetheart.
The everyday misery of war came home to many that autumn. A year in, the gnawing fear and apprehension that had accompanied the prospect of invasion had receded, to be replaced by the sheer weary difficulty of putting up with things. In 1940 women’s entire way of life was under aggressive assault. In the face of this, the average woman demonstrated the qualities of endurance and submission that had been bred into her sex over centuries. She was used to being a second-class citizen, used to being patient and passive. Seventy years ago most women felt that world events were something out of their control. War, and bombs, were foisted on them by men; they had no choice but to accept what they couldn’t challenge. Conversations with women who lived through the Second World War run to a refrain of stoical acceptance:
‘We all had miserable days … but we weren’t allowed to be miserable. It was a case of ‘Get on with it. You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’
‘We were much more accepting in those days. We didn’t fight life like they do today.’
‘You just got on with your life, like … You had to live through it, and if you survived, well, good luck to you.’
Living in Britain in 1940 meant enduring a barrage of hardships ranging from death, injury, bereavement, homelessness and poverty to lesser annoyances such as exhaustion, electricity cuts, high food prices, queues, shortages of eggs, kippers and Cutex nail varnish.
‘You just grin and bear it – that’s all you can do.’
But such passivity was being put to the test as never before. This last comment came from a woman who survived one of the most horrifying nights of the war, 14 November 1940, the date of the Coventry Blitz. The catastrophe visited upon this small city was the pattern for the subsequent bombings of other compact town centres – Southampton, Birmingham, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Leicester, Bristol, Clydeside – all of which had the heart knocked out of their close-knit communities. The German strategy was to set fire to the city centre with incendiaries. Thirty thousand of these were dropped on Coventry that night. Guided by the blaze, whose light could be seen from the south of England, heavy bombers then gutted what was left at a rate of at least one bomb every minute for over ten hours, pulverising the medieval centre, including Coventry’s beautiful cathedral.
It is now estimated that up to a thousand people may have lost their lives that night; more than 1,200 were seriously wounded. In Coventry and Warwickshire hospital matron Joyce Burton and sister Emma Horne drew on all their reserves of courage and training to maintain morale and care not only for their existing patients but also for the numerous wounded and dying citizens brought in by ambulance during the course of that terrifying night. The sick were in danger from fire, flying glass and debris; the nurses had to move these people out of harm’s way, placing them on mattresses under the beds and protecting them from flying fragments with bowls placed over their heads. They reassured and comforted them. Casualties were arriving every few minutes; often, they were firemen injured and burned by incendiaries, many with scalding shrapnel buried in their flesh. For the dying, morphia was administered. By a miracle, the nurses’ home had just been completely evacuated, minutes before a high-explosive bomb reduced it to ruins. Bombs shattered the water mains, and nothing could be sterilised with boiling water; in the middle of the night the emergency generator failed, and doctors had to operate by battery lights. Smashed windows let in the chill winter air, and the dead lay among the dying. Without exception, everyone in that hospital worked through till the all-clear, and – that November night – every member of staff survived.
Joan Kelsall still lives in Coventry in a modest but cosy semi-detached house not far from the M6 motorway. In 1940 she was nineteen, living with her family near the city centre, with a good job working at the Scotch Wool and Hosiery store. Her memories of 14 November are more typical:
It was a bright moonlight night. The sirens went off. They’d been going off for quite a while. ‘It can’t be anything,’ we thought. Then all of a sudden we heard this awful drone, so of course we just got straight out of the house into the shelter. And that bombing didn’t stop till it got daylight. It was one continual drone, and bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp. But it never entered my head that I might die.
In the morning I got up, and the smell was dreadful – burning wood and everything – we were only ten minutes out of the town centre, and just up the road was the Daimler factory, which was a target. ‘Well,’ I said to Mother, ‘I’ll have to go to work,’ not realising how bad it was, so I got my bike out and got as far as Bishop Street, and I couldn’t get any further. There were firemen and hosepipes everywhere, and the wardens wouldn’t let you through … It was then it dawned on me. The city was flattened – there was just nothing left. And I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve lost me job.’ So I came home. And the familiar area I’d grown up in had just all gone … But our house had been spared. There were people wandering around – and there was no water on, so they were all trying to get water from somewhere. They looked dazed. But they didn’t moan a lot; you know, it was amazing how cheerful people were. I think they thought, you know, ‘We’ve got to get on with it.’ There was police and the WVS giving them assistance, with canteens and so on.
But I started to cry – ‘I haven’t got a job! I’ve lost me job!’ I was only a teenager. And me mother was very cross. ‘You’ve got your life,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about your job.’
The citizens of Coventry picked their way among the remains of their city, each with their own tragedy to deal with. Alma Merritt and her family broke out of their shelter; heat had warped the structure and they had to get free with a mallet. ‘We came out to find our home had gone.’ Twenty-one-year-old Alma went to her job at the Gas Department, but most of her office block was destroyed. ‘I walked into the city centre. In the Cathedral the heaps of stones were still steaming. I don’t remember eating at all that day.’ Joyce Hoffman’s family escaped from the cellar of their burning house and found safety in a public shelter. They emerged next day to find their home a shell, everything they possessed destroyed. ‘All we had were the clothes we were wearing, and my mum and gran had their handbags.’ The Wall family were forbidden from taking their dog Skip into the shelter by an over-zealous ARP; poor Skip was tied to a lamp-post outside, never to be seen again.
Eight miles away to the west, Clara Milburn arose after a sleepless night and listened to the radio reports of the destruction over breakfast. She had lain awake in the shelter, listening to the bombardment. The sound – ‘like old sheets being ripped up’ according to one woman quaking in her Stratford shelter – could be heard across the Midlands. ‘I feel numb with the pain of it all,’ wrote Mrs Milburn. Shocked and dispossessed people from the city were making their way to the country villages. Clara immediately offered up her spare rooms and donated rugs and deckchairs to the ‘trekkers’ who had straggled out to Balsall Common.
Atrocity on this scale left the habitually gentle sex struggling to express their sense of violation. Where a man might react to massacres inflicted by such raids through physical reprisals, women were often left helplessly venting their fear, grief and sense of wrong. ‘I coped by getting angry,’ says Joan Kelsall. ‘You sort of think to yourself, “I’ll get them,” and that helps you through.’
Rage against all things German spilled out in some cases into an intensely ‘unfeminine’ hatred. Cora Styles was sixteen when a piece of red-hot shrapnel whistled three inches from her head and nearly killed her. To this day she feels Germans are the enemy. ‘Perhaps this is a terrible thing to say, but I HATE the Germans. GOD, I hate the Germans. I said then, if I get my hands on a German I’ll … I’ll batter him with a saucepan!’
Marguerite Patten reserves her saucepans for the kitchen, but also still finds it hard to temper her profound sense of outrage:
People were terribly killed. I defy anybody not to feel hatred. My God, we thought, let us get up and at them … I agree with my husband who used to say, ‘The only good German is a dead German.’ Oh, yes, we DID hate them. And it wasn’t hatred of the actual pilot who did it, it was hatred of the people who organised them … Oh, yes, definitely – we hated, hated, hated them.
Mrs Milburn went out into her garden and exterminated the pests, meting out a horrible revenge on the vermin that killed her vegetables:
I kill all the wireworms, calling them first Hitler, then Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Himmler. One by one they are destroyed, having eaten the life out of some living thing, and so they pay the penalty.
A Bristol woman working in an aircraft factory told herself that every rivet she hammered into a Spitfire was another nail in Hitler’s coffin; in one week she broke three hammers. In such reactions one can begin to see the breakdown and collapse of familiar models of womanhood. Tender-hearted passivity and stoicism had their limits; stress found outlets where it could.
*
Hatred, anger, aggression: by 1940 the stereotype of the soothing, neutral, deferential woman was starting to erode. The constant nearness of death awakened violent passions, emotional and physical.
The aphrodisiac effect of war on men has often been commented on, brought about by a combination of frustration, excitement and a subconscious desire, perhaps, to compensate for loss of life through the regenerative urge. But women were also touched with a heady mix of impulses: elation, tenderness, impetuosity, arousal. By the time the Blitz started Joan Wyndham had fallen decisively for gorgeous Rupert Darrow, who, with his dark hair, aquiline nose and all-over tan blended the looks of a Hebrew king and those of a Greek god (‘bronzed all over … Oh boy, oh boy!’), though her decisiveness failed her when it came to losing her virginity. Rupert was very persuasive:
‘Would you rather I raped you in the proper he-man fashion, or will you tell me when you’re ready?’
‘I’ll let you know.’
… Inside me I could feel every moral code I had ever believed in since childhood begin to crumble away …
Eventually, following much discussion of cocks, orgasms and contraceptives, Joan made her decision sitting in an air-raid shelter with the London streets on fire around her. The flashes, booms and flaming skies had ignited her desires. ‘The bombs are lovely, I think it is all thrilling,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Nevertheless, as the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow.’ That night 430 people were killed, and 1,600 injured. The following day it was Sunday and Joan put on her best black-and-white checked trousers and went to church. Afterwards she went to Rupert’s studio in Redcliffe Road and they had lunch. The hour was approaching. In the event, Joan’s deflowering was an anti-climax, for her anyway: it combined unpleasant pain with a sense of disappointment and the absurdity of the whole thing. Afterwards, exhausted with stress and over-excitement, she slept through a heavy air raid. Two nights later Redcliffe Road was hit. Joan raced round, faint with fear. Number 34 had caught it. Partly crushed beneath blocks of collapsed wall, the very bed on which she had been seduced hung over the street, balanced precariously on the remains of Rupert’s bedroom floor. Blindly she fled to search for him; could he have gone to her studio? There, propped on the landing, was a note from him, along with his guitar, his cat (in a basket) and his gas-mask. He had, it turned out, been saved by pure luck, having chosen the very moment when the bomb went off to go to the shelter and borrow sixpence for the gas meter. Days later, Joan was still delirious with relief at Rupert’s narrow escape – ‘It took that bomb on number 34 to make me realise how much I love him … this is the happiest time of my life.’
Mary Wesley’s wartime novels such as The Camomile Lawn (1984) give form to her stated view that ‘war is very erotic, people had love affairs they would not otherwise have had.’ In 1940 the then Mary Swinfen, married to Charles Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen, was doing just that with an exiled Czech politician, a British soldier and an attractive Jewish-French barrister who had escaped from the Nazi invasion of France. There were to be many others – pilots, paratroopers, officers, commandos, French, Poles, Americans, flames old and new. For women like Mary, with the audacity to disobey the rules, there seemed nothing to be lost. ‘We had been brought up so repressed,’ wrote Wesley. ‘War freed us. We felt that if we didn’t do it now, we might never get another chance.’ Being a passive, docile instrument of men’s desires was not Mary’s style; the shriek of bombs released explosive energies in her.
With death raining down, sex was a way to challenge extinction. Phyllis Noble noticed that the Blitz had reinvigorated her parents’ sex life – she could hardly fail to, walking in from work one day to find them making love in the sitting room armchair in broad daylight. In the London Underground shelters, one might catch an occasional glimpse of a couple having intercourse in the darker recesses beyond the tracks. ‘I had seen a couple locked together during the most terrible bombing, absolutely oblivious of anything except each other,’ remembered Frances Faviell. At moments of the most terrible bombing, expressing love physically was an act of defiance against the ruptured bones, the crushed guts – the living urgency of sex a kind of triumph over the gory imperatives of war. The available evidence suggests that fear, loss and destruction seem (to some extent) to have precipitated the sexual liberation of both men and women. Compared to the years before the war, in 1939–45 more women were having sex both before marriage and with men other than their husbands, more of them were contracting sexually transmitted diseases, more were using contraceptives, and women’s knowledge of the facts of life increased. The divorce rate also increased at this time.
The extremes of Blitzkrieg exploded our cities, our factories and our infrastructure. Now, as violent death sabotaged family life, as everything dear and familiar to women was smashed to tatters and fragments, it was exploding the sexual contract.