When the news came through to her mess, Mary Angove let rip with an ear-splitting yodel: ‘YOOOO-HOOOO!!! – And I put my head round the Mess door, and I said to my Commandant, “The war with Germany’s over!” – “Well,” he said, “I thought it must be something like that.” ’
On VE-day the ATS, in common with the rest of the country, were off duty. Mary and her friends went down to the pub in Devizes for ‘a few drinkies’, followed by a greasy fry-up and an evening at the pictures.
Verily Anderson and her two little girls were staying with her parents at their Sussex village rectory, yearning for the war to end so she could start her married life with Donald again. And then suddenly, on Marian’s fourth birthday, it did end:
‘Marian,’ I said, ‘you must remember this all your life. It’s history.’
They rummaged in a drawer for paper flags and carried them up the drive to deck the trees by the road. Warm weather had returned, and the village was planning high jinks for all on the green, but at heart Verily felt she was a Londoner. ‘ “I know where I’d like to be tomorrow,” I said wistfully.’ On 8 May she resigned herself to getting the children ready for the afternoon’s festivities in ironed frocks, adorning their little heads with red, white and blue ribbons. Mrs Bruce stopped her daughter as she was gathering up her own clean clothes. ‘ “If you run,” she said, “you’ll just catch the next bus into Eastbourne, and then the train. I’ll look after the children.” ’ Verily didn’t wait to be persuaded; by three o’clock, waiting for her connection at Eastbourne, she was listening to Churchill’s victory speech relayed on the station’s loudspeakers:
The German war is therefore at an end … The evil-doers … are now prostrate before us. Our gratitude to our splendid Allies goes forth from all our hearts in this island and throughout the British Empire.
We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing … Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!
London-bound, Verily gazed out at the farms and villages and, as she drew closer to the capital, the suburban terraces of England in Maytime:
There was not a house in town or country without its flag flying for the day. Rural cottages, great Victorian villas, rows of railway-side tenements, however battered they or their surroundings, all had their flags.
Verily stepped off her train into a city in holiday mood.
Looking on, Mollie Panter-Downes felt as if the population had all set forth for a huge one-off family picnic. At the heart of her description of how London spent that unforgettable day floats a beguilingly festive image: the girls. Released from their imprisoning offices, ‘the girls’ were like flocks of ‘twittering, gaily plumaged cockney birds’, dazzlingly pretty, charmingly colourful, dressed for summer, cornflowers and poppies poking from their curls.
They wore red-white-and-blue ribbons around their narrow waists. Some of them even tied ribbons around their bare ankles. Strolling with their uniformed boys, arms candidly about each other, they provided a constant, gay, simple marginal decoration to the big, solemn moments of the day.
To many eyes, this was the expression of victory. The dark days were over. Bright colours, pretty things, and femininity would replace the sombre colours of war: khaki, dinge and blackout. Frivolity, floral frocks and youthful pleasures would return to the land.
Marguerite Patten’s mother, like Verily’s, seems also to have felt that this was a day when the younger generation should experience the celebrations. Marguerite’s husband, Bob, was in the Middle East. Since 1943 she had found her niche broadcasting from the BBC’s ‘Kitchen Front’ and was now sharing a home in Barnet, north London, with her younger sister Elizabeth, her small baby and their mother.
And my mother said ‘You two girls ought to go to London to celebrate – I can look after the baby.’ So off we went. And I can’t even begin to tell you how we felt then.
Marguerite is well into her nineties. But her face still lights up at the memories:
Victory! We couldn’t, couldn’t believe it really had come. It was wonderful … The sheer joyousness of that day! I kissed more people that day than I kissed in my entire life. We danced, and we sang … and of course we all got as near to Buckingham Palace as we possibly could. You can’t exaggerate the joy of that day. And we could go home in the dark and not worry about an air raid! And people could leave their curtains undrawn! No, the feeling of joy on that day was something to remember the whole of your life.
‘A magic night’ was how another young woman, Joan Styan, remembered the celebrations years later. For her the whole day was one of impassioned emotion and exhilaration, with an overpowering sense of being free again. She and her mum fought their way through the jubilant crowds to Buckingham Palace and sang along to the Vera Lynn favourites while waiting to see the royal family appear on the balcony. Vere Hodgson recorded in her diary that she and her friend Kit had been lucky enough to get into St Paul’s Cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. They picnicked by the Thames – ‘carefree after so many years of anxiety’. Like thousands of others, factory worker Olive Cox and her boyfriend were given a day off from the production line. They took the train from Chelmsford to London and wove their way through the City bomb sites till they got to Trafalgar Square, where they joined a crocodile of revellers dancing down Whitehall. There seemed no point in going home. Big Ben chimed midnight, and they lay down on the grass in Green Park and slept till dawn.
Across the country church bells pealed, town bands played, bunting fluttered from lamp-posts. Overflowing pubs, squares and streets stopped the traffic for a nationwide holiday, gramophones were set up at street corners and radios blared out dance music. Teenager Anne Thompson stayed out till three in the morning conga-ing down the Bedford River embankment. In Oxford twenty-year-old student Nina Mabey fell into the arms of another undergraduate who had joined the crazy crowds and promptly fell in love with him. Like many others, Sheffield housewife Edie Rutherford broke open the supply of gastronomic delicacies which she had hoarded for precisely this occasion; she and her husband feasted on asparagus tips and tinned tomatoes. Muriel Green got drunk on old sherry and Pommia: ‘the strongest drink I know’.
Joan Wyndham headed for her mother’s flat in Chelsea. For lunch there was tinned fruit salad washed down with gin, then they braved the West End. Caught up in a forest of crowds, Joan found herself swayed between a troupe of Polish airmen and the mighty herd, all chanting ‘Bless ’em all, bless ’em all / The long and the short and the tall’. She lost her shoe dancing, her stockings were in ribbons. Suddenly, there was Winston Churchill on the balcony of the Ministry of Health, making the V sign, and roaring out: ‘Were we downhearted?’
And we all yelled, ‘No!’ Then we sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and I think we all cried – I certainly did. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life.
With the public rejoicing came private mourning, for the destruction of homes and belongings, for the theft of six years of youth, for relatives, friends and lovers who were not alive to see the peace. One young woman would never forget standing motionless amid a frenzied crowd, haunted by the thought of her brother, who remained ‘Missing in Action’. For her and her mother, the war would never truly end. Another woman learned that day that her injured husband, in hospital, would live. Late into the evening she sat on the wall in front of her bomb-damaged house, watching as the newly lit lights streamed into the street, thinking of the many lives that had been lost. At last she went back inside; her two young boys were in bed. She stood and looked at their sleeping faces: ‘[their] lives lay before them in a world at peace’.
But for those excluded from the celebrations by geography, VE-day struck a bittersweet note. Too many people were still separated from those they loved. Soldiers like Jack Clark, who in May 1945 was moving into Germany with the British Liberation Army, felt curiously removed from their own victory. ‘It may sound funny,’ he mused in a letter home, ‘but it didn’t somehow make much impression on us when we first heard the capitulation … we didn’t take much notice but just went on cleaning our Carrier!’ The fact was, that Jack’s heart was in Rishton, Lancashire, with Olive, his wife:
Whenever I think of Home now I vision you with your loving arms outstretched to hold me closely … us walking hand in hand together and your Love mirrored in your eyes when we kissed in the moonlight – the tender loveliness and glorious womanhood of your beauty and the sense of completeness which only exists when we are together … My life is built around the promise of our future together.
I’m watching the days and hours tick by.
For Jack, and for countless men like him, the promise of home was the promise of womanly consolations. Olive, for her part, wrote back to her husband, painting a picture of enchanting domesticity. Baby David, born in December 1944, was growing apace: ‘he is just like a jack-in-the-box’. On VE-day the baby clinic was closed, so Olive couldn’t get him weighed, but she and her mum treated themselves to an extra ‘cuppa’, cleaned the house and put out the coloured bunting. Somebody had just given her new pillow-slips, and she had done ‘a big wash’.
But it wasn’t just the men stationed overseas who felt fractured and incomplete when the European war came to an end. By 1945 QA Lorna Bradey had been abroad for four years. By then she was desperately homesick: ‘God how I longed to see my family. I ached to talk to them.’ Home leave was allocated by lottery, but her turn never came round: ‘I can remember the anguish and disappointment each time the names were announced. I swallowed another lump in my throat; perhaps next time.’ She was in Genoa, on the point of setting up a new hospital with her beloved medical team, when orders to go home finally materialised in June 1945:
I had always imagined the moment, the excitement, but it was not there. I panicked. These had become my people. I didn’t want to go. How could I transmit all this to the folks at home? The gap, four and a half years, had been too long. They wouldn’t know what I was talking about, they had shared nothing of what I’d been through … I dreaded the moment of farewell and left Genoa in tears with all my friends gathered around.
A week later she set sail from Naples, ‘drained of all emotion’.
After the German withdrawal from northern Italy, Margaret Herbertson remained stationed near Siena with the SOE FANYs. All of them chafed at the excessive formality of the thanksgiving parade laid on to celebrate the 8 May victory. There was hymn-singing, to the accompaniment of a discordant piano, and the girls sweltered in their winter uniforms. ‘The ceremony did not appear particularly joyful. I heard one senior officer remark, “You’d think we’d lost the war, and not won it.” ’ Perhaps this was owing to the casualties they’d experienced at close quarters. For Margaret, the death of one of her closest colleagues soured the occasion. Captain Pat Riley had been killed only days before the end of hostilities, when his plane hit a mountain in the fog. Another friend, Francine Agazarian, had recently received news of her husband, an SOE espionage agent who had been captured in France. The Gestapo had hanged him at Flossenberg concentration camp. Margaret looked on helplessly as poor Francine, broken-hearted, trailed around the paths of their Sienese villa, her futile unhappy kicks sending the gravel flying. For too many, the victory was a hollow one.
Widowed at the age of eighteen when her young husband Don was torpedoed in the Atlantic, Cora Johnston had joined the Wrens early in 1943, working as a form-filler in the certificate office. It was a period of hard work and relative stability for her. ‘God was very good to me. He gave me a wicked sense of humour that has seen me through some terrible, terrible times. I could see the funny side of everything.’ But the shock of Don’s dreadful death was to exact a grim toll. A year later Cora broke down completely:
I was crying all day, I was in a terrible state. Everything had caught up with me: the raids and everything that I’d been through had knocked me for six. And on the day that war was declared over I was invalided out of the Wrens.And there they all were, dancing in the streets, and there I was looking as though I’d come out of Belsen – black eyes, and so thin. And it took me two years to get over it.
For many, uncertainty and anxiety about loved ones in the Pacific continued to gnaw. Monica Littleboy had never forgotten George Symington. Memories of the irresistible young man who had first won her love back in 1939 still tugged at her, and she felt an overpowering sadness for him. ‘No one had heard news of him for so long. Was he still alive? There seemed no prospect of an end to the war in the Far East.’ Thelma Ryder didn’t have the heart to celebrate VE-day. ‘The Far East was still on, and I had had no news of Bill since 1942.’ He had been on board HMS Exeter when the Japanese sank her in the Java Sea. Was it fair to expect Thelma to wait for somebody who might never come home? ‘Well, I did find another chap towards the end of the war.’ But in 1945 a telegram at last got through to his family that he had been captured; it included the words ‘Inform Thelma’. Knowing that he still loved her sent the old feelings rushing back: ‘I was over the moon when I heard.’ But now she had an indeterminate wait ahead of her.
The diarist Shirley Goodhart had been feeling increasingly restless. Jack, her husband, who was stationed in India as a doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps, had written to her in April to say that his service required him to spend a total of three years and eight months in his posting. ‘That means we shall have another 18 months apart.’ The rejoicing around her did nothing to quell Shirley’s mounting depression, but vigorous housework seemed to help. ‘I spent most of the morning scrubbing and polishing and had no time to feel miserable.’ On VE-day she joined forces with Nan, a girlfriend in London. Neither was in the mood for dancing and drinking, so they avoided the West End. Instead they visited another friend, Adrian, who was wounded in hospital, gave him an outing in his wheelchair and enjoyed the kind of palmy relaxed day that they would have taken for granted before the war: ‘[We] sat out of doors enjoying non-hospital, non-canteen food, and warm weather, and each other’s company. We talked lightly, about books, about people, and a little bit about VE-day … On our way home Nan and I decided that we couldn’t have chosen a better way of celebrating.’
For those whose menfolk had been imprisoned in Germany, however, the long wait was at last over: the time had come for happy arrivals, glad reunions, heralded across the land by telegrams. Those faded slips of paper, franked and signed, with their abbreviated, pasted-on communications are still preserved among treasured letters: HOME SATURDAY STOP MEET ME STOP.
On VE-day Jack Milburn was in bed running a slight temperature. Clara left him there and mounted her bicycle to fetch bread from the village. The day was spent intermittently listening to the broadcasts from London, including the weather forecast, suspended for the last five and a half years. But it was impossible not to keep thinking of Alan: ‘He will be here soon.’ The Union Jack was hoisted on its pole in her front garden. His room was ready.
Wednesday 9th May
A Day of Days!
This morning at 9.15 the telephone rang and a voice said: ‘I’ve got a very nice telegram for you. You are Milburn, Burleigh, Balsall Common 29?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
The voice said: ‘This is the telegram. “Arrived safely. Coming soon. Alan”.’
Clara was bursting as she called out to her husband, ‘We’ve got the right telegram at last!’ Upstairs she ran, and there, together with their devoted maidservant Kate, the Milburns gave themselves over to pure happiness:
And then all three of us, Jack in bed, Kate nearby and myself all choky, shed a tear or two. We were living again, after five-and-a-half years!
Two hours later the telephone rang again. The operator put through a long-distance call:
‘Is that Burleigh, Balsall Common?’
‘Yes! Is that Alan?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
And then I said: ‘Oh, bless you, my darling.’
All evening they waited and at last, tired out with the emotions of the day, Clara went to bed – only to be woken by the telephone yet again. The clock showed nearly midnight. Alan had arrived at Leamington station, a drive of nine miles. It was a warm night; she climbed quickly into her clothes, ran down and started up the car; the roads were empty until she reached the town, where crowds were still milling, and she had to sound the horn to clear a way. There in front of the railway station two figures were visible in the lamplight, one in blue, one wearing a khaki beret. For a moment she mistook him, until the man in the khaki beret strode to the car –
‘Is it Ma?’
– and then they were in each other’s arms.
Mrs Milburn’s wartime diary ends two days later on 12 May. The victory that had brought her son back to her had made her life complete; there was nothing more to say, for her cup was full. After Dunkirk there had been seven weeks of numbing anxiety. Since then, for five years, her daily life had been permeated with an all-consuming uncertainty and a constant longing for his letters. She had drawn on all her stoicism and patriotism to keep her spirits afloat, to endure the absence of everything that made her a mother. Being needed by Alan had made sense of her life. ‘How I have longed to have the little toffee tin of grey trouser buttons out again all these long five years … The long, bad years of war begin to fade a little as Alan’s voice is heard … and the house is once more a real home.’
With him in it, how happy she was. There was mending to be done.
Patrick Campbell-Preston and his young wife Frances had been married for just nine months, following a whirlwind engagement, before he too was captured at Dunkirk. By 1945 he was being held in Oflag IV-C (aka Colditz), the high-security prison for officers regarded as escape risks. Frances wrote to him weekly with bulletins of her life at the tiny cottage she had found in Berkshire for herself and their little girl, Mary-Ann. The month before Patrick’s return was ‘gruelling’. Which army would reach Colditz first? What if the Nazis shot everyone in a final mad gesture? Frances was a nervous wreck – ‘every telephone call was torture’ – and she drifted ghostlike round the cottage for days, listening to every radio bulletin. When the news of the liberation of Oflag IV-C came out a couple of weeks before VE-day, Frances let out ‘a bellow like a mad bull’. But a week then passed without further news before the 1 a.m. phone call announcing that Patrick had landed at a military aerodrome near Beaconsfield. Laughing, crying, Frances was unable to believe the truth of his return. But then there he was, thin and weak and more handsome than ever. For two whole days he and Frances caught up. There was five-year-old Mary-Ann, whom he had never laid eyes on, to get to know. And there was a torrent of talk:
This was the only time Patrick ever talked of his experiences. After that he never referred to them again. It was like lancing a colossal boil, after which the wound was sealed and healed.
Jean McFadyen was still working for the Timber Corps when the war came to an end. The end-of-war celebrations meant release for her boyfriend Jim, who since 1942 had been held in a German POW camp in Yugoslavia. During his captivity correspondence between them had been intermittent. ‘I just couldn’t believe it when it came to an end.’ Jim had suffered appallingly. When the Germans realised that their bases in Yugoslavia were threatened by the Red Army they pulled out rapidly, leaving prisoners like Jim to their fate. Jean remembers Jim telling her how the men went mad, scavenging for food. Eventually they were found and flown back: the first time he’d ever been in an aeroplane.
I got a telegram from his mother to tell me he was being trained up to Edinburgh. I couldn’t come straight away, because I had to apply for leave; then I travelled down to Edinburgh. And he came to meet me off the train, wearing a suit of his father’s that didn’t fit him because he was so thin – suffering badly from malnutrition. There was a big difference in his appearance. But I recognised him.
To be honest I can’t really talk about it … It was such a happy time. Just such a relief … Everything was over. The war was finished.
*
Demobilisation was a piecemeal process, and the conscripts and volunteers awaited so eagerly by their womenfolk returned to Britain only when they were authorised to do so. Doris Scorer’s boyfriend, Frank White, had volunteered for a three-year stint in the navy in 1943. Nothing she could say would dissuade him, and he left her in tears, with the words ‘Don’t wait for me’. But as time went by she missed him more and more. Their romantic canal walks, and Frank’s passion for the natural history of the Buckinghamshire countryside, passed into nostalgic memory – those happy days nutting in the copses, peering at the diadem spiders spinning their webs among the blackberries, secret kisses behind violet-scented banks. ‘He seemed so far away, when would he come home?’ She sent him airgraphs, and tracked the movement of his ship, the destroyer Exmoor, in the eastern Mediterranean. In February 1945 Doris found a column inch in the newspaper, describing how crew from the Exmoor had overpowered a German raiding party on the Dodecanese island of Nisiros, killing eight and taking thirty prisoners. She bubbled over with pride.
Back at the Wolverton aircraft factory, Doris was temporarily assigned to a desk job. She quickly discovered that, far from being a task requiring awe-inspiring skill, the checking of invoices was un-demanding work. It gave her a vision of a better future. They did invoices at Bletchley Park, didn’t they? Doris went out and bought herself a dictionary: ‘I was going to conquer the world.’ If she learned to spell, and picked up shorthand, surely she could compete with those rarefied beings ‘over there at the Park’. But two weeks later she was put back on piecework.
Doris’s war ended when her aircraft woodwork shop was abruptly stood down. With nothing to do, the girls were first put to work on their knees scrubbing the steps up to the manager’s office; then they were retrained as French polishers. She finished her Works career rubbing linseed oil into lavatory seats.
Then came the telegram: BE HOME FRIDAY NIGHT STOP MEET ME STOP. Doris shared her good news with everyone who would listen. Friday came. She washed her hair, sluiced her armpits – ‘no bathrooms for us’ – made up carefully and dabbed her best perfume, Bourjois’s ‘Evening in Paris’, behind her ears. She sewed up a ladder in her stockings and put it to the inside, hoping it wouldn’t show, then made her way to the station wearing a pale-blue dress with a flattering ruched front. A cloud of smoke announced the chugging arrival of the train. ‘Wolverton! Wolverton!’ called out the woman porter.
Was he on this one? There was someone struggling with a kit-bag, holdall and parcels, a tall figure in black … a face tanned from the Mediterranean sun, eyes bluer than ever. It was him.
Later, an acquaintance of Doris who witnessed their rapturous reunion told her: ‘Ooh, it was lovely.’
Chief Petty Officer White and Doris Scorer were married by special licence during his leave. But no sooner was the fortnight over than Frank had to head back to Chatham to complete his service commitment. With a year of that still to run, twenty-one-year-old Doris had her navy wife’s pay book to live on, and a run-down rented house to get into shape. Until his return, she was on her own.
Frank was to prove a caring but conventional husband. ‘Hubby’, as she called him, was hard-working and over time scaled the job ladder to become a teacher and lecturer, but his expectations of his wife – that she would stay at home, and that meals would be on the table at a set hour – did not evolve along with his career. That urge to win the war and conquer the world stayed with Doris, however, as did the allure of putting pen to paper. Thirty years later, the Wolverton housewife wrote and published a memoir of the war years, in which her own experiences were centre-stage; its triumphant title: D for Doris, V for Victory.
As the homecomings began, parties were laid on for the returning servicemen. In Liverpool, as elsewhere in the country, communities welcomed them back with slap-up feasts. There was great baking and cutting of sandwiches. Helen Forrester couldn’t help but feel bitter envy at the sight of happy wives, equipped with pails of whitewash, chalking the house walls with their husbands’ names: WELCOME HOME JOEY. WELCOME HOME GEORGE. Harry O’Dwyer was one of 30,248 merchant seamen who would never come home to her. Eddie Parry was one of the 264,443 British servicemen who would never come home either. It struck her then that nobody ever painted messages for ‘the Marys, Margarets, Dorothys and Ellens, who also served’.
It was still a popular idea that women did not need things. They could make do. They could manage without, even without welcomes.
In fact, many Marys, Ellens and Dorothys spent the next couple of months, or more, feeling jaded and impatient. WAAF driver Flo Mahony was in north Wales for the victory celebrations. There were, she recalls, some small bonfires. But more memorable to her is the sense of uncertainty and resentment:
None of us knew how much longer we were going to be in the Air Force, or when we were going to get out. The war basically stopped. There was no more wartime flying. And so air crew were redundant and they didn’t know what to do with them. So they sent them to the Motor Transport section and told them to go and be drivers – and of course that was our job. So there was quite a bit of resentment of these air crew. And a lot of people were at the end of their tether and were quick to flare up, and there were lots of frictions.
Everybody was given a demobilisation number. When your number came up, you went to the Demob Centre and were sent home. Flo Mahony’s friend Joan Tagg, a wireless operator, had joined the service later than she had, so didn’t expect to be released as early. But the great pride she had taken in this important and highly graded job suffered a mortifying blow when, in the summer of 1945, it was stopped overnight, and she was posted to Gloucester to do number-crunching in the Records Office:
The men were coming back, and the men automatically took over our jobs. We weren’t wanted … And this was the worst possible posting they could give me because it was clerical. Also, when they posted me as a clerk they wanted me to remuster, which meant going back two grades. I had loved being a wireless op, and I was absolutely livid.
Men and women alike chafed at the tin-pot bureaucracy and officiousness that now prevailed. ‘The day war ended they started the spit-and-polish,’ says Joan. Flo agrees: ‘The Air Force was known for being relaxed compared to the army. But now there were so many people sitting about with not enough to do, and suddenly, you had to go on church parade, you had to do this, you had to do that. You had to be properly dressed. And they started making us do drill all over again.’ There was work, but it seemed to have no purpose. Idle servicewomen – and men – were encouraged to attend EVT (Educational and Vocational Training) classes to prepare them for civilian life. A future as a shorthand typist or counter clerk beckoned.
Still in Italy with the FANYs, Margaret Herbertson took up the offer of a job as ‘FANY Education Officer’. She too remembered the early days of peace as having an anti-climactic quality. The flow of signals had completely dried up, leaving coders and intelligence officers like her with nothing to do. ‘We all felt quite dazed. The war, for many of us, had lasted for over a quarter of our lives. I spent a day tearing up papers.’ The War Room, with its atmosphere of feverish urgency, its charts and diagrams, had been dismantled. As far as getting home was concerned, priority went to servicemen who had spent far longer abroad than the girls. Some of the FANYs immediately volunteered for the Far East. Others just applied for leave and went on sightseeing tours round Tuscany.
Ironically for her new appointment, Margaret had herself opted out of education when she first decided to join the war effort back in 1939. But, untaught though she was, her superiors put her in charge of batches of FANYs who came seeking instruction in English Literature, Current Affairs, Needlework, Art History, Italian and so on. Hastily, she assembled a rag-bag of tutors, including nuns, librarians and miscellaneous semi-qualified colleagues, and together with them devised a reasonable programme, which included educational outings. These last were fraught with peril. Every bridge in central Italy had been blown up by the retreating German army, and an improving day out to admire Quattrocento frescoes in the hilltop town of San Gimignano involved a spine-chilling detour up a zig-zagging 1 in 10 gradient. The road was barely wide enough for the three-ton truck, and the girls closed their eyes, clinging to the sides of the vehicle and praying. Undaunted, in June Margaret organised a cultural trip to Venice: getting there took fourteen hours across mountain passes, negotiating pontoons and carrying their own tinned provisions – but no tin-opener.
By July arrangements were under way to send the FANYs back to England. Margaret had the job of processing despatch of their luggage, and ticking innumerable boxes relating to the hand-in of their uniforms: 952 small sleeve buttons, 310 tunic buttons, et cetera, et cetera. On 11 August 1945 she and her group of eleven girls piled their cases on to two army trucks and said goodbye to Siena. ‘[It] has continued to tug at my heart.’
Then followed an experience which would be shared by returning personnel worldwide. Transit camps had all of the discomforts of barracks and billets, but none of their well-worn cosiness. Add to that the daily frustration of petty-fogging army bureaucracy and the intense heat of a Neapolitan August, and it was unsurprising that morale became low after three weeks not knowing when shipment would happen. Several of the FANYs became ill. At last, on 3 September, they embarked on the Franconia, ten of them sharing an airless cabin. On board were thousands of troops, and an apprehensive huddle of young women – Italians, Yugoslavs and Greeks – who were being sent to England: a shipment of foreign brides. ‘The weather, at first hot and sunny, grew grey and overcast as we sailed north west towards the Irish Sea.’
QA Lorna Bradey arrived home in Bedford to an ecstatic welcome from her family. But after the brilliant colours of Genoa and Naples, everything looked shabby and diminished. And just as she had feared, things at home were very different. Lorna and her sister had always shared an unstrained intimacy; but when she opened her trunk, she found to her fury that her sister had ‘borrowed’ all her clothes. It took a while to appreciate that the family had been struggling for years to scrape by. Her mother – always selfless, never petty – said nothing as her hungry daughter polished off the week’s butter ration at one sitting. But the first question on everyone’s lips was, did she have any coupons to spare? ‘No, was the firm answer.’ She would have to go out, join a queue and get some. After Italy, home was all a dreadful anti-climax.
I tried to get into the pattern of life – but I was lost. We had nothing personal to say to one another. If I talked about my experiences they were politely interested. They just did not understand.
For many, the weeks following the celebrations felt haphazard, disorienting. There was peace – but it was not peaceful. The final thrust of the Allied victory in Europe, and Germany’s last ghastly spasms, had subsided. But the after-shocks reverberated: there were journeys, telegrams, arrivals, departures, greetings, upheavals, reunions. There were marriages, and divorces. There was grief, mourning and fear about the future. So many people’s lives were still precarious, unsettled, subject to the agitating inconsistencies of authorities and politicians. Children had to be returned to their parents, sons to their mothers, husbands to their wives. In the longer term houses needed to be built and jobs found. In Europe the infrastructure was collapsing; populations were starving. And as the war in the Far East still dragged on, there was another great exodus of soldiers on their way to the battlefields of Burma, Malaya and Java.
It was hard, in those days, to feel any faith in the promise held out by Vera Lynn’s heartfelt rendition of the Irving Berlin lyric, ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow … ’. On 23 May, a fortnight after VE-day, Churchill’s Coalition government was disbanded. A General Election was called for 5 July.
What kind of world did women want? On the whole, nothing too radical. There is little evidence that Britain’s women were emerging from the Second World War with plans for a feminist revolution or a Utopia. Working on Sheffield’s city trams as a ‘clippie’ during the war, Zelma Katin had become known as the ‘Red Conductress’; throughout, she had made her voice heard at meetings of the Transport Workers’ Union. She made common cause with the workers, moved to solidarity with them by the injustices she saw regarding pay and hours, and displaying an admirable stamina on committees. When hostilities ended she felt grateful for all the insights her contact with the proletariat had given her and looked ahead to a brave new world. But more than a new world, Zelma just wanted a rest:
I will confess that I am thinking not only of a future for humanity but a future for myself. I want to lie in bed until eight o’clock, to eat a meal slowly, to sweep the floors when they are dirty, to sit in front of the fire, to walk on the hills, to go shopping of an afternoon, to gossip at odd minutes …
‘And is this – THIS – your brave new world?’ you ask.
Yes; just at this moment, when I’m hurrying to catch my bus for the evening shift, it is.
There were exceptions. Naomi Mitchison’s socialism had remained intact throughout the war: ‘I doubt if anything short of revolution is going to give the country folk the kick in the pants which they definitely want, or rather need.’ Vera Brittain had spent a lifetime espousing both feminism and pacifism, which to her were two sides of the same coin. She had not hesitated to attack the leadership of Winston Churchill, continued to press for women’s equal participation in public life and found in her husband’s candidacy for the Labour Party a further cause to back. Left-wing women like this had plenty to vote for, a world to be conquered.
After the First World War women’s history had turned a corner. In 1918 the vote had been granted to property-owning women over the age of thirty, followed by the full vote in 1928. But there was no comparable prize for women in 1945. After six long years of home-front survival Nella Last, and thousands more like her, were deeply tired. On VE-day Nella felt ‘like death warmed up’. It was a sensation that could only be alleviated by restorative contact with nature. Coniston Lake worked its usual magic:
It was a heavy, sultry day, but odd shafts of sunlight made long spears of sparkling silver on the ruffled water, and the scent of the leafing trees, of damp earth and moss, lay over all like a blessing.
Nella decided to vote Conservative. ‘I don’t like co-ops and combines, I hate controls and if … they are necessary from the economic point of view, I don’t want them so obvious and throat-cramming.’ For so many women like Nella, her home was her area of control. That May, the Lasts finally got workmen in to refurbish their bomb-damaged house. Carpets were relaid, electrical fittings rewired, and the pelmets were replaced over the windows:
By 4.30, all was straight, and the air-raid damage, the shelter and the blackout curtains over my lovely big windows seemed a nightmare that had passed and left no trace.
In 1945, the average British housewife cared less about broader issues and a great deal more about the roof over her head, about queues and food shortages. These had got so bad by the end of the war that one of them, fifty-year-old Irene Lovelock, decided to found the British Housewives’ League.
In June 1945 something inside Mrs Lovelock snapped. The wife of a Surrey vicar, she returned home in a state of rage after spending a long morning queuing for food in the pouring rain; her fellow queuers included grandmothers and women with small babies in prams. She marched into the house and, though she had no experience of leading public meetings, told her husband she wanted to borrow the parish hall. There she took the platform and soon found herself waxing eloquent on the subject of queues and malevolent shopkeepers. Realising that she had tapped into a profound well of resentment, she then wrote to the local paper and got a huge response. The movement snowballed, and in July Mrs Lovelock became chairman of the BHL Committee, heading up a campaign to improve the lot of housewives and their families. In the early days there were only a few hundred members, whose principal targets were the manipulative shopkeepers who expected women to wait, often for an hour, until they were ready to open the shop. Provisions were then issued to the front of the line until – often within half an hour of opening – they cried out ‘No more’ and banged down the shutters. This happened all too often – particularly, it seemed, in the case of fishmongers. But the League grew; in August it held its first London meeting and, as shortages became harder to tolerate in the post-war period, so the BHL increased its active membership by thousands, who called upon politicians to attend with urgency to the things that women really cared about. Tradesmen’s deliveries should be resumed at the earliest opportunity. Queues should be eliminated. Housewives had worked their fingers to the bone for nearly six long years, running their houses without help, clothing their families, battling with the mending. Among the League’s stated aims were ‘an ample supply of good food at a reasonable price’ and ‘the abolition of rationing and coupons … These are a threat to the freedom of the home’. Some branches even swore an oath not to buy expensive imported fruit like pineapples or tangerines.
Enraged by obstructive fishmongers, middle-class women banded together to voice their frustration.
Mrs Lovelock and her League offer a fascinating case of the contradictory impulses that swayed women in the 1940s. Here we have a vigorous, independent-minded female activist, determined to mobilise women and make their voices heard in public. Her movement, with its parades and demonstrations, almost certainly drew inspiration from the tactics of the Suffragettes a generation earlier. But its aims, to begin with, were confined to getting butchers’ deliveries up and running and preventing exploitation by fishmongers. For Irene Lovelock’s world view, like those of many thousands like her, was unquestioningly traditional. A mother of three and pillar of her local church, she would have accepted the biblical portrayal of the virtuous wife: ‘for her price is far above rubies … She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household … Her children arise up and call her blessed.’ Her wifely identity was bred in the bone.
The League, while stoutly maintaining that it was non-affiliated, drew its membership from the conservative middle-class. Because of this, it was infiltrated and identified with the doctrinaire right wing of the Tory Party, who feared and resisted socialism in all its guises. Rationing, and controls, came under that heading. Soon the BHL’s crusading protest on behalf of the housewife began to look like bigoted and reactionary extremism. The press reported scuffles and disturbances at BHL gatherings. Labour politicians took advantage of the mixed messages to discredit the housewives’ cause as propaganda, denouncing these ‘middle class women’ for stirring up unrest and disaffection with their policies. Women’s primary interests – home and family – fell victim to dissent, and before long the protesters were regarded as a parochial, if strident, minority.
It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Irene Lovelock and her tribe of honourably intentioned mothers and grannies. For six years they had meekly accepted the need for every aspect of their lives to be regulated by the state, and now their patience was wearing thin. With supply problems becoming ever worse, worry about food was even more intense in the post-war period than it had been during the years of conflict. Bread rationing, introduced in June 1946, was the last straw. But another whole six years would pass before queuing for brisket would become a memory.
*
Shirley Goodhart’s Mass Observation diary provides an insight into the way intelligent women thought about politics in the weeks immediately after the war. A conversation Shirley had with her mother shortly after VE-day shows them both thoroughly engaged with the question of their future government, but it also shows a generational divide:
May 20th 1945
Mother and I sat up till midnight talking politics … Of Attlee: ‘I used not to like him, but I am changing my opinion and I think that he will be our next Prime Minister …’
I have said that I expect the General election to bring a Labour government with either Attlee or Bevin as Prime Minister. If Mother were free, I believe that she would vote Labour, but for my father’s sake I expect that she will vote Conservative. He always has been Conservative and is too old to change. Thank goodness she expects me to vote Labour! My parents-in-law would be horrified and to avoid arguments I shall have to be quite dumb about politics when I see them in the summer.
On 5 July the British electorate voted; the results were delayed three weeks until the 26th, because postal votes had to be gathered from servicemen and women still stationed abroad. Opinion polls which indicated a swing to Labour were generally disregarded, and few doubted that Churchill would gain a majority.
The Oxford student Nina Mabey had decided to join the Labour campaign. Already this vibrant, clever young woman had broken loose from her parents’ right-wing political opinions, which to her seemed inexplicable. Nina felt unaccountably lucky to have got a place at a top-class university. At Somerville College, where she was reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics, she had given the matter much thought. It would be a betrayal, in her view, to use her classy college education to fast-track her way into the privileged ranks. Enthusiastically, she had joined the Labour Club. ‘Our duty was to make sure, when the war ended, that a new, happier, more generous society would take the place of the bad, old, selfish one.’ And this was the line she had argued, vehemently, one evening in 1944, with another undergraduate in her year-group who, she discovered, was steering an opposite course by joining the Conservatives. The young woman in question was chemistry student Margaret Roberts, later to become Margaret Thatcher. She was ‘a plump, neat, solemn girl with rosy cheeks and fairish hair curled flat to her head who spoke as if she had just emerged from an elocution lesson.’ Though Nina felt her idealistic arguments to be compelling, she became aware after a while that they were not getting through. So she changed her tack. How on earth could one want to be associated with such a stuffy institution as the Conservative Club, when the Labour affiliates were all so much more fun? All the really interesting people were members.
Margaret smiled, her pretty china doll’s smile. Of course, she admitted, the Labour Club was, just at the moment, more fashionable – a deadly word that immediately reduced my pretensions – but that, in a way, unintentionally suited her purposes. Unlike me, she was not ‘playing’ at politics. She meant to get into Parliament and there was more chance of being noticed in the Conservative Club just because some of the members were a bit stodgy.
By the summer of 1945, however, Nina and her ‘fashionable’ friends were electioneering in earnest. The Labour manifesto, entitled Let Us Face the Future, promised the Dunkirk spirit applied to the tasks of peace. ‘The whole Labour movement was riding on a high tide of hope.’ Nina and a group of Socialist activists from Oxford decamped to nearby Reading and threw their energies into Ian Mikardo’s campaign. Mikardo, a prominent advocate of nationalisation and the extension of wartime controls, was hoping to overturn a safe Conservative majority of 4,591. The students were swept up in an atmosphere of feverish political excitement. In bus queues, in pubs and on the streets Nina sensed that the British people truly wanted change; from demobbed soldiers to grandmothers with shopping baskets there was, she felt, a groundswell of longing to make the world anew. Things could be different. There could be a free, equal society. They pounded the streets, knocked on endless doors and chanted their new campaign song: ‘Vote, vote, vote for Mr Mikardo, chuck old Churchill in the sea.’ Nina stood on a soapbox on a corner fighting to make her voice heard above the lively crowds. Her feet were blistered and her throat was sore. She lived for a week off marmalade sandwiches.
Naomi Mitchison had mixed feelings when she heard that her husband, Dick, had been offered the Labour candidacy of the marginal seat of Kettering. As a candidate’s wife she worried about looking the part and felt she ought to acquire some stockings. But Naomi was essentially a bohemian and drew the line at wearing a hat. While Dick played by the rules in a city suit, his loyal wife supported him in gipsy glad rags, ‘eating chips out of a bag’. For his sake she canvassed, addressed envelopes and made speeches at street corners, but her heart was not in it. She preferred to spend time in Scotland, dealing with the practical needs of her estate, and writing. ‘They [Dick’s campaign force] don’t recognise that a wife has any job apart from her husband. Nor does Dick really recognise this farm. And never has recognised that writing is anything but a spare time occupation. I suppose the next generation will be better,’ she wrote sadly.
But Naomi had no doubt that this election was of supreme importance. Everyone knew that a massive task lay ahead. Britain was still living with the legacy of the 1930s Depression: child poverty, slums, ill health and the spectre of unemployment loomed. War or no war, nobody had forgotten the Jarrow marches. The country owed £3.5 billion. Bombs had destroyed or damaged three-quarters of a million houses; willow herb flourished in the craters where buildings once stood. The streets were full of rubble, the roads potholed, trees and public spaces neglected. The houses that remained needed paint and repair work. All the park railings had been removed and replaced with barbed wire or nothing at all. Trains were late and slow, and there was little in the shops.
Rations continued short. Nella Last couldn’t get any bacon; people in Barrow were having to wait a fortnight for sugar, and there were queues everywhere, she reported, ‘for wedge-heeled shoes, pork-pies, fish, bread and cakes, tomatoes’. In Slough, Maggie Joy Blunt complained of the unvarying diet on offer where she worked: ‘We have had nothing but cabbage on the menu in the canteen for weeks and weeks.’ Barbara Pym often felt close to tears when, after waiting for ages, buses failed to stop because they were too full. Queues were so bad that she often decided to go without things rather than join them. She was bad-tempered and irritable, and her nerves felt frazzled.
This sensation was shared by many. Mary Wesley remarked on a generalised feeling of ‘sadness and emptiness’. In Paris, the British Ambassador’s wife, Diana Cooper, was ‘overcome … with the miseries, the senselessness, the dreadful loss’. People laughed when the radio comedian Robb Wilton seemed to catch the national mood, joking about his wife’s gloomy reaction to VE-day: ‘Well, there’s nothing to look forward to now. There was always the All Clear.’ But it was close to the truth.
‘By the way, dear, did anything come of all that election fuss we had a fortnight ago?’ To many women, post-war politics seemed irrelevant to their dreary, everyday lives.
The middle-aged novelist Ursula Bloom felt badly let down by the peace, which seemed to have little to offer women of her class and generation. Ursula was fifty-three, and came from solid patriotic middle-class stock. Her parents had gone without to bring her up nicely; she had always supported herself, had maintained standards by sheer hard work and had married a naval commander. At the end of the war she felt she deserved some respite from all the penny-pinching and self-denial, and she yearned to eat steak. ‘I’m growing very old, I thought, because after all I’m not even glad that the war is over. Apathetic.’ Now Ursula couldn’t get decent meat or a live-in maid for love or money. Above all she felt enraged and compromised by the black market in hard-to-obtain goods and luxuries. Even reputedly high-minded pillars of society cheated and lied to get whisky, nylons, eggs, petrol coupons or – her personal undoing – digestive biscuits. ‘I wanted to rejoice,’ she wrote, ‘[but] rejoicing did not come.’
And now, in the summer of 1945, Ursula looked on with mounting disquiet as the election campaign proceeded to confirm all her worst fears. She predicted class warfare, culminating in revolution. The nation seemed to be turning its back on Churchill, though he had saved the world for them. She caught a glimpse of the old man in his car looking pale, weary and shrunken, ‘making the V sign which was already very out of date’. Nobody was cheering him. Fearful for the outcome, Ursula offered her modest services to the Tories but shrank at the sight of the sullen young men from the opposition staking out the Conservative committee rooms. With their shabby clothes and aggressive postures, they seemed hostile and full of rage. ‘ “Vote Labour. Vote Labour. Vote Labour,” they muttered.’ Nevertheless, Ursula set out in a spirit of patriotism. Canvassing round Chelsea, she knocked on the door of a surly woman who told her she wanted a new government because she couldn’t get rusks for her baby. Ursula, a practical woman, brightly suggested that she bake bread crusts in the oven. It had worked for her when her own son was little. But her well-meaning advice was met with black looks.
’Think I have time for that?’ she challenged. ‘Besides, the little bastard isn’t worth it.’ … She was furious with me for being kind. ‘The likes of you have never had to work,’ she said, and went away growling: ‘Vote Labour. Vote Labour. Vote Labour.’
What kind of a fair world was this, reflected Ursula. Surely this was no way to help one another? On another doorstep she tried to explain to an unwelcoming woman that the rich were bled so dry by taxation that they could pay no more. There were no rich people left. Her own earnings, Ursula admitted, were ravaged by the taxman at up to twelve shillings in the pound, which went to support individuals like her. ‘More fool you!’ came the tart rejoinder. It was all utterly discouraging.
In Reading on election results night Ian Mikardo invited all his volunteers and supporters to a party and rewarded them with large quantities of whisky. Everyone got roaring drunk. But Nina Mabey couldn’t be there. It was the height of summer, and in the Shropshire village where her mother was now based she was needed to help with mail deliveries while the postman got his harvest in. And so she heard the news as she pushed her bike up the hills and freewheeled down the vales of the Welsh borderlands, her letters and parcels in her basket. After the three-week wait, the results were announced in a cascade of hourly bulletins. Farmhouses and cottages alike had their windows open; from inside, she could hear the election results being broadcast across the valleys and pastures:
‘Labour gain,’ the wireless said. ‘Labour gain, Labour gain …’
Nina could barely prevent a foolish grin from breaking across her face at every halt on her route, hardly stop herself from asking the farmers and smallholders she met what way they had voted. In any case, this Montgomeryshire constituency was true Liberal heartland, its outstanding MP Clement Davies the leader of his party.
Later that day she got the full picture. It had been a Labour landslide; the party had won an effective majority of 146 seats over all other parties combined. Ian Mikardo had gloriously justified all their efforts in Reading by bringing in a majority of 6,390 over his opponents. The Tories were wiped out. That evening Nina stood in Montgomery’s market square and listened to Clement Davies’s victory speech, in which he generously conceded to Labour’s spectacular win. He spoke passionately of tolerance and goodness, wisdom and hard work. She was immeasurably touched:
Tears of joy ran down my face. It was all coming to pass. The new world, the new day, was dawning.
For Nina, the promise of clear blue skies was being fulfilled.
Naomi Mitchison had come down to Kettering for the count. Dick Mitchison won his seat with an impressive majority, and his wife and supporters were euphoric. As the scale of the Labour victory became apparent, Naomi grabbed a couple of gladioli from a vase on impulse and stuck them in her hair.
Some Tories, like Virginia Graham, tried to see the funny side. ‘We went to the Ivy on Election Night so we all felt a bit giggly,’ she wrote to Joyce Grenfell, now back from the Middle East. But the fun of addressing her chums as ‘Comrade’ suddenly started to fall flat. ‘I suppose that if the tumbrils are coming they make so much less noise than bombs we can’t treat them seriously.’ Others were less amused. The Conservative Member for Barrow-in-Furness had lost by 12,000 votes. Nella Last called in at the WVS; her organiser, Mrs Lord, was distracted with anxiety. No doubt about it, trouble was in store. There would certainly be civil uprising and riots now that the ‘soldier vote’ had trounced the ‘Tory dog’. Mrs Lord’s trembly voice rose in hysteria. Nella gave her two aspirins washed down with a little sherry in a medicine glass.
Ursula Bloom felt full of dread. She feared for her country which was now going to be led by inexperienced politicians. State controls would foster inertia in men’s souls. And what presumption to treat her class as idle parasites. In particular, she felt affronted by the implication that she herself was a lady of leisure. She had worked hard all her life. It enraged her. To her, the ‘new world’ coming into being felt full of loathing and envy, and it was a world which she now had to grow old in.
The revolution had begun.
Politics were swept off the front pages thirteen days after the Attlee victory, when the morning papers carried news of the atomic bomb which had been dropped on Japan from those deceiving blue skies. A ‘RAIN OF RUIN’ had descended from the air, reported The Times on 7 August. Next day the Daily Mail told readers: ‘Hiroshima, Japanese city of 300,000 people, ceased to exist at 9.15 a.m. on Monday morning … While going about its business in the sunshine of a hot summer’s day, it vanished in a huge ball of fire and a cloud of boiling smoke.’ Three ladies from Southampton promptly penned a deeply felt outburst to the editor of The Times:
Sir, – The use of the atomic bomb on Japan must surely appal anybody whose natural feelings have not been entirely blunted by the years of war …
The argument that war can be ended by increasing the destructiveness of weapons has been shown again and again to be fallacious … It is for people everywhere to say: ‘This shall not be.’
‘It’s a new kind of bomb, darling, for the benefit of mankind.’ How could one explain the atom bomb to the next generation? What kind of world were they growing up in?
Their heartfelt letter was published on 10 August, the same day that the paper carried a shorter report of the follow-up attack: ‘ATOM BOMB ON NAGASAKI – SECOND CITY HIT’. The Americans had code-named their two nuclear bombs Fat Man and Little Boy; those who developed these unknowably destructive weapons did not, it seems, consider that they might possess any feminine attributes. On 14 August the Japanese surrendered.
Thelma Ryder felt nothing but relief. The war was really over now, and Bill would be released.
I thought it was wonderful really, because we’d had enough of war. I thought – anything that will end any war, anywhere … After all, they’d asked for it hadn’t they? – you know, what with the terrible things they’d done. I know it was horrible for them, but it had been horrible for us too.
Many felt the same. ‘At last, at long last! The day we have waited for nearly six long years has come round,’ wrote MO diarist Muriel Green. On Wednesday 15 August the flags and bunting came back out again, and happy crowds gathered in front of Buckingham Palace. The royal family made more balcony appearances, and more fireworks were let off down the Mall. There were bonfires, parades and street parties. Children were treated to unforgettable spreads: jellies, hot dogs and cakes. Eileen Jones, a twenty-three-year-old munitions worker in Eccles, Lancashire, celebrated by quitting her job. Her brother Albert had spent three years as a POW in the Far East. After five years of twelve-hour shifts drilling parts for submarines on inadequate pay, she’d had enough. Albert would be freed now, so she walked out, rejoicing.
But the obscene destruction caused by the atom bomb made it hard for many others to replicate the enthusiasm they had felt three months earlier on VE-day. One despairing woman took to her bed for a fortnight, and a respondent to Mass Observation wrote: ‘It casts a gloom over everything, and its terrifying possibilities make nothing worth while doing.’ Ursula Bloom spent the morning of VJ-day rushing round Chelsea trying to buy enough bread to see her household through the holiday period. The shops were all shutting, with no information as to when they would reopen. Ursula was slipping ever deeper into a mood of profound gloom and fear about the future. Would mankind never learn? ‘Fear rose like a flagrant weed in our hearts. This was not victory!’ Nella Last felt the same. ‘Tonight I thought of the dreadful new bomb – we will always live in the shadow of fear now … I’ve a deep sadness over my mind and heart like a shadow, instead of joy the war has ended.’ Frances Partridge, who had felt a quiet elation after VE-day (‘surely it’s only logical that pacifists – of all people – should rejoice in the return to Peace?’) felt sickened when she read an account of the after-effects of the atomic bombs. Victims unhurt at the time of the explosion were falling sick, with bleeding, rotting flesh and nausea, followed inevitably by lingering death. What kind of world was her child growing up in? He was only ten …
I thought with despair of poor Burgo, now so full of zest for life and unaware of its horrors. My own instincts lead me to love life, but as I read on, a desire welled up in me to be dead and out of this hateful, revolting, mad world.
Shortly after the bomb was dropped, the Daily Mail columnist Ann Temple offered a ‘Woman’s-eye view’ of the new atomic age. Reactions to the cataclysm were, she argued, split along the lines of the conventional sexual divide: the male, as a natural hunter and killer, looked on with awe and exultation; the female, at heart a preserver, begetter and guardian of life, felt a deep fear. But women were also endowed with great intelligence and wisdom. Our nation would be short-sighted indeed if it failed to deploy these characteristics. In 1945, women’s increasing empowerment and influence gave only grounds for optimism. Today, the town council; tomorrow, who knows, the United Nations? Yes, women could save the world.
And yet the deeply embedded consensus that women’s proper destiny was wifehood and motherhood continued to block the way ahead. Churchill’s coalition had held out against all attempts by the female labour force to achieve equal pay with men. And when the scale of the British post-war economic calamity became apparent – for with the American lend-lease arrangement terminated the country was running on empty – the political patriarchy was in no mood to embrace sex equality in the workplace or anywhere else.
On VJ-day Lorna Bradey was invited to a celebratory party in her home town of Bedford. A huge bonfire was lit. Lorna gazed into its flames, absorbed by her private memories. Over five years of war, she felt she had lived volumes. 1940: Dunkirk – fleeing from the German invaders down the crowded highways of northern France as bullets sprayed the roof of their ambulance – Messerschmitts dive-bombing the decks of their fleeing vessel; 1941: the tropics, blue bays and jacaranda trees – Tobruk harbour, and the dawn escape across grey, foam-flecked seas back to Alexandria; 1942: Cairo and the desert, the background to a horrifying drama as she saved the life of her friend, bleeding to death after a backstreet abortion; 1943: Italy, the high emotions of the operating theatre at Barletta: amputations, burned-away faces – the parties, the kisses, dancing with Henry on the Adriatic shore; 1944: Mount Vesuvius erupting, Capri …
I seemed to be standing on the outside looking in.
In August 1945 Lorna felt like a spectre at the feast.
For Phyllis Noble the end of the war brought on an overwhelming existential melancholy. For two years she had been working as a meteorological observer in the WAAFs, during which time she became romantically entangled with a handsome navigator named Adam Wild. As ever, Phyllis was at the mercy of her emotions. Her love affairs were in a complete mess. She loved Adam and was sleeping with him, but Adam didn’t love her; meanwhile Philip Horne, a married officer at her Norfolk base, had declared his passion for her: ‘Forget that twerp Wild and marry me – when I’m free, that is!’ At the same time she continued to be haunted by the memory of her relationship with her earlier sweetheart, Andrew Cooper, to whom she had lost her virginity back in 1942. She knew Andrew still held a torch for her. In light of her other failed romances, she now hoped they might be able to pick up where they had left off.
But her hopes for a renewal were to be dashed. After VJ-day they met. It emerged that during the time they had been apart Andrew too had had one or two light-hearted relationships. Whether they were physical ones she did not inquire, but surmised that they probably were. In any case, they were both adults now, what was to be lost by being open about such things? So she told him about Adam Wild.
It was a mistake. Andrew reacted with resentment and dismay. ‘He had remained faithful to me and, in spite of everything, had hoped and believed that I would have remained faithful too.’ Later, she received a letter from him, telling her that she was vain, empty and superficial – a ‘despicable creature’ – and breaking it off for good.
Phyllis now felt utterly drained. The dislocations of war, her turbulent passions and her own lack of a personal compass had beached her. Dispersals of friends and family were upsetting; in 1944 a V1 had hit Lampmead Road, where her beloved grandparents lived. Though the poor old couple survived, their cosy home had been destroyed, aspidistras, ornaments and all: ‘It was the end of an era.’ The damaged remnants were carried on a handcart round to Uncle Len’s, and Gran and Granddad sadly took up residence in a top-floor flat with no garden. Phyllis watched their decline with pity and dismay.
I fell into a mood of trepidation and gloom. I had recurrent nightmares about death, represented by skeletons and threatening people in black, and with so many people moving out of my life I felt bereft and uncertain about the future.
Peace, far from offering a new start, had slammed the door in her face.
Helen Forrester too felt that life had been merciless to her, but on VJ-day she celebrated with the rest. The office workers at the Liverpool Petroleum Board were given a holiday, and Helen joined five of her single girlfriends. They smartened up – as well as they could, in their threadbare dresses and heavy utility shoes – and went out for a day’s fun. Along the way they found a friendly demobbed soldier to join their gang, and someone suggested having their picture taken. The soldier was just for show, unclaimed. Two of the girls were ‘fancy-free’, and two engaged. Another had lost the man she loved. Nobody except Helen was in mourning for two dead lovers. Later, the picture seemed to encapsulate that time when, after enduring six sad, bitter and laborious years, the wartime generation of women stood – wearing bright, forced smiles – on the threshold of a new world.
I smiled for the photographer, but I remember that I wanted to scream at the unfairness of life.
Surrounded as she was, Helen felt angry, lost and dreadfully alone.
*
There were 60,000 British POWs held in Japan, and by the beginning of September 1945 news began to filter through from officials that the camps were being cleared and the prisoners evacuated. By now it was also known that many of them had been brutally treated. Was George Symington one of them? Monica Littleboy’s memories of her tall, slim, handsome boyfriend with his cultured manners and easy charm seemed so long ago; 1939 was a world away. In 1945 Monica was starting a new life; she left the FANYs, went to London, secured a promising job as a programme assistant with the BBC and began dating a confident, attractive man who also worked in radio. Then, one evening in the autumn of 1945, the telephone rang at her digs. The operator put through a call from Southampton Docks. Disbelievingly, she heard the voice of George Symington:
It was as if a life had suddenly come back from the dead … a voice from the past …
George wanted them to meet. Monica now found herself struggling with a mixture of emotions: curiosity, tenderness, unease. Full of misgivings, unprepared, she agreed to see him.
He arrived in a taxi, with kit bag and all … He stood there. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was not the young man I had known. I was stunned. Misshapen, pitted, scarred. Only the eyes were the same.
I looked at this hulk of humanity and my heart bled.
Somewhere inside this wasted frame was the man she loved. Pity flooded her; pity born out of the past, fed by memories. It was a pity that would change the course of her life.
Thelma Ryder was luckier when Bill got back from Japan. She saw and was shocked by the cinema newsreels which showed the men’s condition – ‘It was terrible to see them, you know, their thin bodies and their bones showing through’ – but she was spared the immediate sight of her fiancé, who had been starved and on his release weighed barely seven stone. Bill was restored to health over several months before setting out on the long sea voyage that would take him home, at last, to Plymouth:
He didn’t get home till Christmas 1945.
I went up to the station to meet him. Well they told me the train was coming in on one platform and I was waiting there, but it came in on a different one. And there was me galloping up the platform – and Bill was with his mates. And they said to him ‘Look, there’s Thelma coming – look at her – she’s like a racehorse!’ I couldn’t get there quick enough.
There is wistful affection in Thelma’s voice as she remembers their reunion:
Yes, I recognised him. Even though his hair was cropped short – they had to keep shaving it off because of the lice and all that, you know. And then I got on the lorry that they sent for them and went up to the barracks with him. And then he came home to my place to stay.
But you know I never heard him complain. He’d say, ‘They were only doing their job, like we were.’ Bill was never bitter; he never bore any malice. But I said, ‘Well, we never treated our prisoners like they treated you.’
And he was just lovely … We were married in 1946, and we were happy for twenty-nine years.