Will women ever be satisfied? Will a day come when there is no conflict for us between our ambitions and our nesting instincts? Must choice always mean sacrifice? The women who lived through the decade covered by this book learned the hardest lessons of history about strength, self-determination, sacrifice and freedom. Women had proved to themselves that they possessed equal competence with men. If only to themselves, they had exploded the inequality myth. But after six tumultuous years, the desire to retreat from the fight was often stronger than the urge to press unpalatable claims. They wanted a quiet life.
‘I’m not clever beyond homely things,’ wrote Nella Last in her October 1947 diary, ‘but if I’d not the delight in a well-cooked and -served meal, and well-kept house and my odds and ends of sewing, I would have nothing to make me happy at all now.’ On the 28th she noted:
My husband says sometimes how lucky he is because I’m always ‘serene and calm’ and ‘there’s always home, thank God’.
The dollies and soft toys she made gave her intense joy.
If peace, for women like her, meant sewing stuffed rabbits by a cosy fireside, the spreading of a clean tablecloth and a husband’s gratitude, then surely they had earned it.
*
While Britain did its best to keep warm during the freezing winter of 1947, the Royal Family were visiting South Africa; the newspapers gave their trip exhaustive coverage. Back home, the March thaw brought with it catastrophic floods. Crops, vehicles, pets and ration books were washed away when rivers across the country burst their banks. With the waters lapping around their sitting-room suites and kitchen cupboards, East Enders teamed up ‘in the spirit of the Blitz’ to rescue furniture and belongings from ground floors.
But floods and austerity hadn’t quenched our appetite for hearing about the lifestyles of the ruling class. Mary Grieve, the editor of Woman magazine, knew that her readership was in thrall to the House of Windsor and its doings: ‘In the late forties the devotion to the Throne … built up into a fever of intensity.’ Six years of hardship unleashed pent-up longings for an infusion of glamour into our grey lives. Tiaras, ostrich feathers and a hint of royal romance tapped into the yearnings of a public starved of dreams, and nostalgic for a time when the world had seemed a safer place. Princesses on horseback and kings on thrones represented a fast-disappearing world of order, security and Empire.
On 10 July suggestions of wedding bells became a delicious certainty when Princess Elizabeth’s betrothal to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten was announced by the Palace. ‘Enthusiasm and affection boiled over,’ wrote Mary Grieve. ‘In 1947 the country needed something to rejoice about,’ and next day thousands waited all afternoon outside Buckingham Palace for the young couple to emerge on to the balcony.
Clement Attlee’s post-war government had embarked on an ambitious programme of reconstruction, social welfare and redistribution. There was no doubt in the minds of either the middle classes or the rich that their comforts were being eroded not just by strikes, power cuts and burst pipes, but by Labour’s fiscal policies, designed to penalise the wealthy at rates of up to 95 per cent. ‘The rich could not pay more, because with the present taxation no rich were left,’ moaned Ursula Bloom.
But who would have guessed that the upper classes were feeling the pinch? In 1947, when Buckingham Palace announced that presentations were to be revived after the wartime suspension, no fewer than 20,000 debutantes were awaiting the summons to curtsey to their Majesties. Frances Campbell-Preston’s family held an austerity dance for her sister Laura. Her father got in cider cup from the local pub landlord (‘I told him to put in very little gin’), someone, somehow, found enough sugar to whip up cakes, and armfuls of flowers were brought in from the garden. Though guests came in dresses run up from muslin curtains it was a huge success, with Princess Elizabeth herself leading the conga.
‘The war certainly taught us to improvise,’ recalled Barbara Cartland in her memoir The Years of Opportunity. Her own experience in recycling wedding dresses for Service brides served her well when her daughter Raine was due to be presented at Court in spring 1947. Typically, she managed to lay hands on a vintage Molyneux frock for this occasion. But Raine had a whole season of balls ahead of her, and Barbara was determined that her daughter should star. Undeterred by the impossibility of buying large quantities of fabric in Britain, Barbara holidayed in Switzerland ahead of the Queen Charlotte Ball and managed to bring back several bolts of white tulle, which she had made up into a spectacular full-skirted gown in the style of the French Empress Eugénie. A blue taffeta dress, bought for £3 from a school friend and embellished by her mother with a deep hem of velvet and off-coupon artificial flowers, also earned her rapturous compliments.
Indeed, anyone who had hoped that the war would, overnight, level out our caste system had not reckoned with those centuries of entrenched privilege. Memories of desert warfare, death camps and troop ships were banished by nurses and FANYs alike; there were those among them who retreated to the shires, changed each evening into low-cut dresses and jewels, to be waited on by liveried footmen. ‘Allowing for the general impoverishment,’ commented George Orwell in 1946, ‘the upper classes are still living their accustomed life.’
*
Britain had voted in a Labour government, but it seemed, by tacit consensus, that even under socialism the rich man – and woman – would remain in her castle, the poor woman at her kitchen sink. After such a war, who wanted revolution? In 1948 the sociologist Pearl Jephcott interviewed a sample of young, single, northern, working-class girls about their aspirations:
Q. Do you think a lot about any one thing today?
A. Yes, getting married.
Jephcott’s conclusions were unedifying:
The majority regard 23 or 24 as zero hour as far as matrimony is concerned …
Practically every girl says that she will want to give up her job when she gets married.
On the whole work appears to call forth no strong emotions, only a feeling of relief at the end of the day, when you are rid of it and free to do what you like … They seem to have few ambitions which relate to their work.
Jephcott’s study concluded that what changes there were were subtle and small. Anyone who had expected, or feared, that the war would ignite a feminist revolution could be comforted by the thought that the nation’s women were not about to mount the barricades.
Almost two years after its end, Nella Last began to assess what ‘coming through’ the war meant for women like her. She would have agreed with Pearl Jephcott that what changes there were were modest ones. For example, it was now more acceptable for women to brave the world on their own. Nella thought back to when her old Aunt Sarah, who had been widowed, had decided she wanted to live alone and refused a home with her relatives. There had been amazed shock in the family – it was just unthinkable, in those days, for a woman to set herself up independently. Today, such an attitude seemed archaic. ‘Everyone asks more of life and that they should be let to work out things for themselves.’
In May 1947, in fulfilment of her own words, Nella planned a holiday – by herself. She would visit her son and daughter-in-law in Northern Ireland. Her husband would not be left to fend alone though; Aunt Eliza would cook Will Last’s lunches while she was away and feed the cat. Will refused to make any contribution towards her jaunt, so Nella applied for a travel permit and withdrew £10 from her bank. The journey involved a train to Liverpool, connection to Speke airport, and a flight – her first – to Belfast.
My extra holiday is my own affair. When I felt the surge of joy run through my veins, I thought surprisedly that I’m not as old as I thought, that it’s rather the monotony of my life that tires and ages me.
Afterwards ‘I couldn’t have had a better break,’ was the verdict.
Monotony, austerity and stewed whalemeat continued to be everyday realities in 1947, but a nation of war-weary women had begun to feel, like Nella Last, that they had earned a little pleasure. The continued threat of economic strictures hung over the nation, but after six years of nervous tension, trauma and hardship it was time to slow down, to step off the treadmill. In compensation for the brutal winter, the summer of 1947 was long and hot, a time conducive to leisure and relaxation.
I am having a deliberately, deliciously idle afternoon on my bed. Weather is perfect; wonderful, brilliant, golden days. Why can’t our summers always be like this?
wrote Maggie Joy Blunt on 13 August. And on the 17th:
‘The crisis – where is the crisis?’ asks the Observer. ‘With Parliament dispersed, Ministers going on holiday – and the country bathed in a drowse of August sunshine …’ Why should I worry about a crisis?
On a sunny August day all Maggie – and thousands like her – wanted was to be able to pause, forget and, as far as possible, bring back those happy remembered days before the bombs and sirens shattered their peace for ever.
Legislation had been introduced entitling workers to an annual paid holiday, and most of them took it that year in Britain, whether hiking in the fells or staying in a Blackpool boarding house, or at a Pontin’s, Warners or Butlins holiday camp in the popular resorts of Skegness, Pwllheli or Hayling Island. The holiday-camp phenomenon was huge. One young working girl who went with her family to a Warners camp at this time recalled the mounting excitement as the family journeyed from Leicester, via Victoria Station (crammed with holiday-makers heading south) to Hayling Island. For this fifteen-year-old every detail remained impressed on her memory, from the orderly flower-beds, to the bottle-green chalets with their white window-frames, to the cheery waitresses. After long, happy days on the beach, you could take part in obstacle races, donkey derbys, fancy-dress and knobbly-knees competitions or the drag contest held on ‘Topsy Turvy night’ – it was all ‘clean fun’. The evening’s entertainment ended with the singing of ‘Goodnight Campers’ to the tune of ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’. ‘We had not had so much fun for years.’
At the other end of the social scale Glyndebourne, the originator (in 1934) of the ‘country-house opera’, was back in production by the summer of 1947 after a wartime interval when its stately interiors were made over to evacuees. Now Victoria Station also offered the spectacle – at 2.45 in the afternoon – of a host of opera-lovers boarding the Eastbourne train in full-length evening dress and mink stoles rescued from their wartime mothballs. The hit of the season was the lustrous contralto Kathleen Ferrier, in Grecian tunic and bay leaves, singing the title role in Gluck’s Orfeo. Audiences were offered a special cocktail named after her, a hideous-sounding concoction of crème de menthe, brandy and lime juice. All was not austerity.
And there were other signs of a returning light-heartedness, even at this time of generalised hardship. On 28 August the Daily Graphic sent its female staff out on an assignment headlined ‘WOMEN WITH THEIR EYES OPEN’, to report on whatever they saw that raised their spirits:
– the nonchalant way people eat peaches at five for a shilling as if they had never been a luxury …
– a glimpse of the screen star Margot Grahame wearing earrings ornamented with her initials …
– the Oxford-street fashion parade of gay summer dresses and smart shoes that was a triumph over austerity. Nearly all the girls had longer skirts – about two inches below the knee. Very attractive.
*
Two whole inches below the knee? Could it be that those fabric-skimping, miserly, military, masculine, so-called styles which had defeminised so many fashion-conscious women were finally to be consigned to history?
The New Look, which filtered gradually across to these shores in 1947, was the vision of fashion designer Christian Dior – a man whose astute commercial instincts were equalled only by his romanticism and intuitive understanding of the 1940s Zeitgeist. On 12 February 1947, in the midst of the bleakest winter in living memory, Dior’s new couture house released a collection featuring sumptuously billowing skirts swirling below waspy waists, with curved shoulders, fluttering bows and generous bosoms, requiring up to 40 metres of material to create. Dior, a keen gardener all his life, named his new collection ‘Corolle’, a botanical term which means the crown of petals encircling a flower’s centre. His dream was nothing less than the reinvention of womankind as flowers in bloom: Eden regained. After six years of khaki battledress, masculine overalls, hair above the collar, queue misery and utility furniture, nothing could have tapped more successfully into women’s deepest longings for a return to femininity.
But over the summer and autumn of 1947, as skirts crept inexorably longer, alarm mounted. Should we refuse to manufacture the New Look on the grounds that it was a shameful waste of fabric and against the national interest, as President of the Board of Trade Sir Stafford Cripps advocated, or would that – as Anne Scott-James, editor of Harper’s Bazaar insisted – be export suicide? That October, clothing coupons were cut to four a month. ‘Much as the average woman in this country may want to follow present-day fashions, it is quite impossible for her to do so,’ wrote one lady to The Times.
Feeling like top dog in Dior’s New Look. Punch, 1948.
Whether or not women could adopt the look, the question remained as to whether they should. For feminists, the New Look seemed to be a visible intent to turn the clock back on emancipation. The war had offered women so many freedoms; wearing uniform had given them pride and independence. So what did Monsieur Dior think he was doing by padding out their bosoms, strangling their waists and sending them tottering out into the streets hampered by such oceans of surging fabric that they could barely walk, let alone run for a bus or climb aboard a train? He was out of touch with the modern world, claimed MP Mabel Ridealgh: ‘Women today are taking a larger part in the happenings of the world and the New Look is too reminiscent of a caged bird’s attitude.’
Mrs Ridealgh had a point. Dior was in love with La Belle Epoque, and there is an argument that the ‘New’ Look was, in reality, unashamedly nostalgic and backward-looking; of a piece, in fact, with the submissive, Brief Encounter mentality which so gripped British womanhood at that time.* For thousands of harassed, dowdy women who had spent blacked-out evenings reading the popular romances of Georgette Heyer, the New Look spoke of a more gracious time: a bygone age when waists were tiny and frocks were floaty, when men helped tender damsels in and out of carriages. ‘Oh yes, I’d have liked to have been born in the age when they wore crinolines … so lovely,’ sighs Thelma Rendle (née Ryder). The 1940s were discovering a ‘New’, ‘Old’ Look: one which had nothing to do with square-bashing or esprit de corps, and everything to do with romanticism and femininity. It was unequivocally gorgeous – and Britain’s women loved it.
Shirley Goodhart was one. Jack had found work in Leeds; to her joy she had become pregnant in the spring of 1947 and gave birth to a baby girl in January 1948. As soon as she was up and about, and relieved to be finally out of smocks, she wheeled the pram down into Leeds city centre to look for ‘new-style clothes’. She was disappointed to find the fuller-skirted models weren’t yet available – ‘most shops still selling off old styles’. But, undaunted, she bought fabric and a cheap paper pattern inspired by Dior and got out her scissors.
Helen is 4 weeks old today. Found time to continue making my new dress, and put it all together ready for trying on. I thought that it was supposed to be ‘new length’ but I find that I shall have to put a false hem in order to make it long enough.
With her figure back in trim, Shirley was in the forefront when the New Look hit the Leeds shops in April:
April 23rd
I’ve bought a new suit; the third ‘new style’ item in my wardrobe. There is an increasing minority of ‘new style’ among the women in Leeds.
The controversy surrounding the New Look was a miniature version of the greater debate, which would not die down, around the place of women in post-war Britain. Fashion, or freedom? Wives, or career women? Flowers, or feminists? But the New Look’s brief sway was, for those who wore it and loved it, an uplifting interlude. It was a love affair with hope, and a covenant from the Great God Fashion that, though food and fuel were short, and though ice and floods might engulf the nation, a full feminine skirt promised that all might still be well with the world.
The hot summer of 1947, followed by an equally glorious (for some) royal wedding, made the belt-tightening and gloom of that year a little more bearable. Attlee’s government needed all the help it could get that August, when – owing to an export–import gap now estimated at £600 million – it was forced to announce that the country was back to a wartime economy, that tea and meat rations were to be cut, pleasure motoring would be abolished, and foreign travel suspended. The Empire, too, was falling victim to financial retrenchments. On 15 August 1947 the independence of India – the ‘jewel in the crown’ – was made effective. International anxieties resurfaced as the sinister terminology of the Cold War gained currency. Britain was weak and poor, its ancient might overshadowed by new powers.
Anything that helped boost morale was welcome: a wonderful exhibition of French tapestries at the Victoria and Albert Museum was a highlight of the year for art-lovers. Ealing Studios started production of a run of heart-warming comedies, beginning with Hue and Cry, filmed on location in bomb-scarred London. Cambridge won the Boat Race and finally admitted women to full membership of the University. The shops were starting to stock expensive luxury goods again: artificial flowers, handbags and cosmetics.
But sometimes it was hard to endure the de-energising diet. Shirley Goodhart found herself seized by longings for ‘large helpings of meat’, while poor Maggie Joy Blunt wrote a frenzied, mouth-watering paean to her favourite dishes of hallowed memory:
Oh, those pre-war days! … Foie gras with whipped cream & hard-boiled egg set in aspic with green peas – Pineapple cream made with real fruit – strawberry meringue pudding … Veal cutlets rolled in beaten egg & grated cheese & grilled … Asparagus … I’m dribbling now.
In September you could still bathe in the sea, and October saw a beautiful Indian summer – which perhaps compensated for the burdensome cut in the bacon ration, the railway ticket price rise, the selling of Government gold reserves to ease the debt and the worrying news that India and Pakistan were now at war.
20 November 1947 was overcast and damp. The romantic novelist Miss Florence Speed was glad, however, that it didn’t rain. She and her sister Mabel listened on the wireless to the wedding ceremony of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten and, along with millions of listeners worldwide, heard the pair make their vows before the altar of Westminster Abbey.
The whole thing was very moving. Mabel said ‘Why do these things always bring tears to our eyes?’
Why? But it did …
At dinner we had a little sherry to drink the health of bride & groom.
On that grey day, Britain’s royal nuptials were a pageant of colour and hope, and a reminder that wars might come and go, but the magnificent traditions that made Britain great hadn’t changed. Dabbing their eyes, the two spinsters Florence and Mabel Speed felt uplifted and moved beyond expression. Princess Elizabeth’s big day locked down a prototype of aspirational post-war womanhood: follow my example, the occasion seemed to say, and catch your Prince.
But average, imperfect young women like Doffy Brewer were simply outclassed. For five years Doffy had done her bit training gunners in the ATS, playing her part in the important defences against the V1 and V2 rockets. After demob in 1945 it was back to the family home at Romford, and teaching. She was twenty-seven.
I was very ordinary, not particularly pretty, terribly shy – particularly with boys – and not grown-up enough. I remember reading a letter in a magazine – this girl was upset because she couldn’t get a boyfriend, and the agony aunt’s reply was: ‘Girls are like cherries: some ripen in June, some in July, some don’t ripen till October. Be patient with yourself.’ And I thought, ‘That’s me.’
But Doffy’s philosophy had to compete with her mother’s tireless attempts to get her hitched.
My mother had three men that she’d lined up for me. Oh yes, she was no slouch, my mother!
The first was Ken. Poor old Ken. He took me out to dinner in the West End, and I ordered a salad, thinking I would appear dainty. But he was famished, so he ordered a meat pudding. And this marvellous vast salad arrived, alongside this minuscule meat pudding. Well, I wanted to laugh, but Ken was very solemn. He didn’t laugh about it at all. So I never went out with him again.
That was one off my mother’s list.
And then there was a chap who was on our staff at school. He was a bit creepy and pompous. He always seemed to have ‘wise’ words. I went into his classroom one day and found his ten-year-olds doing an old-fashioned writing lesson. He had them all copying these lines from the blackboard: ‘Something Attempted – Something Done – Has Earned A Night’s Repose.’ Oh dear! Well, I couldn’t marry a man like that, could I?
And unfortunately the other one was married already, and I would never have married a divorced man, I just couldn’t do it. I really couldn’t.
Doffy’s scruples, patience, and sense of the ridiculous were to keep her single for another twelve years. John Kerr – ‘the nicest man I’ve ever met’ – did not come into her life until 1959.
*
After losing two fiancés in the war, Helen Forrester had also resigned herself to a single future. Soon after the war ended, she got a job with the Metal Box Company. The packaging industry gave her career prospects, reasonable pay and a responsible, confidence-boosting position: it was ‘a fascinating world for a woman to be in’. But with no expectation of marriage she felt an underlying hopelessness.
However, in 1948 Helen met the man who would become her husband: an Indian theoretical physicist named Avadh Bhatia. She did not write a memoir about this life-changing event. But in 1959 she published a novel entitled Thursday’s Child, which opens with the heroine, Peggie, breaking down in tears on hearing that her fiancé, Barney, has been killed:
I was stupefied … It was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés …
‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I shouted in my agony.
Helen’s son, Robert Bhatia, offers a caution about his mother’s first novel. ‘She always swore that it was not autobiographical.’ Nevertheless, he notes that she clearly drew on her relationship with Avadh Bhatia and his home country in writing Thursday’s Child.
‘Peggie’ meets ‘Ajit Singh’ at a Liverpool club set up to help the city’s numerous immigrants integrate with the locals. They drink tea together:
I took a good look at him. He was dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy, grey trousers; his white shirt made his skin look very dark but his features were clear cut and delicate; both in expression and outline his face reminded me of a Saint in an old Italian painting.
Ajit (like Avadh) is in Liverpool to study. Avadh, who came from a high-caste, privileged, traditional Indian background, had already received an advanced degree from the University of Allahabad and was now in England writing a thesis for his doctorate. In the novel their relationship develops slowly. Ajit invites Peggie to meet other members of the Indian community; in return he is asked back to the family home, though her broken heart is not yet mended. But the more time they spend together, the more Peggie grows to like and respect him. As a Hindu, he teaches her about Shiva, the destroyer, and Brahma, who creates. ‘So life is born anew and nothing is wasted.’ One winter’s day they walk out of the city by the sea wall, and eat sandwiches together in a sheltered hollow of the dunes. Gradually she confides in him and tells him of her past griefs. Ajit listens, then takes her hand:
‘Let me marry you. Let me show you what life and love can really be.’
I started up as if to run away, but he would not let go of my hand.
‘Don’t go away. Hear me to the end.’
I looked down at him and was astonished at the beauty which flooded his face; it was transfigured … I knew I was seeing something rare …
‘I have loved you from the first day I saw you …’
Helen Forrester’s marriage to Avadh Bhatia was a deliverance. After the war the savour had gone out of Liverpool and all it stood for. As a choice of mate Avadh couldn’t have been more unconventional, nor represented more of an escape from the sorrowful stranglehold of her past.
Soon after their marriage in Britain, the couple started a new life in Ahmadabad, the largest city in Gujarat, on the edge of the desert. In Thursday’s Child Helen Forrester evokes the shock of arrival amid the deafening bustle of streets, thronged with children and beggars, tongas, bicycles, camels and cars. Temple bells clanged and radios blared. In India she learned to bargain for everything, she learned to distinguish the rank smell of a jackal, to wear a sari and to give orders to the servants. She tells of the culture shock entailed in adapting to her new in-laws, and how she felt ‘pummelled by new experiences’. There was the vice-like heat to acclimatise to, and a landscape of cactus and sand. Monkeys lived in the mango trees, and an incessant creak came from the tethered ox whose exertions drew water from the well. She became accustomed to the sight of snakes, scorpions and locusts, and she caught dysentery. ‘Although I hardly realised it at the time, I was slowly becoming part of India. Each friend I made, each custom I learned to understand and tolerate, was a thread which bound me closer to her and made me part of her multicoloured pattern.’ Helen’s lifelong marriage to Avadh remained loving and supportive, based on profound communication. ‘How much I owe him for making my life anew,’ she wrote. ‘My cup runneth over.’ But, humbled after so many years of unhappiness, she never questioned Avadh’s precedence. ‘They always lived where his work took him,’ says their son. Eventually they moved to Canada; at the high point of his career Dr Bhatia was director of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Alberta. ‘My mother was a devoted faculty wife. And when she began to write, she did so in the last half-hour of the day, when other duties were done.’
Today, Robert Bhatia remains proud of Helen’s capacity to transcend the misery and hardships of her early life:
She got away from her terrible previous environment completely. But emotionally she never completely left it. She never truly got over losing two fiancés. Was she happy? How can I answer that? There was always a twinge of sadness and bitterness for much of her life. I think she was angry at the cards life had dealt her, and after all that she had experienced she sometimes had trouble relating to people who had not been through the war.
Life had beaten her down, but she turned herself around. Her secret was her courage, and her maturity. She was talented, and yes, truly, she was a competent, strong, and successful person.*
*
The idea of marriage, whether within or outside her social tribe, was still problematical for Phyllis Noble. Again and again she had been caught up by her passions, but her greatest fear was that passion was a trap. She would end up like her mother, whose life – cumbered with shopping, washing and meals – had hit a cul-de-sac. But could she envisage a future without motherhood? In the autumn of 1947, when she embarked on her course of study to become an almoner – or hospital social worker – she was twenty-five years old. Her father had begun to mutter that she would soon be on the shelf. But Phyllis knew that there was time enough.
Hospital social work was a small profession, but Phyllis had found herself on the end of a government-backed recruitment drive. Dwindling numbers of almoners needed to be made good, and many patients wounded in the war were in dire need of social rehabilitation. Once the new National Health Service came into being – scheduled for summer 1948 – the need would be all the greater. Phyllis was in at the beginning of a Labour-initiated sea-change in social services. The post-war world would see the obsolescence of the WVS-style Lady Bountiful, with her easy authority and ‘duchess touch’, to be replaced by full-scale professionalisation of the sector. Phyllis would be attending an ‘emergency’ course lasting just one year.
For Phyllis 1947–8 was a year of profound intellectual release; of reading, self-examination and mental discovery:
Sleep considerably delayed last night [she wrote in October 1947] by mental excitement consequent on Prof. Marshall’s lecture on ‘Social Structure’.
Psychology lectures awoke unprecedented questions in her brain. She explored the agnostic writings of Winwood Reade* and read My Apprenticeship by Beatrice Webb. The Webbs’ extraordinary partnership – intellectual, ascetic, though childless – inspired her. Marriage could surely be something higher and better than slavery dressed up as sexual attraction. Sidney Webb was unprepossessing, but he was brilliant. ‘It is only the head that I am marrying,’ Beatrice had written. Together, they were guided by their socialist mission and their avowed aim to reduce the sum of human suffering; there was no hint of servitude or dependency in the Webbs’ relationship, which proved that there could be such a thing as a marriage of minds:
[They] made me realise that there could be perhaps a form of marriage which was a beginning and not, as I had always feared, the end of life.
Sometimes, Phyllis’s head was so busy she needed time to process her thoughts and find a perspective. She walked one November evening across London Bridge and crossed the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral. Six years earlier the same cityscape would have resounded to the detonations of high explosive and the ear-splitting rattle of anti-aircraft fire. The sky would have been alight with apocalyptic flames and criss-crossed with searchlights, with the Thames warehouses a blinding furnace, presenting a scene of terror as people scurried for shelter. Now the serene vision of a lofty plane tree silhouetted against the evening sky caused Phyllis to catch her breath – ‘[making] me gasp for the dear dead spirit’. Inside the cathedral an organist practised, the echoing chords enhancing the tranquillity:
I could be calmed by the reflection of man’s transiency as an individual; yet power as a stream – represented, perhaps, by this imposing, strong, building. The sound of trains rumbled outside & pressed in. It was inevitably to minimise one’s own petty affairs, by reflecting how the scenery around those walls must have changed, & changed again, before reaching the present confused, noisy & dirty pass.
Life, it still seemed to Phyllis, was a mess.
As far as her own petty affairs were concerned, confusion prevailed; her new-found philosophy had not yet taken root. At a New Year’s gathering at the Strand Palace Hotel she was partnered with a charming married man who – it was explained – was on his own because his wife was expecting a child. In the early hours he burst into Phyllis’s bedroom, where, after some kerfuffle, she gave in to his energetic persuasion. Escaping from the hotel the next morning was potentially deeply shaming – ‘in the late 1940s adultery (or, in my case, fornication) in a hotel room was not taken lightly’ – but her seducer managed things with the utmost aplomb. It was clear he was a practised cheat.
Dirt and poverty were also now part of Phyllis’s everyday experience. In January 1948 she was despatched to Deptford to do field-work with the Family Welfare Association. On the 13th she recorded her first home visit to an Irish slum family in her journal. ‘To think,’ she wrote, ‘[that] such squalor can still exist!’
Surely I can never forget that smoke-filled room: the mouldy cabbage in the corner, the bowl with its dirty water, the toddler with transparent shirt and no shoes on the bare boards. And it will be some while, certainly, before I forget the shock of horror on hearing – ‘There’s another behind you’ – turning to see on the springs of the bed amongst the rags, that tiny 1 month old mite …
We are still suffering from the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Equally true that two major wars have aggravated a vast problem …
At present, I feel only the scratching against a stone!
The next two months were to bring her up against a Dickensian London she had barely imagined, of hunger and ignorance, hostels and down-and-outs. The experience would shape her political convictions and her life’s work. In March, she made an investigative visit to a homeless men’s hostel in Kennington. One of the supervisors, a good-humoured, enthusiastic and studious young man, showed her around, and they got into conversation about society and its problems. He was impressively eloquent, well read and well informed. That evening she wrote in her diary:
Peter Willmott was extremely interesting. A person I should very much like to know!
Peter, it turned out, was as attracted to Phyllis as she was to him.
That spring of 1948, things moved very fast. Phyllis agrees now that it was unlike any of her previous relationships. From their first meeting she felt instinctively that this was someone she could be happy with. ‘It was a coup de foudre.’ That same day Peter Willmott had confided to a friend, ‘I have met the girl I want to marry.’ Their relationship progressed at breakneck tempo, and inevitably there were stumbles. Peter talked Phyllis into attending Mass at Brompton Oratory, though they were both staunch agnostics; it would be a cultural experience, he explained. But when she turned up in green slacks he expressed disapproval. Another time he objected because she licked her knife. Just how progressive was he, she wondered furiously. Was this middle-class young man, despite his professed impartiality and freedom from prejudice, just as class-bound and sexist as the rest of them? ‘But the magnetic spell between us quickly drew us together again. Being apart was too painful.’
Phyllis’s family were soon pestering to see ‘the latest’, but for as long as possible she delayed taking Peter back to Lee for a Sunday roast dinner to meet them. What would her lover make of their unintellectual conversation, their ramshackle working-class home, the steamy little kitchen festooned with drying underwear? Her mum would be sweating over the range, piling everyone’s plates high with mashed potatoes and greens (inevitably followed by a boiled suet pudding). Her dad would be a bit too blustery after a few pints in the local. For despite Phyllis’s declared lack of class bias, there was still shame attached to her proletarian origins. Her worries were soon allayed by Peter’s affectionate reaction. ‘I really like the way you are with your family. And they are obviously so fond of you.’
Every spare hour outside work Phyllis now spent with Peter Willmott. His shabby flat over the hostel in Kennington was a romantic refuge from petit-bourgeois domesticity. They would eat bread and cheese sitting on the worn rug in front of the spluttering gas fire, then make love in Peter’s institutional metal bed. He rarely changed the sheets, but to her eyes it was all ‘admirably carefree and Bohemian’. But Phyllis was still in a minority in feeling entitled to a sex life before marriage; the prevalent British view, as revealed in a survey made by Mass Observation in 1949, was still small-c conservative; few people thought moral standards were improving at this time, extra-marital relationships were frowned upon, and a majority were against pre-marital sex.
In May Phyllis went to St Thomas’s Hospital to finish her training as a student almoner in Casualty. Here her job was to discuss her patients’ worries. Did they need referrals? Did they have domestic, financial, nutritional or mental problems? She was also expected to explain to each patient that the hospital depended on voluntary contributions, reinforcing the point by rattling the little tin box on her desk and asking for a donation to hospital funds. ‘I seldom managed this part of the interview without embarrassment on my side, and too often on that of the patients, whose worn clothes and worried faces showed clearly enough how little they could afford.’
On 5 July 1948 all that ended. As the date approached for the birth of the National Health Service, there was great joy and excitement in Casualty. Shortly before the appointed day, Phyllis and her colleagues threw out the little tin boxes. ‘It was the symbolic new beginning of a health service that was intended to be free for all.’
For many who had worked and campaigned for a better post-war Britain, the National Health Service represented the fulfilment of all that they had dreamed of, the dawning of ‘a new world, a new day.’
On Day One a Leeds woman went straight out to the pub to celebrate with her friends. Her mother, as she recollected, was at the dentist’s surgery on that momentous morning, waiting to have her teeth pulled and replaced with dentures; one of her sisters was first in line at the optician’s for new NHS spectacles, while the other, who had been made to pay a midwife 12s 6d to have her first baby – (‘it was rather bad … no gas and air’) – rejoiced to have her second, easy delivery for nothing: ‘She thought it was absolutely wonderful, because besides having a free midwife, she had a nurse came in every day … bathed the baby, showed her how to look after it … ’. In Manchester another woman shopped her way round the services, starting out with a doctor’s prescription, then on for an eye test, followed by a visit to the chiropodist and back to the doctor’s again for a hearing test, before suggesting that she might as well call in on the undertaker’s on her way home …
Women had always been on the sharp end when it came to dealing with everything from coughs and sneezes, to births, deaths, toothache and chickenpox, and the National Health Service had an immediate impact on them. For years their own ailments had been neglected as too expensive to treat. A female doctor working in general practice in a poor district was overwhelmed by the difference she was able to make in the first six months of the new service, as women flooded in with chronic conditions like hyperthyroidism or varicose ulcers. They had lived all their lives stoically accepting that ‘you never go to a doctor because it’s always far too expensive’. Now they could, and did. ‘Suddenly they could be treated.’ Other health professionals, like nurses, were uplifted beyond measure by the overnight availability of elementary supplies: ‘Suddenly you’d got it all, this gorgeous soft cotton wool, beautiful clean bandages … we talked about it for weeks afterwards.’ Patients were delighted by the contrast. Domestic servant Margaret Powell had first been hospitalised in 1944 and then again in 1948; her first experience, with a gastric ulcer, had been nasty, scary and humiliating. The food and amenities were ‘deplorable’, the lack of privacy – with public bedpan sessions, and one toilet roll between four – was distressing. When she returned after July 1948 with breast cancer, ‘what a change I found’:
You were treated as though you mattered. Even the waiting room was different. No dark green paint, whitewash and wooden benches. There were separate chairs with modern magazines.
For a week she was on the ward:
And again what a difference I saw … The bed that I’d had before was like lying on the pebbles on Brighton beach … But now I had a rubber mattress. I felt as though I could have lain there forever.
And the food was beautiful.
Margaret felt she was in a luxury hotel. Each bed had its own curtains, the meals were many and various, served on brightly coloured trays. There were even fish knives.
*
Welfare for women was, at last, becoming a reality. Family Allowances took effect from 1946. By 1948 the Family Planning Association had sixty-five clinics, and by the following year new ones were opening at a rate of five weekly. National Maternity Services accompanied the inauguration of the NHS. Recommendations for day nurseries, baby-sitting facilities and home helps were in the pipeline. There would be community centres, communal laundries and restaurants. The Labour government took every opportunity to congratulate itself on the rosy cheeks and improved height and weight of thousands of post-war boom babies; in these respects the good intentions of ministers and social reformers to improve the lot of women seemed to be bearing fruit: the harvest of peace was delivering undreamed-of progress and benefits, especially to poor working-class women.
The later 1940s also offered glimpses into an even more rewarding future: one in which the housewife might cease to be a beast of burden, lay down her load and – with time on her hands – turn, like men, to careers and causes. Social involvement for women meant reading intelligently, attending meetings and lectures, playing as full a part as they could. For women to remain at home was insufficient today. In his essay ‘Woman’s Place’ William Emrys Williams,* director of the Bureau of Current Affairs, wrote:
She has the same responsibilities as men.
The war has precipitated the answer.
The new buzz-phrase was ‘post-war participation’, and it was actually beginning to look achievable.
Was it possible that the long hours spent queuing outside individual shops were numbered? In January 1947 the Daily Express ran an enticing piece entitled ‘QUEUES: This may be the answer’. The illustration showed a stylish young woman pushing a wheeled double-decker trolley; the article explained how she would do her shopping in a new form of ‘help-yourself market’, proceeding through a one-way turnstile into aisles full of shelves, from which she would fill her trolley with tins and packages, before submitting the contents to a cashier who would ring them up on a register and pass them for packing to an attendant. The supermarket – American-style – was born. ‘The women there like it – and I think shoppers here would too.’ By the end of that year ten such stores had opened in Britain.
What could be done about the queues? ‘We may have to adopt the American help-yourself idea,’ suggested the Daily Express.
And was it possible that the time spent on housework might finally be reduced? Most housewives at this time still spent up to eleven hours a day on their tasks. But labour-saving gadgetry was starting to appear on the market: the twin-tub, the Frigidaire and the electric toaster. Since the 1946 ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition Mrs Post-war had had her heart set on such futuristic delights. Shirley Goodhart was one young wife who purchased a Hoover vacuum cleaner in 1949: ‘Such a joy to get our bedroom carpet clean without the effort of lying under the bed with a handbrush.’ And, judging by the deluge of requests for post-war career advice to women’s magazines, women did indeed have ambitions that extended beyond keeping their homes immaculate:
I shall soon be leaving school and I would like to work in a film studio.
I am terribly anxious to get a job abroad as my divorce has just come through and I want to get right away from all the unhappiness connected with my past life.
But, despite the recommendations of a Royal Commission report, equal pay was still being sidelined. Noisy equal-pay activists were regarded as a sectional minority, and the Labour Party felt able to risk losing their vote. In 1948 the patriarchy still found it too hard to accept that women might have the same skills, intellect and competence as men; nor could they contemplate any erosion of their power base.
Since the age of sixteen Phyllis Noble had dreamed of a life different to that of her mother. Education had shown her the way. Books and ideas seemed to promise an abundant harvest, a life of the mind, and, after the war, she had entered a profession where her skills were needed and appreciated. The road lay open. But the claims of love were immediate and pressing.
On 31 July 1948 Phyllis Noble’s hopes of a modern marriage were, to the limits that she could have hoped for, fulfilled. Peter Willmott had been offered a place to study Economics and Politics at Ruskin College, Oxford, and, faced with enforced separation, they decided to get married straight away. Having agreed, Phyllis was jittery. ‘I suppose if it doesn’t work out we can always get a divorce,’ she said, but Peter soberly discouraged any flippancy on the matter. Her mother panicked at the spectacle of Phyllis throwing herself away on a penniless student. ‘He’s got nothing,’ she wailed. Mrs Noble was made so distraught by her daughter’s plans for a no-frills wedding with no guests and no reception that Phyllis eventually caved in and invited her family to see them being married by Donald Soper, the famous Methodist minister, at Kingsway Hall. To her relief, Peter’s family were dissuaded from making the journey. On the day, she put on her best interview suit – green gaberdine – teamed with a pink felt hat and dainty veil and caught the bus to Holborn. The Nobles were there in force; but Peter, exhausted from doing night duty at the hostel, was late. Their two witnesses arrived shortly afterwards, and without further ado the ceremony was under way. When it was all over the company repaired to the pub for a cursory drink to toast the newly wed pair before they fled for Charing Cross. As they reached the honeymoon pub in a Kentish village their nervous excitement slowly ebbed. Peter could barely speak from tiredness, and on reaching their bedroom dropped instantly into a deep and childlike slumber. ‘This, I thought, is surely an odd and lonely start to a marriage.’ They had known each other barely four months.
Some excerpts from Phyllis’s diary for 1948:
20th August 1948
A new page for Mrs Willmott!
7th September 1948
Such continuous happiness is almost unbearable – certainly contains an element of anguish. After 5 weeks life still really consists only of Peter.
3rd November 1948
Impossible to express the deep excitement which tingles and sings inside on looking around at ‘our home’ … To me it is already all I want a home to be – not too large, not too small, mainly furnished with books, made alive by our love.
Phyllis had found her life’s partner.
But by the end of 1948, when she discovered she was pregnant, their life together took a new turn. Peter was working for the Labour Party, and having a baby would mean no room in the Canonbury flat. So when Peter’s father offered them accommodation under his roof in Essex the Willmotts, like many other homeless young couples, had no option but to accept. In August 1949 Lewis was born. For Phyllis, freedom, ambition and choice were all deferred, as motherhood brought with it a rush of conflicting emotions. There was intense joy but also, with Peter’s commute and demanding job taking up most of the long day, debilitating loneliness. And, as any new mother knows, intellectual activity went on hold. Books, ideas and ‘post-war participation’ were suspended. After broken nights and mornings spent boiling nappies, Phyllis’s face would be streaming with tears as she pushed her pram between the endless hedgerows of that featureless countryside. Her picture of a marriage that would exclude her from ‘real life’ was materialising in just the way she had always dreaded. What had become of her ‘marriage of minds’? Was she becoming her mother? It was indeed a punishment, a sentence to servitude and hard labour. ‘I’m so tired of my life here in such a weary, weary way,’ she wrote early in 1950:
This year, I shall not find spring singing through me with upsurging hopes. Although each day I am expectant for I know not what, each day I am worn out by waiting – for Peter, for the future, for life to begin again.
But Phyllis had married a man who accepted her for who she was. Outfacing her mother’s disapproval – ‘as a daughter she thought I was odd … abnormal’ – she struggled on and resumed her career at the earliest opportunity.
That was over sixty years ago. Phyllis was widowed in 2000. ‘We were married for forty-two years. I’m a relic. I’m just amazed I could have survived him. Peter was so much more sensible than I was – the guy rope tying me to the ground; he was a wonderful man.’
*
For Joan Wyndham, being lonely and hard-up had never cramped the bohemian in her; and anyway, what bona fide bohemian had ever had any money?
Joan was the kind of optimistic young woman for whom hope would always triumph over experience. In 1946 she was jobless, and her boyfriend, Kit Latimer, had broken her heart by announcing his intention of marrying a rival ex-WAAF. Back in Fitzrovia, she took to drinking with the Ceylonese poet Meary Tambimuttu, who had been a wartime sex symbol and was as indigent, romantic and generous as she was. His bed was full of bugs, so she never slept with him, but in a profligate moment at the Hog in the Pound Tambi produced an engagement ring set with three opals. Joan went to wash her hands, and the gems – all imitation – immediately dropped out and disappeared down the waste. Mortified at the thought of hurting Tambi’s feelings, she ran for the back door and never returned.
As the cold winter of 1947 set in, Joan kept warm in bed with the painter Lucian Freud. But Freud quickly replaced her with a new muse, Kitty Garman. Once the weather improved Joan and a girlfriend hitch-hiked to Cornwall and made for the Scilly Isles, where they camped out in a sea-cave with a group of young French proto-hippies who lived on boiled limpets and roasted seagulls. It was a happy time, which lasted until the local police evicted them. Joan then decided to track down her smart but reprobate father, the spendthrift journalist Dick Wyndham, at his mill house in Sussex. The autumn saw Joan in Oxford. At a party she met a tall, blond, clever philosophy undergraduate named Maurice (Mo) Rowdon: ‘We took one look at each other and spent the rest of the night talking and dancing. A few days later I moved in with him.’
In March 1948 Joan too became pregnant. She and Mo Rowdon decided to get married, though their infant daughter was already three weeks old by the time Joan finally got to the altar. In the halcyon early days of her marriage Joan suddenly got the news that Dick Wyndham – who had been reporting the first salvos between the newly formed state of Israel and its Arab neighbours for the Sunday Times – had been shot dead by a sniper. There were terrible pangs for a father whom she had barely known – mingled with the overt hope that she and Mo would surely, now, come into a fortune. But by the time the lawyers had paid off Dick’s debts and calculated death duties, there was only enough to buy a small cottage near Sevenoaks, to which they decamped that summer:
Domesticity – how I hated it! Much as I loved my daughter, I wasn’t too keen on the rest of the stuff that goes with motherhood. Those were the days when nappies were soaked in pails, boiled up on top of the stove and hung out to dry in the garden. In spite of rationing I cooked a huge fantastic meal twice a day, and grew fat and ugly.
I had a pleasant house in one of the prettiest villages in Kent, an adoring husband and a lovely daughter – so why was I so bloody miserable?
Rural heaven, the timeless peace of an English valley, couldn’t compete with her formative years spent in the Chelsea Blitz. For Joan, post-war participation meant parties, and not the political kind. At the age of twenty-seven, how could being a housewife measure up to the sheer adrenalin rush of making love as the bombs rained down, dropping amphetamines in an air-raid shelter or dancing, drunk on crème de menthe, to a soundtrack of sirens? Joan tried growing vegetables, acquired a cat and a rabbit and made friends with the only Communists in the village. But it was no good. ‘All the time I was dreaming of Negro nightclubs, young bearded boys in tight black trousers, and smart literary parties full of my father’s old friends.’ The city in wartime had marked her. Nothing would ever quite live up to it again.
‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise (1938). Exiled to Kent, Joan Wyndham would probably have recalled this famous dictum from her father’s literary drinking companion. Joan had met Connolly in 1945, describing him as ‘fat and piggy with one of those clever-ugly faces like Dylan Thomas had’. Certainly, Connolly saw his notional pram (he had no children at the time) and the responsibilities it represented as more of a threat to male creativity than female. His assumptions, and those of his sex, were that the pram’s occupant would be taken care of by the female parent, whose ‘good art’ was presumably of lesser importance.
Nina Bawden’s creative talents were shelved when she turned down a £900-a-year job in journalism because of her pregnancy. The newlywed acquired instead a substantial Rolls Royce of a perambulator, immensely heavy and cumbersome. Getting this monster up the steps to the front door left Nina exhausted, but it was ‘light and springy on the flat’. Nicholas, born in summer 1947, lay in it, and was now the focus of her existence:
I would have given my life for him had the need arisen. But I was alone with him all day and longed for someone to talk to who could talk back to me. Eventually, I met another girl in a similar plight. We pushed our prams to the park together on fine afternoons and, when it rained, sat in each other’s houses smoking and drinking gin or whisky while our babies played behind the sofa and pulled each other’s hair. Babies and boredom, boredom and babies – when the whisky ran out, we made up our faces, exchanged clothes, did our hair, and the afternoon still yawned ahead.
*
For too many women joining the ranks of wives and mothers in the second half of the 1940s, it felt as though the war had offered them a glimpse of how life could be – a tantalising taste of liberty – only for it to be snatched away again. ‘Grossly unfair’ was how ATS volunteer Hilda Marter described her own situation in 1945. Hilda, who had married shortly before the outbreak of war, joined the ATS after her husband was posted abroad and spent four years seeing action on the command post of an anti-aircraft battery. It was ‘an important job … that I enjoyed and … being my own person – instead of a housewife pandering to my husband’s every need … gave me a confidence I had never had before.’ At last her husband got leave – just as she was expecting to be sent out to Belgium. At such a time it was out of the question to ask him to use a condom – ‘tantamount to asking for a divorce’ – and to her utter dismay, Hilda became pregnant. All hopes of promotion, travel and status were suspended. Her husband departed again, and she was left alone with a new baby in an insanitary, run-down cottage. ‘I often wonder what sort of career I might have been able to follow had I been able to choose my own destiny.’ Despite her unchallengeable competence and professionalism, women like Hilda still felt incapable of challenging their husbands.
The sexual stereotypes were as axiomatic for many women as they were for men. Ursula Bloom, who came from a slightly older generation, struggled to express the misgivings she felt at modern men helping in the home:
Men and women have drawn level in the race for life, but the condition is such a new one that any woman worth her salt still cannot bear to see a man doing the jobs that should be entirely hers, without a sense of embarrassment.
It is a difficult matter trying to re-educate oneself to the new system.
In the same vein, Barbara Cartland was unable to countenance outside careers for married women. She herself had declined an invitation to stand for parliament because the hours conflicted with the children’s bedtime and the peaceful after-dinner interlude ‘when a man likes to sit beside the fire and talk over what has happened during the day.’ She was lucky, as a novelist, in being able to drop everything when her husband returned from his office. And if confident, privileged women like her felt unable to make claims, how much more so did the working-class factory women interviewed by the social researcher Ferdinand Zweig? ‘The one thing which struck me in my inquiry was the sense of inferiority which many, if not most, women have. They accept man’s superiority as a matter of fact.’
In the later 1940s, despite all that they had proved both to themselves and to men, most women still lacked any sense that they were entitled to stand equally beside their ‘lords and masters’.
*
In 1947 a galaxy of distinguished women came together who, over the course of the next four years, would meet to discuss where their sex stood in the mid-twentieth century. Eminent representatives of the business, charitable, employment and educational fields, scientists, journalists, feminists and trade unionists attended.* This rolling conference, entitled ‘The Feminine Point of View’, set out to explore how far emancipation had really come, why its impact had been restricted, and what could be done to enable women to achieve their potential.
In 1951 Olwen Campbell, one of the sponsors of the conference, wrote a report of its deliberations and conclusions. The great and good who had gathered over that four-year period had concluded that a feminine influence would unquestionably have a benign impact on our world. Women’s contribution was, they now urged, of the utmost value – ‘We believe that the world desperately needs her point of view’:
The ultimate aim, which we should never lose sight of, is nothing less than a society shaped and run equally by men and women and pursuing the best ideals and hopes of both.
Polite and moderately worded as it was, the professed aspiration of these thoughtful and educated ladies was not so much to engage in a battle with men, but to redeem humanity itself. Like Vera Brittain five years later (in Lady into Woman) they were pursuing not so much equality for themselves, but a ‘woman’s service for peace’, a future for the human race. A lofty aim indeed, which might have carried more weight had their rhetoric not been so polite, so conciliatory. They had perhaps heeded the fate of those activists whose campaign for equal pay had been sidelined.
These women were as sick of bombs and battles as everybody else, and even in dissent the participants saw themselves as more ‘feminine’ than feminist. They came from a world, and spoke to a public, in which ‘all girls want to marry and nearly all will marry’. They held firmly to their interpretation of the female character, with its traditional qualities of compassion, intuitive sympathy, aversion to violence, selflessness and reverence for individual life. They accepted that the ministrations of home and family fell primarily on the female. Olwen Campbell and her company were not about to jettison their foundation garments, march as sisters or chain themselves to railings. That was still a long way off.
And perhaps that was why – despite their excellent analysis, compelling arguments and the conclusive need for a new approach that would break the cycle of aggressive wars – the 1950s would see the institution of marriage enjoying unprecedented stability, with little change either in women’s status or women’s self-estimation. Perhaps, too, it was why change, when it did come in the 1970s, had to be played out according to men’s rules: those of noisy protest, angry demonstration and belligerent force.
The children of the Armistice had travelled a long road since 1939. We have a tendency to romanticise the Second World War, to build up comforting pictures of heroism featuring armadas of small ships, defiance of danger on the high seas, the gallantry of Spitfire crews, the fearless comradeship of the Blitz and feats of bravery on the Normandy beaches, all to the accompaniment of wailing sirens and the ringing rhetoric of Winston Churchill. We tend to see it as a man’s war.
The woman’s war had its moments of glory too. But they were often simpler: celebrating a sinking with a bottle of cheap wine labelled ‘Matapan’; the joy of a double-yolked egg; beautiful shiny lace-up shoes; a mattress remodelled from sugar sacks; cream cakes on the Cobb; jitterbugging; floating on Martini … And the tough times were correspondingly banal: days on the factory floor, followed by ‘straight to bed, buggered’; rising at 4 a.m. for a working day on the Sheffield trams; frozen early mornings in the conifer plantations of northern Scotland; grief and ennui; ‘Missing, presumed killed’; pouring rain, and counting the bricks in the wall; rubble; destruction; death on the ward; the swabbing of shit from traumatised soldiers after D-day; lisle stockings and snapped knicker elastic; waiting, hoping and despairing. And this time the accompaniment is Vera Lynn’s crystalline voice singing:
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There’ll be love and laughter,
And peace ever after,
Tomorrow – when the world is free.
Though the perfect peace was as empty a promise as the bluebirds, not everything had been lost. In jungles and deserts, the ideal of home had kept many millions of soldiers going through the weary years of war. Treasured in each wallet or kitbag, the creased and dog-eared black-and-white photograph of a smiling girlfriend or wife would sustain its memory. From all the struggle and heartache of the war Home and Hearth had emerged as the repository of all things good, all things worth fighting for, with Woman at its heart. Electricity and technology were transforming it from a prison to a power base. For the next decade and onwards, Home would be woman’s empire.
‘With these modern inventions housework’s a pleasure.’ In 1946, a Hoover seemed to promise true joy.
War had brought her pride, and a sense of value. Friendships forged out of common experiences endured. Voluntarism thrived. A generation emerged from ten years of rationing unable to contemplate waste or debt, incapable of using more than a quarter of an inch of toothpaste, resistant to the modern culture of excess. Many who lived through the war continue to share a powerful patriotism and sense of national unity. And ten years of suffering and boredom bred millions of stoical survivors. If the women who came of age in the 1940s have just one thing in common, it is their characteristic quality of patience. Their mantra: ‘We didn’t analyse. We just got on with it. We lived from day to day.’
And as the war receded into history, most of them were quietly relieved to have come through, grateful for what remained of life’s blessings.
This story began with snapshots from the lives of some of the participants in 1939. It draws to a close a decade later with some pages from the post-war album. Here they are, a bit older, some with small children and husbands, in sepia and black-and-white, smiling bravely for the camera. Most of them by now will be familiar.
First, a wedding photograph; taken at St Mark’s Church, North Audley Street, Mayfair. Blooming and smiling, with a long veil, ruffled full-length lace wedding dress and carnation bouquet, Helen Vlasto has married her long-term sweetheart Dr Aidan Long. Her private means, and his post in a London hospital, enable her to return to the life for which she was born, that of a lady of leisure. The Longs are rich, and outnumbered – even in these austerity days – by their staff: maids, a chauffeur and cooks. But grief is lying in wait for Helen when her baby daughter, born in 1947, dies after just a few days. Helen, who has relied all her life on her looks and good fortune, becomes ever more unwilling to engage with matters of substance. The days fill with aimless activity: letters to write, hairdressing appointments, cocktails at six. It is as if the war had never happened; Helen’s life has gone on hold. ‘[She] was an extraordinarily late-developer,’ says Helen’s son. ‘But [writing her memoirs] was a turning point. She was able to reinvent herself and in her late 50s and 60s acquired a rapidly forming “gravitas”.’
Ilkley Road, Barrow-in-Furness: a December night in 1948, with the rain lashing outside, and a fire crackling. Diarist Nella Last is recording a tetchy row between herself and her husband, Will. Tea – a generous spread of hard-boiled egg with grated cheese, wholemeal bread, butter and jam and toasted fruit bread – has been cleared away, when Will (who continues to run his joinery business) starts to drone with misery about the threatened departure of one of his apprentices. Driven away by Mr Last’s grumbles and fault-finding, the boy is off to join the navy. But Nella has no sympathy with her husband. She lashes out and tells him plainly that the only thing that keeps her chained to the stove and sink is her own self-respect as a housewife. It’s not surprising you lose everyone who ever works for you, she tells him. ‘You never say a thing is nice or give a word of thanks for any effort, and you pounce on any little error or fault.’ And if he didn’t start trying soon, she’d be the next one packing her bags.
A cottage in Slough, a few weeks later. Maggie Joy Blunt’s guests have left and, thankful to be on her own again with her beloved cats, she reflects on the isolation of her post-war existence: ‘I am at heart a solitary, selfish creature and am sure I should find marriage irksome eventually.’ Life holds challenges enough for Maggie; she has decided to put effort into changing the world through politics and will campaign in the next election for the Liberal Party. There is charitable work to do, friends, the theatre, a writing project that will occupy much of her time, and plans to open a bookshop. ‘My philosophy for years now has been to take things as they come, to live the life you have in hand as fully as you can, & let the future take care of itself.’
A summer day in Piccadilly: Madeleine Henrey and her husband have returned to their Shepherd Market flat. Bobby is at school now, and Madeleine is writing the story of her Normandy farm. But Madeleine finds she can’t concentrate, and the Bond Street shops beckon. A sunny London morning and the thought of new hats still have the power to tempt a woman like Madeleine and, basket in hand, she heads out. Here in the West End many of the buildings have been cleaned up – at least on the outside – but the little shops with their heraldic crests which once sold kid evening gloves that buttoned up above the elbow all seem to have closed. Still, rumour has it that the price of knitting wool has come down and, even better, that nylon stockings are in. It is a matter of time before the big stores will yet again be full of lovely, shimmering fabrics. No man can experience the joy Madeleine feels at stroking the tempting softness of a bolt of crêpe de chine. ‘I am thankful to be a woman.’
Ham Spray House: at the foot of the Wiltshire downs, Frances and Ralph Partridge continue to lead quietly civilised lives, in which books and the company of friends predominate. Their son, Burgo, now fourteen, is entering a difficult adolescence. The summer of 1949 is sultry; the only cool time is the early morning, and Frances walks barefoot on her dew-laden lawn before breakfast. Later in the day, a circle of deckchairs under the beech tree is a shady refuge for drinks and conversation. On 6 August Frances rereads her wartime diaries and reflects on how life has changed since the days when her interest was exclusively, hectically engaged by public horrors:
Now we have lived through three years of total peace; we still have rationing but don’t fear it getting worse (as we did then); there have been political crises and alarms for us to read and talk about ad lib. The chief change is that today our minds are much more often full of the books we are reading, the work we are doing, and above all the vicissitudes in the lives of Burgo and many friends whose troubles are very much our concern.
Her pacifist convictions remain unaltered.
Oundle, Northamptonshire: another wedding picture. Lorna is smiling for the camera, after trading her maiden name, Bradey, for Kite. Ralph, her husband, is a career soldier with the British Army of Occupation in Germany, a onetime patient of hers. In Hanover in 1948 they renewed their romance, and he proposed after a night at the opera. Lorna’s marriage to Ralph Kite means automatic resignation from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. She has a child now, she works in the army thrift shop, dutifully attends coffee mornings, hosts curry lunches and tries to avoid becoming too like the other ‘kitten’ wives on the base at Sölingen near Düsseldorf. But there is nothing to do, and it is, in many ways, a mind-numbing existence. Lorna, high-spirited, sociable and sexy, is too uncompromising to fit neatly into the ‘devoted military wife’ slot. She has always lived life to the full, always loved to party, and the role of flirt comes more naturally to her than that of docile housewife. And, though their marriage is strong and loving, any spare energy is expended on stormy rows with her husband.
A railway station in Sussex: Anne Popham, back from Germany since 1947, has found a job as an exhibitions organiser for the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain, work which has brought her back into contact with the world of contemporary artists. One of these, a tall, talented man with red hair, asks her out. He seems kind, clever and impressively well informed about politics and current affairs and yet he also seems deeply unsure of himself. An invitation follows to his parents’ Sussex home, where Anne sits to him for her portrait. The family welcomes her; she feels admired, appreciated. He sculpts a head of clay, caressing the terracotta cheekbones, moulding her lips with sensitive, spatula-like fingers. She feels beautiful. When he takes her to catch her train she reaches up and briefly kisses him. They look at each other with new eyes.
Ontario, Canada: Mavis Lever, married name Mavis Batey, has travelled to Ottawa, where her husband Keith has accepted a position on the staff of the High Commission. After five years of fever-pitch work at Bletchley, Mavis is relieved not to have to keep up the pace. ‘We could never have slogged the way we did without the excitement of the war. Mercifully, I decided to have a baby.’ So she has packed her Harris tweed suit and boarded a liner for the other side of the world. She also takes with her her secret life of codes and intercepts, but for another twenty-five years she will not reveal a word about her wartime occupation. In Canada a second baby is born. Far from home in a land of plenty, Mavis enjoys the heaven of disposable nappies; also chocolate, and steak. Inexperienced as a cook, one of our foremost code-breakers is almost floored by the expectation that she will whip up a three-course diplomatic dinner for her husband’s colleagues – ‘How do you feed an Ambassador when your repertoire doesn’t extend beyond corned beef and bread-and-butter pudding?’ The Bateys return to England in 1950: with her family growing up, Mavis discovers a surprising new outlet for her forensic talents and love of literature, becoming the secretary and later president of the Garden History Society.
Edinburgh: Jean Park (née McFadyen), has ‘landed on her feet’. After months of frustration living with the in-laws in Edinburgh, she has the luck to find a flat in the church manse. Brenda, the minister’s wife, is pregnant and has advertised the accommodation in return for help in the house. A happy time follows: ‘We got on great. I only worked for her up until lunchtime, and my time was my own after that.’ Brenda and she share out the washing, the baking, and – when the time comes – baby tips. Jean’s own daughter is born in 1948. How far has she come from her lonely teenage days, skivvying in the great landowner’s remote castle in the glens? In her view, cleaning for Brenda at the manse was a world away. ‘My life had changed completely. It definitely gave me confidence. I would never have done all these things if it hadn’t been for the war.’ Her relationship with her employer and landlady is one of mutual respect and firm friendship.
Blackheath, London: an envelope drops through Miss Mary Cornish’s letterbox, from nineteen-year-old Fred Steels. It contains greetings, and reminiscences about the days they spent together after Lifeboat Number 12 was cast adrift on the Atlantic ocean. ‘It is just over 4 years since we wrote to each other,’ he tells her,
but I do know that it is just over 8 years since we shared our nightmare experience, and I want you to know that I for one will never forget what you did for us during that experience.
Miss Cornish reads it and adds it to a growing bundle of correspondence from the boys – Paul Shearing, Ken Sparks and Billy Short – who still write to her, addressing her as ‘Auntie Mary’. She is fifty now and has returned to her life as a music teacher. If anything, her ordeal has sharpened her appetite for life: for music, gardens, books, travel and friendships. The fortitude and mental grip that helped Mary Cornish survive shipwreck and despair now propel her forward; she possesses, as her niece says, ‘a fiery spirit’.
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire: the wedding of Alan Milburn to Judy Pickard is taking place, just over a year after his return from Oflag VIIB. To his mother’s relief, Alan spends the six months following his release on light duties in a mixed battalion only 10 miles from Burleigh, the home in Balsall Common where she has spent so many anxious hours awaiting news of his safety. During this time he is billeted at a hotel named The Oaks, and it is here that he meets Judy, whose mother is the proprietor. Judy finds her new mother-in-law, Clara Milburn, to be a firm and friendly woman – ‘unique in many ways’. In her sixties, she continues practical and as busy as ever, gardening, reading, writing, painting and tending to her husband Jack’s needs. With Alan settled, she eagerly awaits the arrival of a Milburn grandson (and it must be a boy), for in Clara’s world view Milburn men still lead the human procession, while Milburn women are there to applaud, to wait and to sew on their buttons.
South Kensington: Frances Parker (née Faviell) is remaking her life in London after the extremities of the Blitz, the anguish of post-war Berlin. The bombs had razed 33 Cheyne Place to the ground; she and Richard have moved to an airy and comfortable modern house with a large studio in a quiet street behind Fulham Road. John is at school. Back in her old haunts, Frances picks up the artistic social life that she left behind in 1939. She has time and peace of mind, too, to give to painting, and canvases accumulate. The studio is stacked high with portraits of her many friends, lovingly executed miniatures, the occasional exuberant flower piece: a rhododendron, joyfully magenta in its blue vase. But the war memories persist. Painful and difficult though she finds it, Frances embarks on a book about her time in Berlin, followed by a book about the Chelsea Blitz. Writing them is both liberating and cathartic, and the books are well received. But A Chelsea Concerto will be her last. Frances Faviell now confronts a war that is unwinnable, for at fifty-seven she is dying of an untreatable cancer.
North Berwick, the Firth of Forth: it’s the Sunday before Kay Mellis’s wedding to Alastair Wight. In Scotland in 1950, working-class tradition still requires the engaged couple to hold open house for well-wishers, who are expected to call by bearing gifts: useful household items like wringers, sewing-machines and carpet sweepers. Kay’s mum has made it clear that she and Alastair ought to stay in to greet the many guests from their close-knit Edinburgh neighbourhood. But Kay and Alastair, who have known each other since childhood, have other ideas:
That weekend we decided that we weren’t going to be staying in on a Sunday, we were going to North Berwick on the bus. My mother wasn’t best pleased because she thought people would come and we wouldn’t be there. But still, away we went.
The couple walk along the bay arm in arm, past the outdoor salt-water swimming pool and round the picturesque harbour. Perhaps they reminisce about Kay’s Land Army days: the back-breaking years when girls like her ‘weren’t allowed to be miserable’ despite her sore hands, raw from hoeing, and the rats that plagued her nights. Or maybe she remembers John, the kindly farmer who employed her – ‘I was his chick’ – or the reels in the village hall after the day’s work was done.
But most likely she and Alastair talk about what it will be like when they are married. Dress-making is her love; she won’t have to give that up. His steady job with a printing machinery firm will ensure them an adequate income.
The war ending was going to be the start of something wonderful. We’d rent a house, it wouldn’t be bought, you know what I mean? – and we’d get some furniture. A Chesterfield suite, a dining room suite and a bedroom suite.
On that sunny afternoon, with the sea sparkling and the gannets calling from the Bass Rock, Vera Lynn’s promise of peace is being fulfilled for Kay and Alastair:
We had a lovely time in North Berwick. We had a bag of chips out of the chip shop. And I felt we had done what we wanted to do that day. Maybe we didn’t do the right thing. But we did it because it was what we wanted to do.
They feel lucky to be alive and in love. In a week they will be man and wife. They dream of a peaceful future. They will have a family and, in time, grandchildren. Kay’s sewing-machine will whirr all day, and there will be all the fabric she ever wanted.
Kay Wight is in her late eighties now. She and Alastair still live quietly in their modest home in an Edinburgh suburb. She tut-tuts a little about modernity – ‘Kids now grow up before their time. Och, it’s a disaster!’ – about the way her granddaughters don’t learn to cook – ‘What’s better than a plate of mince and tatties? Don’t get me started!’ – and about the way women wear trousers to dances – ‘There’s nothing worse.’ She laments the loss of community: ‘Life was so different then – your aunties and uncles and everybody lived nearby. Your whole life was different, you know what I mean? If you were bombed out it was a case of “Come in, come in.” There was always a door open.’ And teenagers get away with disrespect to the old in a way that to her is incomprehensible:
So I say, all right, I’ll go back to my wee old chair.
It is the fate of every generation, as it grows old, to be pushed to one side by the young. The achievements and sacrifices of the 1940s women have bought us peace, but we take them for granted. Their values are rejected as old-fashioned and irrelevant. We patronise them a little and, ultimately, forget them. The process is necessary, but we also lose by it. For if we are ever to learn from history, we must get under the skins of the people who made it: our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers, Kay Wight, and millions like her. They are us, and we will, in our turn, be like them.