Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  Towards the end of 1940 Father got a job as Chief Draughtsman at the Barrow Hematite Steelworks in Barrow-in-Furness. We gave up the house in Margaretting and my mother, brother and I moved north to stay with my mother’s mother and sister in Wallasey, while Father looked for a suitable house for us in Barrow.

  My maternal grandmother was a rather beautiful, ladylike and gentle person. She had been born into a fairly prosperous Liverpool family and had married the son of another solid, middle-class Liverpool family, the Parrotts. He is described on their wedding certificate as an ‘African trader’. For some unknown reason, my grandfather had gone off to Canada when my mother was quite small, leaving Grandmother in Liverpool with their three children, promising to send for them when he was established. He corresponded for a while and then she heard no more from him. The years passed and she brought up the children as best she could, on her own, with help from her family. Then one day, in 1917, she was contacted by the War Office, to be told that her husband was on a hospital ship in Liverpool docks on his way back to Canada, seriously wounded. He had become a Canadian citizen, had been conscripted into the Canadian army and had fought in France in a Canadian infantry battalion. If she wanted to see him before the ship sailed, she must go straight down to the docks. She did, and my mother then aged sixteen went with her. Neither of them ever talked about what was said at that meeting but it must have been a traumatic occasion. It was their last meeting for he died not long after his return to Canada.

  Wallasey in 1940–41 was not a good place to live. Night after night the German bombers came over to try to flatten the Liverpool docks. My grandmother had a flat in a large Edwardian house in Church Street, just up from the Wallasey sea front and opposite the docks. My brother Brian and I slept on bunks behind a thick curtain at the end of a long corridor. It was thought to be safer than sleeping in a room, where the windows might break and the glass cut us. We didn’t like the dark, so we drew the curtain back after we had gone to bed. Looking up the corridor one night as the bombs descended, I saw a picture falling off the wall and a nightlight on a table flickering and going out with the blast of a bomb which had fallen very near by. Until recently my mother still kept that particular picture with a crack in the frame where it had hit the floor.

  After a few weeks of this, the bombing became so intense that, when the sirens sounded, we left our house and went next door to a ballroom dancing school, where there was a windowless basement. We and several neighbours sat there night after night till dawn came and the all-clear sounded. The first time we decided that it was too dangerous to stay in our own house, we delayed until the middle of an intense air raid. As we went outside I looked up and saw the sky lit up by the flames of the burning docks, with a pattern of spotlights, antiaircraft fire, barrage balloons and an aircraft falling on fire out of the sky.

  For months during this period, Brian and I did not go to school. There probably seemed little point as we were awake most of the night and in any case we did not know how long we would stay in Wallasey before moving on again. I think Mother did not really want us to go to school in case there was an air raid and we got separated, because by then the sirens were sounding during the daylight hours too. Being separated from us was her biggest anxiety at the time. We used to sleep during the day and sometimes play in the park, but eventually the school inspectors got on to us. Rather surprisingly they were still working and they told my mother we had to go to school. I can’t remember many lessons, though, when we did, just more time spent sitting in the white-tiled school cellar during daytime raids.

  Later in 1941, we moved to Barrow-in-Furness, to join my father. By then, night after night, the Luftwaffe was bombing the Vickers dockyards at Barrow. At first we lived in rooms in a tall house on Abbey Road, where the safest place during a raid was under the stairs. We went there every night, the landlady’s family, my mother, brother and I, while my father was out on the streets as an air-raid warden.

  After a short time in Abbey Road, we moved to yet another rented house, No. 5 Ilkley Road, a pebble-dashed semi, where, like our neighbours, we turned our back garden into a vegetable patch, stuck tape over the windows to stop the glass shattering in the blast and battened down to see out the war. But before that time came we had yet more nights of bombing to endure. In this house the safest place in a raid was judged to be under the dining-room table and we were all sitting there one night during a particularly ferocious attack, when the blast from a nearby bomb drove the soot down the chimney and covered us all from head to toe. On that night my parents decided again, in the middle of the raid, that the bombing was too close for safety and we set off in our nightclothes, covered with soot as we were, to walk the hundred yards or so to the municipal air-raid shelter. I was terrified, as yet again I saw the sky full of the lights of anti-aircraft fire and burning planes and buildings. I remember urging my parents to run, but my father insisted we walk. No Nazi was going to make him run, and in any case he took the view, difficult for a six-year-old to appreciate, that if we were to be hit we would be hit whether we walked or ran. That night I had a very narrow escape, when a piece of shrapnel missed me by inches. I felt the draught as it passed my shoulder.

  After that experience, we acquired an air-raid shelter, a mighty structure of steel plates, which was actually a blast shelter from a quarry. It entirely filled our sitting room but was rapidly absorbed into the family and became accepted as part of the furniture. We could sit up in it, and we had beds in there too. We spent every night in that shelter while the bombing went on. My brother colonised it and used it as a base for his model railway. It made a really satisfactory reverberating sound when hit, and on it I learned the Morse code. Air-raid shelters were a part of life in those days – everyone had one. I used to envy some of my friends who had neat table shelters, which could be much more easily disguised than ours. They made wonderful hiding places for games at birthday parties, but in fact they must have been horribly claustrophobic in an air raid. Others had Anderson shelters in their gardens, deep dangerous places, which hung around long after the war and often seemed to be full of stagnant, smelly water. The father of one of my friends once used his to drown a family of kittens – an execution which I still remember with horror to this day.

  During one night we spent in our air-raid shelter, the houses across the road were landmined. Amazingly, my brother and I must have gone to sleep during the raid and been put into our beds still asleep when it was over. But later in the night our ceilings collapsed and we woke to find our beds covered with dust and to see my mother and father sweeping up the ceiling plaster from the floor. Our windows had all been blown in and the staircase had shifted inches from the wall. I had been delighted when we moved into that house. It was the first house of our own we had had since we left London and I felt that at last we had settled somewhere. When I woke up and saw the state of things I was heartbroken, and according to family legend, I said ‘Oh, look what’s happened to our nice little house,’ and burst into tears. We lived with the house in that state until towards the end of the war, when the bomb-damage people came to repair it.

  Looking back on my early childhood, I realise now how frightened I was for most of the time. After some months spent wide awake in cellars and shelters, listening to aeroplanes and the explosions of falling bombs, I began to shake uncontrollably when the siren sounded and the shaking did not stop until we heard the all-clear. Obviously my experiences came nowhere near the horror of those of many children in Europe during the war. But even what I went through would be thought nowadays to require instant counselling. In those days you just absorbed the experience and dealt with it however you could. I was left with some tangible symptoms of anxiety. In my teens, I began to suffer claustrophobia which lasted for years, even after I was married, and had the effect of making it very difficult for me to sit in the middle of a row at a concert or the theatre or in church. I had to know where the exits were and to have planned how I would get out. If I found myse
lf in a situation where I could not easily get out of a room, I would come out in a cold sweat and start to shake. Perhaps less clearly attributable to the war, I developed a quite pessimistic and anxious personality. I grew up feeling that it was no good having great expectations, nothing in life was going to be easy and there wasn’t much certainty around; so you’d better depend on yourself to make the best of whatever came along. And heaven only knew what that would be.

  I suppose I caught that attitude from Father, whose experiences had given him a fairly dour attitude to life. He was a self-educated Yorkshireman, who had obtained his engineering qualifications at night school, after working during the day at Cochrane’s Ironworks in Middlesbrough. He held strong Christian beliefs and taught us that hard work and devotion to duty were the most important things and that they would be their own reward.

  When we lived in Barrow, we had a dog called Billy. Actually, when he came to us, from an old soldier who had died, his name was Buller, after General Sir Redvers Buller, the Boer War general, but we renamed him. When Billy died I was heartbroken. As little girls do when their pet dies, I cried and cried and went on crying into the night. I know Father was really sorry that I was so upset, but his reaction was to say in a rather stern way, ‘Well, we shall certainly never have another dog, if this is what happens.’ We never did, and I felt really guilty and silly for being so upset. All my life I have felt that showing emotion is somehow a bit of a weakness. Emotions are what other people are allowed to have and show and people like me are supposed to be strong, to help when others are in difficulties. It’s a very stark philosophy.

  Both Father and Mother believed most strongly that you must never give up – there was no place for weakness and above all no time to be ill. Father suffered all the time I knew him from stress-related illnesses, particularly constant nervous indigestion, but he never gave way to them. His experiences during the First World War had been horrific, and he could not be persuaded to talk much about them. He sometimes mentioned his time in the military hospital, recovering from his head wound, which left him with a large depressed fracture of the skull. I think he had been very ill at first, but later he had found being cooped up in hospital very difficult and he talked with some shame about an incident, which must have occurred when he was recovering. Having been woken by the nurse at some incredibly early hour to be washed, he had thrown the washing water at her.

  Probably as a result of his head wound, he tended to be anxious and pessimistic. He had some form of nervous breakdown at the beginning of the Second War in 1939, when all the horror of his experiences of the First came back to haunt him. He was kind and took a great interest in his two children, and later in his grandchildren. But he was very conscientious, he always had to work hard and there was not much time or money for relaxation. Perhaps not surprisingly, I do not remember much lightheartedness about him.

  Most of the burden of bringing us up and of keeping Father going fell on my mother, who died at ninety-five during 1997. She was a truly stoical person. She believed, and these beliefs were tested almost, but not quite, to destruction during the war, that whatever the circumstances one should remain as cheerful as one possibly could; that one should never complain and that one should try to cause as few problems or difficulties for others as possible. She taught her two children the importance of perseverance. She used to tell us that nothing that is worth doing can be achieved easily, but that at the end of the day you can do no more than your best. When, later on, I used to moan about exams and say, as I always did, that I was going to fail, she used to reassure me quietly and say that nobody could blame me if I tried my hardest, and so of course I did, and I usually passed.

  With the end of the war came more peaceful nights and what was remarkable freedom in comparison with the life of present day children. With very little traffic about, we played hopscotch and football in the street and bicycled to school. During the war, playing in the street could be a bit hazardous because bands of soldiers used to come and practise urban warfare in our area, hiding round corners and shooting at each other with blank cartridges. When they weren’t there we enjoyed our own war games. My brother always wanted to be Rommel, because it meant he could ride around the street on my tricycle, wearing a long overcoat and a cap.

  I started school in Barrow at the local infants’ school at the top of our road. I must have been a regular little Southerner when I first went there. On my first day I was asked to read to the class, and they all roared with laughter because I pronounced ‘castle’ as ‘carstle’, whereas they all said ‘casstle’. I soon lost my Southern ways after that, and learned how to speak Lancashire. When my brother went on to Barrow Grammar School, I was sent to a little convent school for girls, Crosslands Convent at Furness Abbey on the outskirts of Barrow. The teachers were nearly all nuns and were all characters. There was Sister Borromeo, who taught us history, a long lean ascetic lady, who, whenever she wrote on the blackboard, put a sideways cross over one of the words. This puzzled me for a long time and one day I summoned up the courage to ask her why she did it. ‘To remind me that all my work is done for God,’ she replied. I never worked out whether that was profound, or profoundly dotty. Sister Borromeo was a nervous lady and it was due to her that I transferred my fear of bombing raids to a fear of lightning. I remember one particular history lesson, which was disturbed by ferocious claps of thunder. I had been told that thunderstorms were not dangerous and was quite prepared to shrug them off, until I noticed that after every clap of thunder Sister Borromeo would anxiously cross herself and whisper, ‘I thought I saw lightning.’

  At the convent I was among the group apart, known as the ‘Non-Catholics’. We were excluded from interesting-looking occasions, when incense was burned and rosaries were said. From time to time, a very important-looking figure came to visit the school. He wore a long, purple gown and all the way down it at the front, in a sort of semi-circle over his large protuberant stomach, were tiny little round purple buttons, covered with the fabric of his robe. I used to stare at him, trying to count his buttons, but he never stayed still long enough for me to get all the way from top to bottom. I never knew who he was, though he was clearly some dignitary in the Roman Catholic hierarchy and we all had to call him ‘Monsignor’. The Catholic girls were allowed to kiss his ring, but we were supposed just to curtsy to him.

  But even as a non-Catholic, I did learn to recite the Hail Mary, which was said in chorus several times a day. Or at least I thought I did. No-one ever taught it so I just picked it up, but for years I thought it went, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed art thou swimming and blessed is the fruit of thy, whom Jesus.’ It was only when I thought about this, much, much later, that I realised that could not have been right.

  I was never quite sure how to take the nuns. I had never met any before. We all called them ‘Sister’ and some of the Catholic girls bobbed to them as though they were royalty. But I couldn’t help noticing how oddly they behaved. Sister Dominic was a scatty and very untidy nun whose habit was always dirty and torn, with the tears held together with huge tacking stitches. But she had a heart of gold. She used to bring in to class, as prizes for mental arithmetic tests, pieces of cake of dubious origin, which emerged from the folds of her none-too-clean habit and which certainly should have had a health warning attached. We gobbled them up, both because we were greedy and because we didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Sister Dominic claimed to be lame and was allowed to travel from the convent to the school and back in a wheelchair, a journey of about 200 yards over a rough, stony track. Presumably her sister nuns pushed her to school, but we girls vied for the privilege of pushing her back. Three or four of us would seize the handle of the wheelchair and run as fast as we could, bashing the poor lady and her wheelchair over the stones in what must have been a bone-breaking journey. She seemed to enjoy it though, and when, as regularly happened, a wheel flew off the chair, she would leap out, take off her shoe, and using it as a hammer,
bash the wheel back on. It was this sprightly readiness to leap out which made us all wonder just how lame she really was.

  Sister Cecilia was quite a different cup of tea. She terrified me. She was an exceptionally neat nun; her habit was always clean and beautifully pressed but her character matched her appearance and she was extremely severe. She taught art, and her lessons should have been pleasant occasions, but I was not very artistic and she was very sarcastic. My fear of art came to a head one Christmas when she decided we would all make crackers. I was unable to grasp that you had to get the crêpe paper one way round and not the other. I kept getting it wrong and when all the other children had a box of lovely crackers to show for their pains, I had just a few sticky, mangled messes because I had had to keep taking mine to bits. I stayed awake many nights worrying about those crackers, and to this day the sight of a certain kind of shiny string, which is still sold at Christmas, the kind we had been given to tie up those crackers, gives me the shudders.

  In spite of Sister Cecilia, this was a happy period for me as a child, once the bombing had stopped. Life was no great effort. I was one of the brighter children at the school and had plenty of friends. We went on Saturday mornings to the children’s picture show at the Roxy cinema, where some weeks Flash Gordon and his gang got into the most nerve-racking adventures, and sometimes, for the girls, we had Carmen Miranda and her fantastic fruit-covered hats. We marvelled at the cinema organ, which came up out of the floor changing from livid pink to vivid green as the mood of the music altered. My uncle played the piano for the silent films in Redcar, so he told us all about mood music and the difficulty of keeping the music in time with the pictures. We sometimes went down to the sea at Walney Island, though it was a dangerous place in those late wartime days, as much of the beach was mined and enclosed with barbed wire and there were frightening notices, saying ‘Danger of Death’. At the weekends the whole family went walking in the Lake District, practically deserted and quite unlike the crowded tourist area it later became. We stayed for holidays at the Crown Hotel in Coniston, and watched the Victorian steamboat, ‘The Lady of the Lake’, rotting away quietly on Coniston Water and much to my satisfaction I climbed Coniston Old Man on my tenth birthday.