Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  Early in January 1941, Hitler called off the invasion and suspended Operation Sea Lion indefinitely. Still, night after night, bombers hit strategic ports; as well as London, other ports – Cardiff, Swansea, Hull, Liverpool and others – were to be destroyed according to Hitler’s plan. Irene Grant’s Tyneside and the huge shipbuilding facilities at Vickers in Barrow-in-Furness were also on the list.

  Glasgow was targeted too, and in the course of a bombing raid on that city the Luftwaffe decided to hit Sheffield. Visibility, however, was low and the bombs were accidentally released over Leeds. This was the closest Natalie Tanner and her family got to the Blitz. They were in Bradford for the evening, taking in a play and a late-night drink when they heard the sirens. With the lethargy of those who had never experienced the bombings first-hand, they leisurely finished their drinks before they headed home. The drive passed uneventfully, but when they got home, ‘We heard guns and some dull thuds. We could see the shells bursting and our door rattled a bit.’ Those in Leeds were not so lucky. The bombs caused extensive damage and left fifty-seven dead.

  Irene Grant and her family had just returned home after a day out visiting her mother when the first sirens went on 9 April. The Grants had thus far experienced few significant raids and the noise startled them. Rita, Irene’s daughter, jumped and accidentally spilt her glass of water. Irene’s husband, Tom, began to curse. Quickly, Irene and her other daughter, Marjorie, got between them to save Rita from Tom’s angry blows. Soon, they began to hear the planes come over. ‘So starts the most terrible night of bombs, gun-firing, [and] planes,’ Irene noted in her diary. Windows shook and nearby bombs twice knocked Irene off her bed. Later, Irene learned that the fires she saw from her windows were the timber yards at Tynedock. She also reported that about five miles from her home, North and South Shields sustained heavy bombing, while Sunderland’s Town Hall and many of the businesses on what Irene considered the town’s ‘finest street’, Fawcett Street, were gutted.

  That same night, on 9 April, raiders flew over Birmingham, as they did throughout the spring. This night, after so many raids and so many evenings spent shaking in fear, Alice’s nerve finally shattered. All night, she trembled fearfully, and as each whistling bomb pounded the earth around her shelter, she could not help but jump in fear. When a massive bomb split the ground nearby, electric fear raced up her spine and it took every ounce of strength she had to stop her hands and legs from shaking uncontrollably.

  Luckily, Jacqueline did not have to witness this raid. Only weeks before, Alice’s daughter was at home after Alice had learned that the family that took Jacq in December 1940 had neglected her. Jacq came home with frostbitten feet and filthy clothes – it seemed as though they’d never been cleaned in two months. Furthermore, she complained, the billeting family repeatedly ridiculed Jacq. Sadly, it was a common story for many of the evacuees, though some endured much worse abuse at the hands of their foster families. After several weeks in Birmingham, however, Alice found Jacq another home that was a much happier environment, and her daughter thus narrowly escaped the spring raids on Birmingham.

  In Barrow-in-Furness, Nella Last endured several terrifying nights of air raids over the course of that April. When the sirens went, Nella and her husband, Will, along with their cat and ageing dog, scattered to the reinforced space under the stairs in their semi-detached home, and listened to the angry bombers growling overhead on their way to targets on Clydeside and in Northern Ireland. As they passed over the shipbuilding town, the ‘devil bombers’ let fly machine-gun fire and bombs on Barrow’s city centre and industrial sites. Shrapnel poured down on the roof of Nella’s home, which was not far from the centre of town, while ‘Doors and windows shook and rattled, as if someone is trying to force their way in,’ with every bomb that fell nearby.

  Following each raid, Will, a joiner by trade, went into town to repair what he could and demolish what was unsalvageable. The damage Will witnessed convinced him that Nella’s desire for an indoor Morrison shelter was wise, and the couple quickly sent away for theirs. With each passing raid, Nella noted more and more townspeople packing up and heading out of town. The scenes of people queuing for buses, hailing taxis or simply on foot reminded her of the chaos in France only a year earlier, when scores of scared refugees flooded the roads out of town. What would happen if Barrow had a ‘big blitz’, she wondered.

  On 3 May, Nella hunkered down in her newly arrived Morrison shelter, waiting for ‘the end’ during Barrow’s greatest raid. The squat indoor, coffin-like shelter with thick steel plates on top and bottom and open steel-mesh sides – large enough to accommodate two adults and two children lying down but small enough to fit into a small space – protected her from the damage done that night. The windows in her home were blasted out, doors were torn off their hinges, plaster rained down from the ceilings, walls were cracked, and the roof on the garage separated four inches from the house. Ten people were killed and 2,000 rendered homeless in Barrow’s Blitz.

  A week later, on the night of 10 May, the conditions over London were perfect for destruction. The moon was full – a ‘bomber’s moon’ – and the Thames that sparkled in the light was at its ebb. Across Britain, everyone feared clear evenings and full moons. At the end of 1944, when the threat of bombers over Britain had all but evaporated, Edie Rutherford noted a beautiful moonlit evening and immediately thought of the Blitz four years earlier. ‘I wonder when we will cease connecting perfect moonlight with blitzes,’ she mused.

  The 2,000 fires that were started in London on 10 May 1941 fanned across the city. All firemen could do was watch the conflagration grow as their hoses ran dry. Landmarks across the city succumbed in the onslaught. Bombs destroyed the Commons debating chamber and 250,000 books in the British Museum, Westminster Abbey was bombed, as was the Palace of St James, King’s Cross and Temple Church, along with other notable London structures. Thousands were made homeless, almost 2,000 were seriously injured and nearly 1,500 died that night in London.

  People stood the strain of these raids for as long and as best they could. Some packed up quickly after heavy raids and sought relative safety in the countryside. Others trekked nightly out of town centres and slept on moors, in caves or forests nearby to escape the bombings. In Barrow’s raids, some people walked the five miles to nearby Dalton. During Plymouth’s April 1941 raid, when German raiders hit the city hard for five days in one week, masses walked out of the city at night and slept in barns, in churches, in ditches or under hedges. Some bedded down on Dartmoor, wrapping their children in rugs to stave off the bitter cold nights. When daylight came, they brushed themselves off and trekked back to the city to work.

  In the heaviest blitz on Birmingham, Alice Bridges had hoped to get out of the city, too, but, thwarted in her quest, she hunkered down in her Anderson shelter with a fatalistic attitude, some liquor and her diary. Although she kept a M-O diary for nearly a decade, it was during the 1940 Blitz that Bridges turned to her diary the most. From 1939 to 1949 she sometimes wrote sporadically, sending in brief diaries usually recounting a three-month time span. But with the Blitz, the difference is striking. Almost every day during the height of the Blitz, Alice wrote of her own experiences and actively sought out friends and neighbours, asked them about their stories, and told M-O about them. At significant points in her daily life, such as during the Blitz or a er major tiffs with her husband, she became detailed in her writing. M-O was not only a social research group for whom she volunteered, it was a friend to whom she could turn and offload her troubles. And, during those long and sleepless nights of autumn 1940 and spring 1941, she had plenty of time to do so.

  The constant barrage of the blitzes could work strangely on the mind. At times, the fear was intense – hands shook uncontrollably, stomachs churned, chests tightened and pangs struck at the heart. But the body and mind can take only so much for so long. Mundane thoughts would creep in and temporarily mitigate the fear. While Nella Last waited for ‘the end’, with her ceiling com
ing down in bits all around her, she thought of tea and wished she’d eaten the fruit salad she’d saved for another day. Friends told Alice, ‘Sometimes we feel all “het-up” and quite sick and ill at the thought of what is happening and what might happen and at other times, don’t care a damn.’

  ‘Taking it’ did not mean that one was impervious to the fear, but that one put on a brave face and remained outwardly calm while a titanic struggle to overcome that fear raged inside. Keeping up appearances, keeping to schedules and ‘acting’ normal was a crucial component in this battle. A factory roof might be blown off during a raid, office buildings reduced to rubble, but the workers came nonetheless, even if it took them hours to pick through blitzed streets or walk across miles of hills from where they sheltered for the night.

  Women were under considerable pressure to keep calm in front of their families – going to sit on the stairs to cry alone or finding refuge to allow a tear to fall in the darkness of the cinema. A brave face also meant a pretty face. Forgetting one’s appearance was evidence that the war had beat them.

  When Alice visited her friend, Jane, who had been bombed-out during the December raids, she was concerned by Jane’s appearance. Her hair was a mess, no make-up had been applied – indeed, her face was dirty – and there was a blank look in her eyes. Furthermore, the baby was fussy and the new house was a wreck. Alice sat with Jane and listened to her troubles. Bridges offered comfort by telling her that everything happened for a reason, but ultimately reminded her of her duty. She told her friend,

  Don’t you see that the whole happiness of this home depends on you … Frank [Jane’s husband] is trying to make the best of it and keep bright and the baby, you can’t expect him to be anything but naughty and altered if you are so altered.

  Alice then bathed the baby, cleaned the kitchen floor and did some laundry for her friend. Afterwards, Bridges was pleased to see her friend had washed and powdered her face, ‘We all look better for a bit of powder,’ she wrote. Now Jane could provide comfort to her family and face the war once again – if only in appearance.

  The Blitz lasted for nine gruelling months, from August 1940 to May 1941. Britain was given a respite from the intense bombings when Hitler’s desire for lands in the east led him to turn his attention on his erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. Invasion forces rolled into the USSR on 22 June 1941. Although bombers still visited Britain afterwards – Birmingham experienced the last of its seventy-seven raids in April 1943 – the intensity and coverage was never what it had been during late 1940 and early 1941. Over 43,000 civilians perished in the Blitz, and thousands more were injured. It would take nearly three years of war before military deaths would surpass the civilian deaths endured in nine months of the Blitz.

  Chapter Four: Oh God, What a Night

  1 Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 749.

  2 Quoted in Gardiner, Wartime Britain, p. 332.

  3 Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain, 1939–1945 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 141.

  4 Ibid., p. 144.

  5 Quoted Gardiner, Wartime Britain, p. 307.

  6 Quoted in William Shirer, The Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1939–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 496.

  7 Quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Macmillan, 2004), p. 122.

  8 T.C.G. James, The Battle of Britain, ed. and with an introduction by Sebastian Cox, (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 294.

  9 Gardiner, Wartime Britain, p. 350.

  10 Mass-Observation diarist 5318, 13 October 1941.

  11 Quoted in Calder, The People’s War, p. 204.

  12 Ibid., p. 179

  13 Quoted in ibid., p. 171.

  14 Carlton Jackson, Who Will Take Our Children?: The British Evacuation Program of World War II (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2008), p. 14

  15 Clyde Binfield, The History of the City of Sheffield, 1843–1993 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), vol. 2, p. 243.

  16 Mary Walton and Joseph Lamb, Raiders Over Sheffield: The Story of the Air Raids of 12th and 15th December 1940 (Sheffield: Sheffield City Libraries, 1980), p. 7.

  17 Ibid., pp. 12–17.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DOMESTIC SOLDIERS

  The wind and rain lashed violently against the window, and the cold and wild October morning seeped into her joints, making movement almost unbearable. Her body wanted to rest; indeed, at any other time, she would have stayed in bed all morning, hoping her husband might notice and bring her a cup of tea. It would not have been unusual, if the pain continued, for her to stay in bed the entire day or for several days. But that was before the war. This morning, 15 October 1942, Nella Last fought the pain, a determined ‘I am a soldier’ echoed through her mind, calling her wearied body to action. She had too much to do, too much to ever allow aching joints, a sour stomach or a splitting headache (one or more of these ailments afflicted her most mornings) to get in the way of her national service.

  From the beginning of the war, Nella Last had given her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons over to the WVS, where she knitted sewed supplies for hospitals and the armed services. In September 1941, and for the rest of the war, she sacrificed her Friday afternoons to work at Barrow’s canteen, feeding soldiers, sailors and workers who passed through looking for a hot meal and a friendly face. By the summer of 1942, she added to her already full schedule of responsibilities volunteering at a local Red Cross shop that raised funds for prisoners of war. She was a central figure in the shop’s inception and in its continuance in wartime, helping secure a storefront, finding and begging items from neighbours and friends to sell, cleaning and mending damaged goods to make them saleable, pricing, and running the shop on Mondays.

  This schedule left only Wednesdays and the weekends, and some mornings, to manage her home – also an important wartime service. Though she found this work increasingly difficult as her volunteering expanded, filling in the cracks of her leisure and domestic time, she was nonetheless loath to take the advice of Lady Reading, the head of the WVS, who urged her volunteers to ‘leave the house dirty’ and let their husbands ‘jolly well get on with a piece of bread’ – there was war work to be done.1 Nella’s house remained respectably clean throughout the war, and before she went out to volunteer she always left a hot meal warming by the fire for her husband when he arrived home.

  In between cooking and cleaning, making and mending clothes for her family, tending the garden and preparing scraps to feed her chickens, Nella’s sewing machine whirred and her fingers flew across knitting for the WVS and the Red Cross shop. If she permitted herself an indulgence, it was to make ‘dollies’ and stuffed animals for children in hospital or to sell in the shop: rabbits with funny faces, pink ‘piggies’, golliwogs, little ladies and gentlemen lovingly decked out with purses and top hats – whatever her mind could conjure with her scrap bag of cloth. Rarely did her busy schedule permit an escape into the fictional world of the cinema. Instead, her leisure often consisted of no more than snatching a nap here and there or walking along Walney Island with her husband and gazing out at the Irish Sea.

  As she contemplated the sea on those walks, she might have thought how her life had changed because of the war. ‘Not clever, not well-educated’, Nella described herself before the war broke out,

  … with a husband who shunned life and people and insisted I shared his views – or if I made a play and insisted on ‘‘being like other people’’ showed his feelings so plainly in public I quickly got back into the shell he liked so much.

  In the mid-1930s, Nella suffered a severe emotional breakdown that left her almost unable to walk. After numerous treatments, her doctor explained that the cause of the breakdown was ‘repression’ in her marriage. ‘What would happen to a kettle’, he asked her husband, ‘if you put a cork in the spout and tied the lid down tight
and yet kept it at boiling point?’ The point was lost on her husband, but Nella understood all too well.

  Nella had spent most of their marriage giving in to her husband’s moods and whims for the sake of domestic peace, quietly complying with his demands or trying to cheer him when he was depressed, but these efforts only papered over the trouble. Even if she was able to cheer him or draw him into conversation, Will quickly reverted to his quiet, stubborn moods, and with each compromise, she surrendered a little of herself.

  When she was younger, Nella told M-O, she had been vivacious, independent and inclined to adventure, but over thirty years of marriage had changed her. Reflecting on their marriage to a young neighbour, even Will noted Nella’s transformation, which he thought for the better: instead of ‘gadding about dancing’ (as he called it) and orchestrating romantic ‘moonlit picnics’, as she had done in her youth, Nella had settled down to marriage and become more like her husband. Will may have been satisfied with a more staid wife, but Nella resented the compromises she made of herself, realizing that ‘peace’ in the home slowly ate away at her own identity. Will was, she told M-O, a petty ‘dictator’ whose unanswerable trump to anything she wished to do was, ‘I feed and clothe you, don’t I? I’ve a right to say what you do.’