Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  Increasingly, after they’d married, she stayed at home and lost touch with friends because Will did not want to go out and therefore, he made clear, neither should she. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Nella said, she constantly felt ‘outside of things’; she had few social contacts and her husband expected to accompany her whenever she went out. If she did insist on going out, he would invariably act so rude or morose that she quickly became embarrassed and abandoned her plans. With her doctor’s help, Nella realized that her ‘weak mindedness and eternal giving in was killing me’. The doctor recommended a colourful hat and several solo trips to whist games, which put her on the road to recovery.

  That recovery was fleeting. Bit by bit, as the 1930s came to a close, Nella found herself once again giving in, to avoid conflict in her home. By the start of the war, she had relapsed and suffered yet another breakdown. To make matters worse, the last bright spots in her existence, her sons, were leaving home. Arthur’s work as a tax accountant took him to Manchester, and Cliff was in the second call-up for the army and would be off soon. ‘I felt all go – I felt so useless to help,’ she confided in her diary. The war offered Nella new opportunities, and she cast around for ways to be helpful, not just on patriotic impulse – although that was certainly a factor – but also to keep her from worrying over her sons, and perhaps, like the colourful hat, in an effort to loosen the ‘cork’ of a repressive marriage that so often plunged her into devastating emotional throes.

  Walking the streets of Barrow in the first days of the war, she stopped and stared at a ‘big, brave poster’: ‘YOUR COURAGE. YOUR CHEERFULNESS. YOUR ENDURANCE. WILL BRING US VICTORY’. She let the words seep into memory, silently tumbling them over and over in her mind. People always told her she was cheerful, and anyone can endure, she mused. Taking a deep breath, she cast her eyes to the heavens and prayed to God to give her strength to live up to this civilian call to arms. She thought of Cliff going into the army and at that moment, as men and women rushed past her in the streets of Barrow, she ‘vowed to be a soldier too’.

  Little did she know how much her life would be changed by that simple vow; with it, she had enlisted in the People’s War, where everyone had work to do, even if it was just to endure. But Nella went far beyond simply enduring for her country. As we have seen, she volunteered for the ARP and the WVS, and, a day after Britain declared war, she was in her garden laying out a hen house and digging up flowers to make way for cabbages, potatoes, and the other vegetables she would need to feed her family. Like a soldier, she had her hair cut into a time-saving shorter style, but by no means did this mean that she let herself go.

  As a domestic soldier, it was important to uplift morale, and taking time to look ones’ best was a significant part of this duty. Beautifully made-up women were so crucial to the war effort that the government never rationed cosmetics, despite the fact that make-up used valuable wartime materials such as petroleum. Indeed, women’s beauty bolstered male morale, as movie star Gary Cooper informed wartime Good Housekeeping readers. He ‘thanked God’ for women’s beauty in times of crisis, for, he thought, it was a tangible indicator of women’s natural ability to create calm and inspire men to greatness.2

  Nella agreed, and often had scathing opinions of women who were careless about their appearance, as she felt such attitudes undermined the war effort. She was indignant when she saw slovenly women in long trousers pushing prams along the streets of Barrow in the spring of 1942. ‘Many women’, she complained to M-O, ‘are seizing the excuse of there being a war on to give full rein to the sloppy, lazy streak in their make-up.’ Even on the days when she was overwhelmed with work, fighting a headache or backache, Nella was always careful to keep her hair tidy, her lipstick and rouge cheery and her dress feminine. She could understand and even forgive women becoming a little ‘lazy’ during the hottest times of the Blitz, but it had been a year since Barrow had a major raid. There was certainly no excuse to shirk one’s duty, Nella thought.

  Beneath this conviction about one’s appearance lay the idea that a woman’s foremost duty on the home front was to combat defeatism, and amongst the women at the WVS Last was known to raise a smile in a gloomy room, spreading peace and cheerfulness among her comrades at the centre. It was a skill she had honed not just throughout her marriage, but all her life.

  As a child, she had tried to lighten up the unhappy and volatile home in which she grew up, and vowed never to recreate the same contentious domestic situation of her childhood when she married. Instead, she made it a point to fashion a sanctuary out of her home – a peaceful and safe haven for her husband and sons, ‘where’ she hoped, ‘the door will close on all hurting things’ after a hard day’s work, play or school. If her sons ever got into an argument, she shooed them out the door and expected them to work out their differences before they came back inside. In the pursuit of creating such a refuge, however, she buried deep feelings of frustration and a nagging suspicion that she’d lost a sense of self and freedom.

  In the First World War, Nella spread laughter among the injured servicemen on visits to the hospital in Southampton. And when Britain found itself in conflict again in 1939, Nella mustered her talents once more for the nation. She knew, as the government poster had stressed, that cheerfulness and endurance would help win the war. Taking the messages in the poster to heart, Nella joked around with shopkeepers on her shopping rounds and uplifted the spirits of the women in the WVS centre with a mixture of silliness and quiet, resolute confidence in the nation’s cause. Indeed, Mrs Waite, the head of hospital supply, told Last that her ‘saucy tongue’ inspired much-needed levity at the centre and soothed her comrades’ nerves when they were on edge.

  * * *

  Joking in the face of adversity and maintaining composure was an essential duty for the domestic soldier. For the sake of morale, it was also important to keep up the appearance that life continued as usual. This was an almost impossible task, given the scarcities of staples such as eggs and milk, and the imposition of rationing.

  The availability of rations was ensured by the process of registration: each person or household registered with a retailer, and stocks were refilled according to the number of registrants at each retailer. Rationing was intended to guarantee that everyone got their ‘fair share’ of food at a fair price – a necessity for a country that imported most of its food and animal fodder. Ration books were issued in late-September 1939, but the official rationing scheme did not begin until 8 January 1940. At first, only sugar (12 oz), butter (4 oz), ham and bacon (4 oz) were rationed. Over the course of the war, the weekly allowances per person fluctuated according to availability, and the list of rationed foods grew to include meat, cheese, margarine, cooking fats, preserves and tea.

  Edie Rutherford was an avid champion of the rationing scheme, agreeing with the social justice of ‘fair shares’ inherent in the programme. Those who tried to skirt the scheme were particularly loathsome to Edie, and every time she met with one, or was prodded by shopkeepers to take more than her fair share, she was furious. She knew others took advantage of the black market, or stretched the rules and received betterquality items or more than she did. But if butchers winked or shop clerks nodded, Rutherford refused to play the game.

  From 1941, the distribution of milk and eggs came under the rationing scheme. One might expect about an egg a week – more for children or expectant mothers – but the reality was that – unless one kept poultry, as Nella Last did – a shell egg was a rarity. Instead, many made do with the dried eggs that were introduced in the summer of 1942. Other hard-to-find items, such as tinned food or sweets, were put on a points scheme. Points could be used at any retailer on a variety of items. One exercised a degree of choice under the scheme: an entire monthly allocation of points could be spent on a ‘luxury’ item such as a can of first-grade tinned salmon, or one could make the points go further by purchasing several, less exciting, foods over the course of the month. There was no guarantee of availability for an
y given item; the only guarantee was that people could find something on which to spend their points.

  If Edie were given the authority, she would have extended rationing to even more goods than were already officially controlled. She believed that rationing would stave off wasteful behaviour, especially the wild abandon with which the residents in her block of flats squandered bread. A continual complaint of hers was that the English (she was South African) wouldn’t eat day-old bread and that she regularly saw entire loaves thrown in trash bins.

  Rutherford supported those who advocated adding bread to the list of rationed items, but, as bread was generally considered a staple for working-class diets, this was such an unpopular move that the government postponed making such a decision until after the war. Instead, it incrementally increased the extraction rate of wheat in flour to 85 per cent, turning the ever-popular white bread into an unattractive shade of brown and resulting in what most people considered the largely inedible ‘national wheatmeal loaf’. The Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, pointing to the middle of one such loaf, complained at a meeting of the War Cabinet that the bread was ‘indigestible’, and let out a belch to make his point.3 About 86 per cent of the population, including Rutherford, agreed with Bevin.

  As it did with the national loaf, the wartime government sought to make the most out of fabric and other materials destined for the consumer market, with the so-called ‘utility’ products introduced in 1942. Like the National Loaf, Rutherford heartily disliked anything utility. It could be that she, like others, recoiled at the term itself. It was unattractive, it certainly had no glamour to it and, indeed, ‘utility’ seemed somehow to evoke all the gloom of austerity in one word. In utility, fashion took a backseat to thrift: embroidery and appliqué work were forbidden, the widths of hems and sleeves standardized, the number of buttonholes and pockets reduced (a fact that irked many men) and socks were shortened, to name some of the design limitations. In an effort to combat the gloom of style restrictions, the Board of Trade went to respected London fashion designers for smart designs that required little fabric or materials. The same principle applied to the entire line of utility goods, which included furniture, household linens and crockery. Many women, once they got over the initial revulsion of the word, with all its connotations of uniformity and ugliness, found that there was actually a reasonable range of choice and style, as well as quality.

  Rutherford, however, was unmoved. To her, utility meant lack of quality, and she did her best to avoid it. Edie rarely held back opinions in her diary, a fact that M-O seemed to appreciate. When M-O sent a note thanking her for her ‘piquant observations’, she chuckled heartily, as did her husband. ‘Well, I say just what I think,’ she explained and then added, ‘If everyone did, I reckon this world would progress further.’

  Indeed, Rutherford was certain that the shoddiness of such products was behind the scene she witnessed in a local shop. ‘Yesterday’, she wrote, ‘I saw something happen which I have up to now only had happen to me in a nightmare.’ Edie was waiting for a woman in front of her to be served, when, ‘Suddenly her pink silk knickers fell on the floor.’ Shocked, the woman shot a ‘wild glance’ around to see who was nearby, gathered up the offending knickers, then stumbled behind the counter and into a backroom. ‘I bet they were Utility pants,’ Edie joked.

  During the war, and until 1954 when rationing was finally lifted, the price and availability of food, furniture, clothing and other scarce commodities were as much sources of conversation (and grumbling) as the weather. Irene Grant often wondered where the rabbits she used to buy in the butcher’s had disappeared to, and nearly all the women were regularly indignant about the price of less-than-appetizing produce at the greengrocer’s. Grant, Bridges and Rutherford all worried over how to feed their hard-working husbands on the meagre meat rations. Like most women, their solution usually came down to sacrificing their own rations to their husbands. Five years into rationing, Irene’s daughter Marjorie wondered wistfully, ‘What did we used to eat in the days before the war?’ Her mother responded with a mouth-watering array of pre-war foods: fresh fish, sausages, fresh tomatoes, bananas, mushrooms and fruit. Still, despite the maddening lack of variety, Irene was thankful for rationing and points; she knew that without them, her family would have starved.

  Rationing and scarcity required a great deal of ingenuity and skill on the part of the domestic soldier. Women had to navigate the uncertain food supply and come up with tasty and nutritious meals to feed their families – ideally without letting their families know how frustrating and difficult the task was – and Nella Last excelled at all of it. Her ‘Gran’ had taught her many cookery skills that stood her in good stead amid the austere restrictions of rationing. Nella was so successful at keeping her husband in the dark about her economies that once, at the beginning of the war, he chastised her for seeming to disregard the scarcities. ‘It’s time you realized there’s a WAR on,’ he scolded her after a particularly enjoyable lunch. She only laughed and told him not to worry, as it was well worth the happiness it gave him. His ignorance also proved her skill. Privately, she wondered what she could have done to make the meal any cheaper: two days’ soup, toast with a scrape of marg and some leftover herrings on top, and apples that had been given to them cost her a mere 6d.

  Nella was determined to make her home a shelter against wartime conditions and privations for her husband and her sons, when they visited. She saved ‘bits and bobs’, an egg white here or the rare tin of fruit there, for months in anticipation of such visits or other special occasions. Despite shortages and rationing, she made her sons feel loved and special by creating festive pre-war meals with ersatz ingredients, culinary tricks and thoughtful management – and a colourful spray of flowers to complement the experience. Her sons marvelled at her abilities and often praised her for them – little gems of recognition that lifted her spirit. Their ‘cries of delight’ over her domestic genius were ‘enough to recompense for hours of thought and work’, she told M-O.

  While Nella craved the praise and recognition, she also made sure to create a certain mystique about her talents. ‘It does not do to let men know about “domestic economy”,’ she wrote in her diary. At the same time, as more and more women entered the workforce or volunteered more of their time during the war, there was a push to get men to do more of their share around the house. A comment in Woman’s Own magazine may have made some consider that their husband’s help in the home was actually a patriotic duty during wartime. The magazine asked:

  Would your husband think he was losing caste if he helped with housework, shopping? Most still think so, especially in the industrial north, but they must change their views now wives are on war work.4

  Yet there was also a palpable sense that letting men in on the ‘secrets’ of women’s work might destabilize the home and women’s position in it – and at the very least, create more work as a result of men’s domestic incompetence.

  Comedic Mrs Fusspottle, a feature also found in Woman’s Own, famous for her wartime gaffs, such as spreading obviously ridiculous rumours about the IRA ‘pinching our barrage balloons’, related a humorous story about leaving her brother-in-law, Chalmers, in charge of the home for a few hours. It all started when Chalmers told her that women’s work in the home wasn’t difficult. In fact, he said, it was all a lot of ‘female propaganda’ designed to make men feel sorry for their wives, and once husbands found out that their wives in fact did very little, the ‘divorce courts will be working overtime’.

  No self-respecting housewife could fail to pick up the gauntlet after such provocation, and thus Mrs Fusspottle left him with a list of the things she and his wife did on a daily basis. ‘You can’, she told him,

  … sweep and dust through the house, polish the floor boards, wash up the breakfast things, clean the grates, get in the coal – remembering Total Economy – prepare the vegetables, cook the dinner, make a pudding so forth from A to Z.

  But that was not all. A
fter that, Chalmers could,

  Polish the silver in your spare time, clean round the bath … shake the doormats and carpets and hearthstone the fireplaces and doorsteps, not to mention put out the Pig Wash and Waste Paper for salvage and rubbing up the door handles.

  Mrs Fusspottle and her sister came home to find ‘Chalmers in a sweat, all mixed up with furniture and carpets and brooms and smeared with black lead, swearing to himself, tripping over things’.5 He’d put his broom through a pane of glass, knocked over a lamp stand and smashed the shade, spilt coal dust and ashes over the floor, broken two cups and a glass and plate while he was washing up, fallen over the pig wash bucket, and ruined dinner. So, lesson learned: perhaps it was not a very good idea to let husbands in on their wives’ daily round.

  On the other hand, a woman as talented as Last in domestic arts and – especially in wartime – those of scrimping and saving, was obligated to pass such wisdom to other domestic soldiers. She sent advice to Ambrose Heath, a culinary expert on the morning radio programme, Kitchen Front, which offered recipes and tips on rationing. Perhaps to enlighten and assist those at M-O, she also sprinkled her diaries liberally with detailed recipes. And certainly, her skills were welcomed among the women at the WVS.

  The domestic know-how that helped her feed her family during the difficult inter-war period had once gone unnoticed to all but herself. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nella felt it unrespectable to let neighbours know that she employed what she referred to as ‘dodges’, or economies that saved the family money but did not scrimp on taste or style. In wartime, however, this changed. Under the restrictions of rationing, those ‘dodges’ became badges of honour.

  When a colleague from the WVS appeared on her front step in late-August 1941 and asked Last to become an ‘advisory cook’ for mobile canteen units in Barrow, Nella was incredibly flattered. Having worked hard, day in, day out, managing a home and family with little encouragement or praise before the war, Nella slowly began to realize that the same domestic duties that had been taken for granted by her family were actually skills and talents worthy of notice. Indeed, something that she did well, something that defined her life and experience as a housewife and mother, was now flush with value. It was, as Nella might say, a ‘tonic’ to her spirit and a boost to her self-confidence. After Last accepted the offer, and the colleague had gone, her husband wondered aloud at the newfound vigour exuded by his wife of thirty years. ‘You know, you amaze me really,’ he said, ‘when I think of the wretched health you had just before the war, and how long it took you to recover from that nervous breakdown.’ Nella wasn’t surprised.