Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  From these statistics, adultery would seem to have increased during the war. This may be true, but it is not as simple as the statistics suggest. When marriages broke down, the courts accepted only a few reasons for divorce. One could sue for divorce based on cruelty, insanity, desertion or adultery – there was no recourse to divorce simply on irreconcilable differences, which was only an option after 1969. If, as was the case so often in the carpe diem of wartime, marriages were hastily formed with little real knowledge of one’s spouse, or separated couples found love elsewhere, it was difficult to dissolve the marriage once it was realized the two weren’t really compatible.

  In fact, some worked the system and employed the excuse of adultery in the absence of any other legal option to divorce. Stories abound of spousal collusion to create the illusion of adultery in order to escape an unhappy marriage. Individuals or couples could hire professionals to stage what was known as a ‘Brighton quickie’ – an artful ruse in which the name of one spouse was entered in the books of a hotel (usually in Brighton) with a person other than their spouse.2 The bill for the hotel was then ‘accidentally’ sent to the supposedly wronged party, inquiries were made and someone would be produced to corroborate the story. Although Helen Mitchell never goes into details, it seems that one of her friends ‘faked a divorce’ in a similar manner. Helen was intrigued. Perhaps she toyed with the idea herself, but it seems unlikely that her husband would have entered into such intrigue or believed any ruse she might construct on her own. The courts did become wise to this type of judicial manipulation and often refused to grant a divorce if collusion was suspected.

  Sometimes divorce was not an option because the costs were too high. This is certainly the case up to 1949, when Legal Aid was expanded to help civilians who could not bear the financial burden of divorce. Barring legal recourse to marital dissolution, however, individuals escaped unhappy marriages by moving out and setting up house with another person. This was often the case for those who could not afford divorce and for those who were denied divorce by the courts.

  On the other hand, divorce was the pathway of last resort for many, especially women; there was a strong degree of commitment to marriage, even if they were dissatisfied with the relationship. Both in the home and in the media at the time, there was a sense that a woman’s primary role in marriage was to ensure its success, regardless of personal needs or desires. In her ‘Be a Success’ column in Woman’s Own, Rosita Forbes, a regular wartime columnist for the magazine, dealt with the issue of marital discord by answering one young ‘frantic’ wife’s pleading question, ‘Is there any life after marriage?’ ‘It’s all so awfully different from what I thought,’ the young woman complained:

  … just cooking and cleaning and listening to a man grumbling and seeing him leave things about. I thought it would be fine to have a man to talk to and discuss things with, but it hasn’t turned out like that at all.

  Forbes responded with empathy, noting that, ‘Wives, of course, do have a lot to put up with.’ Husbands could be critical, demanding, and sullen, she acknowledged, but the solution to the problem ultimately lay in the young woman’s hands. There was ‘life after marriage’, Forbes assured the young woman. The successful wife needed only to be adaptable. ‘Change yourself to fit being married. It really is less trouble,’ Forbes advised.3

  Indeed, despite her discontent with being adaptable and ‘changing’ to fit her husband’s needs and moods, Nella Last nonetheless believed she had a successful marriage. Hers was not a transcendent, intense love affair, but rather a practical one. Great love did exist, she admitted to M-O, but for ‘ordinary’ women like her, one had to rely on more than love. What made her marriage a success turned less on love, she figured, than on ‘toleration’ – hers alone. Alice Bridges also believed her marriage to be a success story. In her mind, once ‘the glamour of love and physical attraction’ faded, friendship was key, as was a ‘mutual mental and spiritual intercourse’. On the other hand, she also believed that the successful marriage hinged upon a woman having ‘affection, keep[ing] herself … fresh and always sweet’ and maintaining a sense of humour. If this was done, ‘She will always keep her husband’s love,’ Alice stated with confidence. Like Nella, Alice also believed that the responsibility for the success of a marriage lay almost entirely with the wife.

  While wartime and the years immediately afterwards did see something of a breakdown of these notions and an increase in divorces, it cannot be denied that the war did create unique circumstances that threw men and women together and created the foundations and opportunities for infidelity. Long-term separations, like Natalie experienced, were one of the reasons for extra-marital affairs. Loneliness and the psychological stress caused by worry for loved ones or the physical and emotional pain of bearing the tragedy and destruction of blitzes alone provided the impetus for finding comfort in another’s arms. But the call that brought women increasingly into national service, whether it be in factory work or voluntary work, also provided prime opportunities to mix with the opposite sex.

  This fact underpinned many of the arguments against bringing women into what was then considered the male domain. Concerns abounded that women in factories were a distraction to the men with whom they worked side by side. In one factory, the management sent fifty-three women home for wearing tight sweaters. Although they argued that sweaters posed safety hazards because they might catch fire or become snagged on machinery, it seems likely that the sweaters represented more of a danger to the male workers than to the women. Those who disagreed with the dismissals noted sharply that, ‘A small figure in a large sweater might be a threat to safety, a big girl in a small sweater was only a moral hazard to men.’

  Shop rules were put in place to minimize such distractions as well-endowed women in tight sweaters. For instance, in one factory, women were required to wear trousers because the work involved stair climbing. Other factories kept women deemed ‘virgins’ – in this case young unmarried women, ‘old maids’ and widows – separate from other workers.4

  While some saw dangers in the intimacy of the workplace, the blackout was also cause for concern, because it provided perfect cover for romantic trysts. Since night-time was the primary scene for fire watching and ARP duty, the mixing of men and women in these jobs came under particular scrutiny for those who saw families and the moral fabric of society disintegrating before their eyes. In September 1942, eligible women were required to participate in fire watching. Because of the moral panic stirred up by the mixing of men and women on such night shifts, the government soon took steps to ensure that men and women had separate sleeping accommodations when they were engaged on fire-watching duties.

  It was precisely this wartime moral panic that prompted Alice Bridges to investigate liaisons between men and women in various mixed-sex situations such as ARP duty and dance halls. M-O’s mission to observe and understand British society provided an excuse for Alice to embark on these investigations. She was never officially employed by the organization, but purely of her own volition dutifully reported her observations to them. Many Mass-Observers did report what they heard or saw others doing in the course of their daily routine, but Alice continually placed herself in circumstances that would allow her to study what she called ‘sex life’. While she assured M-O that her investigations were entirely innocent, it is obvious that she soon became dangerously entangled in less-than-above-board situations.

  Alice’s investigations began in earnest after a row with her husband in March 1942 over her attempts to find a suitable wartime occupation. From the beginning of the war, Alice had fought her husband and her poor health to find ways to do her bit for the war effort. In fact, the need to do something for the country was so intense that the anxiety ‘strained’ her heart so much that Alice reported that she ‘nearly went deaf’ worrying over ways in which she could help.

  She looked for volunteer work, considered paid employment and schemed various ideas to be helpful, but her husband
continually thwarted her efforts. She complained:

  He wouldn’t let me adopt a small Dutch evacuee … he didn’t want me in ARP, too many men about, he didn’t want me to do war work, it would knock me up and who would look after Jacqueline and him? … He didn’t want me to adopt any one in the services, cost too much for parcels and they’d only want to visit. He didn’t like it when I suggested we had a Canadian for the first Xmas as a guest.

  Finally, however, despite his protestations, she did join the ARP and slowly became involved in the work. But Alice’s intransigence irked her husband, and he insisted she give it up, and her newfound friends, so that she could focus on her family – on him, in particular.

  If she were to give up her friends, Alice pressed her husband to tell her what he was prepared to offer her in return. ‘He looked astonished and said “Nothing, what do you expect?”’ ‘The same old answer,’ she quietly seethed, ‘he soon asks me to give and to give but in no way in thirteen years has he ever given me anything.’ He may have felt he had won the argument, but the issue was nowhere near being resolved in Alice’s mind.

  The next day, he stayed out late drinking on a cold and ‘perishing’ evening with his friends, despite the fact he had severe bronchitis. That night she paced the kitchen – walking past the supper going cold on the table – worrying over him, but becoming more and more angry each time she thought of his staying out late without telling her:

  7.30 came and 8.30 came and 9.30 came and 10.30 came and no Les, I couldn’t do ‘‘nothing’’ so I went in the kitchen and started washing a few clothes and as I stood at the sink the tears poured out of my eyes and never stopped.

  When he finally walked in, he mumbled he was sorry, but Alice let loose a torrent of tears that broke forth so violently he became concerned and promised to be more respectful of her feelings in future. Several days later, when the two had apparently reconciled, she felt comfortable enough to ask him why he couldn’t be more of a companion to her.

  The issue was no longer just about her doing something useful for the country, it was also about the fact that he spent more time with his mates and kept her home alone, night in, night out. It was a sore wound, picked at over and over throughout their marriage, and the tenuous domestic peace once again evaporated. To her, their relationship would be perfect if only he would take her dancing, to the movies or spend more time with her. Alice told him she appreciated that he gave her enough money to run the household, and she had no complaints about their sex life, but there was more to a relationship than that. She complained that he was unwilling to go that extra step, to make the marriage ‘100 per cent’: Les’ patience now razor thin, he shot back, ‘You can go out where you like so long as you don’t ask me to take you.’ This was the pass she needed. From this moment onwards, Alice decided to take her husband at his word. That very night, as he went to the local with his mates, she went out with her ARP friends and started her research for M-O in earnest.

  On some nights she patrolled darkened Birmingham as an ARP warden. But after the last major blitz on the city in May 1941, there was relatively little action in the skies. The same could not be said about the streets.

  On duty a few weeks after she volunteered, Alice and another warden walked alone through the blackout. Vic slipped his arm around her waist ‘as though it belonged there’. Alice didn’t balk: it was all in the interest of science. In fact, she had tried to meet Vic alone once before, but when he appeared at the appointed rendezvous point, with his wife in tow, Alice breezed by the couple as though nothing were amiss. This evening, as they walked together, she left his arm where it was, but told him she was only interested in him ‘from the fun side’.

  Alice was curious about men’s behaviour under the cover of darkness, but since Les wasn’t interested in going out with her, she was also searching for a companion to take her dancing, to the cinema or simply an ear to bend. When it was clear that Vic wanted more than a movie date and sparkling conversation, she told him she had no intention of becoming sexually involved with him. She was ‘fun starved, not love starved’. Furthermore, she blasted, Vic could never measure up to her husband, ‘who was an artist at lovemaking’, in her eyes. As they approached the ARP post, she gave Vic a kiss (‘all he’s ever likely to get from me’) and bade him adieu.

  A week later, she fixed Vic a cup of tea and flirted with him at the ARP post. ‘I intrigue him, I tease him, I tantalize him, he gets worked up to fever pitch,’ she boasted to M-O, ‘and then I tell him it’s time he went.’ After he left, she went out on patrol with a Mr F, but his embrace reminded her of a ‘jelly fish’, so she shook him off and beat it back to the post. ‘It just goes to prove how everything, the blackout … the wardens’ hours … can and does make morals lax,’ she mused in her diary. She, however, was entirely ‘above board’, she promised M-O. ‘What fun I can get decently I’m going to.’

  Alice ‘tantalized’ Vic all that summer, but when he failed to meet her one night, she slit his tyres. Just to make him squirm, she told Vic that she was writing about ‘sex life in the area’ and had committed their tryst to paper, expecting it would be published soon. He ‘nearly passed out’, she reported, pleased with herself for bringing him down a few pegs. But Vic had not seen the back of her: Alice confided to M-O mischievously, ‘I haven’t finished with his peace of mind yet.’

  Although she continued to volunteer at the ARP and to taunt Vic, by 1943 Alice’s curiosity about ‘sex life in the area’ led her to spend more and more time at the local casino. Here, she would eye the crowd from the balcony, make eye contact with interesting-looking men and await an offer to dance. Whether she danced or waited, Alice persuaded the men around her to talk about their private lives and about current issues so that she could report the conversations to M-O. She asked a Canadian soldier what he thought of Britain, and he responded that everything was out-dated and ran too slowly. Other men talked about their personal philosophies – most of which centred on the pursuit of happiness to the exclusion of all else. After dancing with a black GI, she learned from a ‘large fat (let the war go on, I’m doing alright) man’ that no American would ever ask her to dance if she danced with a black soldier. Alice wasn’t worried. Americans had a reputation for being cocky and immature, she said, and she could do without them.

  Some of these conversations led to long-term relationships. While she enjoyed mixing with various men at the casino, Alice preferred a reliable dance partner. Since some men were reluctant to dance, others poor dancers, and still others looked too shady for a turn on the dance floor, a dance partner ensured that she regularly danced, which – though she sometimes protested otherwise – as the war progressed, seemed more important than her scientific mission.

  She met Fred at the casino in the spring of 1943, and since she liked him and he was an excellent dancer, he soon became her regular dance partner, but by October, the relationship had become serious. Fred turned up at her house when Les was at work, brought her gifts (many of which could only be appreciated in wartime, such as a No. 8 battery), and wrote letters professing his love to her. Alice resisted, telling him she did not love him, insisting all she wanted was a friend, and threatening to break it off. They continued to go dancing, but he was so sullen that Alice complained she could find no fun in it. Finally, she scheduled a meeting with him to discuss the relationship. She met him in town, brought him home and made him tea. If they couldn’t be friends, Alice told Fred, the relationship was over. He told her his delicate state was her fault: ‘Fred says it’s the fact that I’m so darned good that’s made him fall in a big way for me.’ He then made vague remarks about ending his life, to which she responded a bit callously that she knew an excellent place where he could do so without raising suspicions.

  When Alice appeared at the casino the next week, Fred was there, and they spent the afternoon together. He was still ‘glum’ and Alice was irritated that he ruined her fun. She came home late that night and met Les just as he was goin
g out of the door for firewatching duty. He was ‘steamed up boiling pitch’: tea wasn’t ready, the blackout hadn’t been installed and the fire hadn’t been made up. He left without eating or changing out of his work clothes. Alice gave him a feeble lie to explain her tardiness, but she ‘felt like a pig’ for the intrigue. It made it worse that Les was drenched to the bone by a cloudburst after going out.

  Les’ misadventure in the rain caused bronchitis to settle in his chest, and on his birthday several days later, he was in bed. That didn’t stop Fred from coming by to see Alice. She did tell Les that she had a visitor, but Alice explained to M-O that she wanted to spare Les the ‘disadvantage’ of being seen in his dressing gown by her dancing partner, so she didn’t let on who the visitor was. With Les in bed upstairs, Fred watched Alice wash the dishes – ‘not exactly conducive to romance’, she admitted. When Fred did anything ‘saucy’, she playfully splashed him with water. Once the dishes were finished, she walked Fred down to the end of the street. He left without his usual kiss because Alice knew ‘the eyes’ of the neighbourhood were upon them.

  ‘The eyes’ watched Alice’s intrigues – they knew when Fred stopped by, they had witnessed Alice toy with men at neighbourhood dances and they knew that Alice entertained more than one man while Les was at work. The gossip was scathing, but she told M-O she didn’t care. The liaisons with Fred and with others at the dances, she reasoned, were mostly good copy for M-O, and the men who stopped in during the day were there for her advice.

  For several years, she went to a weekly ‘discussion group’ led by a psychologist. They talked over common texts and debated current psychological questions. She took the knowledge gleaned from these discussions and counselled anyone who asked for help. In fact, while Les was kept generally in the dark about the dancing partners, he knew about the advice his wife doled out; he was sometimes present when the men called in the evening, and she was very open about it. She was not, however, forthcoming about kissing her dancing partners. Les was jealous of the various men in her life, but most of it was a vague jealousy, for she never gave him any solid evidence of what went on in private. He never knew the line that his wife had drawn in these relationships.