To Phyllis’s relief Mum was overruled by Dad, and in 1933 she took her first apprehensive steps away from the crowded, working-class, patriarchal world of her childhood. A better accent and a better life beckoned, alongside dreams of romance and escape from her proletarian background. But by the time she was sixteen it was 1938. Dad sat gloomily at home reading the newspaper reports about mass unemployment and the threat of war.
In June 1939, aged seventeen, Phyllis Noble joined the ranks of the so-called ‘business girls’. She was to be a ledger clerk at the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate. Her workplace was a gloomy, noisy Victorian hall. Seated on a backless stool before her cumbersome ledger machine (a kind of monstrous typewriter), Phyllis was one of hundreds like her who spent their days sorting through piles of cheques, orders and statements to reconcile the bank’s accounts. Prospects for women in this world were ‘virtually nil’. Like their working-class counterparts, the maidservants in their basements and pantries, the business girls tended to be time-servers, dreaming of ensnaring their boss or male colleague into marriage. Then they could leave:
For women the main road was to matrimony. Judging by the total absence of married women and the scarcity of older, unmarried ones, this was a destination which most women who strayed into the banking world reached soon enough. And indeed with so many young men around, head office at least served well as a marriage market.
Years later, Phyllis told the story of her teenage years and early adulthood in two short memoirs entitled A Green Girl (1983) and Coming of Age in Wartime (1988). She had grown up, married a man named Peter Willmott and become, not a film star or a literary virtuoso, but a respected social scientist. There is little to set her early life apart from the great mass of the working class to which she belonged – so what made her think her unexceptional adolescence was interesting enough to be the material for a book? And yet it is, for the reason that she lived through extraordinary times. Phyllis’s life, like that of millions of her contemporaries in mid-twentieth century Britain, was about to be shaken to its foundations by uncontrollable international events. It would never recover its stability.
For skinny Jean McFadyen – like Phyllis, born in 1922 – a life of obscurity and narrow horizons was also about to be changed for ever. Jean had been brought up in a remote country area of Argyllshire. With an ailing mother and little twin sisters who needed looking after, she left school at thirteen-and-a-half to help. But when her mother regained her health the family couldn’t afford to keep Jean in education. There was no local work for girls, so at the earliest opportunity her parents sent her off to be housemaid to a landowner in Inveraray. ‘I was the junior of the housemaids, so I got all the dirty work to do …’ From morning till night there were beds to make, commodes to empty, grates to black-lead. Eighty years ago there was nothing unusual in such a life for a country-born Scottish teenager, but even then Jean could sense that there was no future in it. ‘It was a dead-end job,’ she recalls. ‘I was seventeen – very quiet and shy, and I hadna mixed very much with people my own age. But I knew there was other things in the world. I knew there was something that I was not having, and I wanted a share of it.’ The disaster that befell Europe a few years later brought untold evil and tribulation, but for Jean the Second World War was to offer an education, a chance of liberty and a source of self-confidence.
Five hundred miles away in Somerset, Patience Chadwyck-Healey, the daughter of a city businessman, was growing up to be waited on by young women like Jean. The Chadwyck-Healey family divided its time between London and a country residence near to Exmoor. ‘We rode and hunted all day - I lived in the saddle. There was a large staff who looked after us, and we were brought up not to go into the kitchen or do anything for ourselves. In fact my aunt was proud of the fact that she didn’t know how to make a cup of tea.’ Patience was born in 1917; in her nineties she is still poised and sprightly, a product of her class. Her education consisted of day school in London, followed by six months being ‘finished’ in Paris (‘as so many of us did’). In 1935 she donned her ostrich feathers and was presented at Court, before ‘doing’ two glitzy seasons as a debutante. ‘We were very ignorant and romantic … attracted in a starry-eyed way to the young chaps we were dancing with. I had no ambitions. I lived very much in the present and enjoyed what there was. I don’t ever remember thinking ahead as to what my eventual life might be. I think I hoped that it would be rather nice if I met a young man …’ For a brief moment Patience considered doing an outside course at university, ‘… but I had no idea how it worked. Then they wrote back and told me I had to sit some exams, so I thought better of it.’ Nothing had prepared this young lady for the approaching derailment of her privileged life at the age of just twenty-two.
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As ‘children of the Armistice’, growing up in the 1930s, these women were just three of millions swept into the conflict that descended on our nation in 1939. The men who embarked on that war certainly did so in part to secure and perpetuate a way of life in which young women like Phyllis, Jean and Patience continued to take after their maternal role models, flush away the contents of commodes for their betters and look decorative in the saddle and at dances. Those men dared all, flew Spitfires, fought Fascism, suffered in prison camps and died in their thousands to preserve an ideal – an ideal of womanhood.
The story told in this book is the story of that ideal: of what it was, what became of it and the reality that lay beneath it. It’s the story of a generation of young women caught up by the whirlwind of war and dropped down again in a different world not of their own making. And it sets out to tell how and why their stable position in that pre-war world, along with so much that they had taken for granted, was dislodged and blown apart by the Second World War, only to be reconstituted after 1945.
They were schoolgirls and business girls, brides, mothers and daughters, poor and privileged; some settled in the marital groove, others looking for love; reaching out to adulthood, or in their prime. These women were preoccupied by concerns that have always filled the minds of their sex: home and husband, boyfriends, family, work, exams, money, social life. If contemporary newspapers and magazines are anything to go on, shopping, childcare, the talkies, wireless programmes, Agatha Christie, knitting patterns, beauty and recipes preoccupied the waking hours of many of them. They revered the royal family. Despite the rise of socialism and industrial unrest, their media were as obsessed with the ruling classes as ours are with celebrities, and any class mobility there might have been in the 1930s was still only superficial. At the opposite end of the social scale from Patience Chadwyck-Healey and her kind was the ‘socially lower’ girl: meek and passive, she knew that the world of the posh girl who ‘talked lovely’ was beyond her reach. And yet the poor girl and the deb shared something. Neither looked for any other escape route than marriage.
But happiness was within easy grasp. Kay Mellis, now in her late eighties, was brought up in Edinburgh in the late 1930s. She speaks with the light, tripping accents of a town-bred Scot – in what she calls her ‘how d’ye do’ way of talking. Kay left school at fourteen and was bound apprentice to an Edinburgh dressmaker for five shillings a week. But she felt young for her age:
I was still going out to play on my bike when I was fifteen. In those days people were more satisfied with their way of life. Our expectations were to be able to live comfortably from Friday to Friday. We were far, far more content than they are nowadays – we didn’t expect the man in the moon to come down and say hello to us! At that age we had no idea what a war was going to be …
Kay’s community was tightly knit. On Sunday nights teenagers would meet at Bible class; Kay had known Alastair Wight, whom she would eventually marry, since their schooldays together. His brother had married her sister – why look further?
Privileged and unprivileged, most of them were innocent about sex. Margaret Herbertson, a diplomat’s daughter born in 1922, was entirely unacquainted with the most basic facts of lif
e: ‘My mother said nothing at all about it to me. Zero. I had an idea that if you were married you had a baby, but how you had the baby I had no idea whatever. We were all very, very naive.’ For the vast majority in the years leading up to the Second World War the walls of home were their fortress. Life for them rolled securely on, seemingly untouched by military build-up and a botched European peace.
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The main purpose of this book is to see the world of war – and of the ensuing peace - through their eyes. These women were entering maturity in a world overshadowed by unemployment and Fascism. In order to follow their stories over the ensuing chapters, we need to start to get to know some of them in the last months before the Nazi crisis erupted in late summer 1939.
Phyllis (‘Pip’) Beck, impressionable, naive, poetry-loving and dazzlingly pretty, is growing up in the little market town of Buckingham. Pip is sixteen years old. Here in Middle England she has started her first job working in a small bakery shop. The income will help her parents, who have fallen on hard times during the Depression. So now she is learning to count out change and display iced fancies on their silver platters in the shop window, while flirting nervously with the boys who bring in the bread deliveries. Soon after, she moves on to train as a hairdresser and beautician – ‘I was fascinated by cosmetics, though I wasn’t allowed to use them yet.’ That year Pip also has her first kiss in a summer meadow with Ron Race, a dashing telegraph boy from the local post office. The occasion, for all its glamorous echoes of movie romance, leaves her with mixed feelings. ‘Supposing I had a baby? Had I done anything that could result in having one? I simply didn’t know.’ Scared, Pip ends the friendship. For such an attractive girl there will be other boyfriends, and better ones.
Twenty-five-year-old Margery Berney is working for her father as a clerk in his Portsmouth building business. Margery is alight with unconfined ambitions. ‘From my earliest memory I was rehearsing for success in my daydreams.’ But in 1939 she is still unsure what form her future will take – tennis champion, pantomime fairy or movie star? Two years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art have convinced her that the stage is not for her, but her true talents have yet to surface. So, like many other middle-class young women, Margery has learned to type. It seems improbable that days spent tapping on a keyboard in an office will lead to the fulfilment of her vague but over-arching ambitions to become something or somebody. ‘But my own sense of purpose was just beginning to develop.’
Mary Cornish shares a flat in Baker Street, London, with a female friend. She is thirty-nine. Both are musicians. Miss Cornish is the elder of two sisters, and Eileen, the younger, has always looked up to her for guidance and leadership. She has also had the fortune, unlike Eileen, to escape the parental home; in the 1920s she studied the piano in Vienna and has since travelled alone. A forthright and fearless person, she has turned her back on marriage and made her own life among like-minded musical friends. Like so many educated spinsters in the 1930s,* she has chosen to teach and since 1928 has been employed as a music teacher at a private girls’ school in Wokingham, returning to London at weekends. There is something in Miss Cornish of the ‘universal aunt’. She combines patriotism and religion and is always willing to be of service to friends, family and pupils.
Thelma Ryder, at seventeen, is a home-loving teenager who lacks confidence. She lives with her mum and stepfather, who run a pub just outside the Marine barracks in Plymouth. The family don’t have much money, but Thelma’s mother takes good care of them; as a tailoress, she makes all her daughter’s clothes. Unusually for a girl of her class, Thelma stays on at school until the age of fifteen. ‘I didn’t want to go to work. I was a proper mummy’s girl really. I wanted to stay at home. I said, “I’ll do the cooking and the housework, and you can do the sewing and bring in the money.” ’ Her mother’s attempts to send her for jobs fail, until finally Thelma finds herself marched to the door of the Initial Towel Company; a job in laundry may not have a future, but it will do till she finds a husband. There, Thelma spends the next three years packing towels for the company’s clients.
Clara Milburn is fifty-five years old. Her home is at Balsall Common, near Coventry, in the heart of the Midlands. Mrs Milburn is a woman of such unimpeachable middle-aged, middle-class respectability that she might be held up as a model for English womanhood. Happily married to a skilled machine tool engineer, she and her husband Jack have one boy, Alan, now twenty-four years old, and a faithful live-in servant named Kate. Mrs Milburn has never been employed, but willingly gives her energies to the Women’s Institute and the church. She is a friend of Coventry Cathedral. She loves her husband, her house, her dog Twink and her garden. But most of all she loves her son.
Helen Vlasto is spending her summer holidays with her family at a capacious house rented by her wealthy grandparents at Frinton-on-Sea in East Anglia. The drawing room is scented with great bowls of roses and cut lavender. It’s a break from nineteen-year-old Helen’s busy life in London, where she has combined training to be a nurse by day with debutante dances by night. That summer, when not playing tennis or golf, the stunningly pretty girl (who has inherited her Greek grandparents’ Mediterranean features) attends to the manicuring of her nails and the applying of face cream.
Monica Littleboy, daughter of a manager with the Colman’s Mustard company, is wondering what to do with her life. There are so few possibilities for girls, especially in Norwich. Discouraged from aiming high by her teachers, she leaves school at sixteen and does a domestic science course – it’s not a success. Early in 1939 she sets out for London to train as a beautician. She lodges in Earl’s Court; London seems ‘exciting but sordid’, but is soon transformed when she meets George Symington, a young man who travels the same journey each day by Underground. George, handsome and educated, is from a different world; though not wealthy he is well-connected. Soon seventeen-year-old Monica is ‘swimming in an endless round of happiness with the one I loved. Our young lives were as yet untouched by the bad news of the war clouds gathering over Europe.’
Anne Popham, aged twenty-two, daughter of a dignified museum official, has also had her world turned upside down. A shy, serious, unconfident student, she is studying Art History in London and has fallen deeply and passionately in love with a married artist. Graham’s good looks and bohemianism, his left-wing politics, his subversive intelligence, his pleas, promises and seductive skill have all thrown her off her preordained course. He has separated from his wife, but will they ever be able to marry? The ups and downs of their illicit affair dominate her waking hours.
Nella Last has lived for the best part of her forty-nine years in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, twenty-seven of these under the same roof as her somewhat gloomy and angry husband, William Last, who runs a joinery business. The Lasts have two sons, but since the boys have grown up Nella feels redundant. Life seems to her a treadmill, her husband is uncommunicative, and, bogged down with housewifely chores, she has no outlet for her feelings or latent creativity. She suffers a nervous breakdown, which coincides with the founding of the Mass Observation project, an anthropological initiative by three young men who are calling on ordinary members of the public to submit diaries recording their everyday lives. The following year, Nella Last decides to join them. It is the first step on the road to her recovery.
Mavis Lever, a well-read sixth-former, has persuaded her parents (who have never before travelled further than Bournemouth) to take up one of the cheap holidays offered by the German government in an effort to propagandise to other Europeans about the virtues of Aryan culture. They are travelling in the Rhineland – now occupied by Hitler. Already a talented German linguist, Mavis now steeps herself in Wagnerian legends, travelling past fairy-tale castles and listening to lieder sung in view of the Lorelei rock. Swept up in a fever of romanticism, she makes up her mind to study German literature at university.
Helen Forrester’s family is painfully poor. In the Depression Helen’s public-school-educated father has gone b
ankrupt; with seven children the family live on the brink of absolute penury. Their tiny terrace house in a run-down area of Liverpool stinks of ‘neglect and malnutrition’. Helen, who is nineteen, earns a scanty living as a social worker for a charity in Bootle, supplementing her income by teaching shorthand in the evenings. She describes herself as ‘struggling to stay alive’. After she has contributed to her keep there is nothing to spare for clothes, a perm, or beauty aids. Painfully thin, Helen suffers from spots and, unable to afford the hairdresser, scrapes her long hair into an unfashionable bun. She has never been kissed by a man.
Madeleine Henrey, the chic French wife of Robert Henrey, an upper-class English gossip columnist, is out with her husband in the West End looking for copy. London’s aristocratic night life is their raw material. They dine together at Quaglino’s, a famous restaurant patronised by the younger generation of royals. Madeleine has diamonds in her hair. Later she swathes her gleaming shoulders in an ermine cape and they go on to the Embassy Club in Old Bond Street. Princes, courtiers and leaders of fashion dance here; it is Madeleine’s job to note every nuance of dress and coiffure, from lipstick to handbag. In those days, she wrote, ‘every woman’s dress was a masterpiece. My husband and I went out every evening during this fabulous period. For me this life was a continual joy, the sort that every girl dreams of. I would never be so young, so full of laughter again.’
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Pip Beck, Margery Berney, Mary Cornish, Thelma Ryder, Clara Milburn, Helen Vlasto, Monica Littleboy, Anne Popham, Nella Last, Mavis Lever, Helen Forrester and Madeleine Henrey … twelve glimpses of twelve lives. Few of the many names which will appear over the course of this book are any more conspicuous or celebrated than these, but every one of them was to have their lives changed by the war.
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