Deeply stirred, feminine hearts beat faster at the thought of our brave soldiers setting off to fight for king and country; one sixteen-year-old promptly got dressed in her Sunday navy-blue and white best and set off down Hereford High Street to wave goodbye to all the gallant lads. ‘Nothing happened.’ Where were the brass bands, the stirring processions she had seen in the movies? She cried all the way home. ‘The glamour of war wasn’t true and someone had lied.’ Another – in the middle of cutting her toenails – stopped to listen to the broadcast with terror and bated breath, before reapplying herself to her task.
That same weekend Marguerite Eave had just moved into a small flat in Bradford. Aged twenty-two that summer, Marguerite was due to start on Monday with a brand-new job as a senior home economist, demonstrating appliances for the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Electric Power Company. For Marguerite, that Sunday remains unforgettable:
It was an extraordinary day – one of those September days when you really feel, God’s in His Heaven and all’s well with the world. Well, I bumped into the girl who lived across the landing, and she introduced herself. She was the manageress of a Jaeger shop. ‘Would you like to come and listen to the broadcast and share a cup of coffee?’ she said.
Well, listening, it was the most terrifying thing one could possibly imagine. I felt, ‘We are alone. Heaven help us’ – a terrible fear and loneliness. And indeed we had everything to fear. And yet in a very short time – I was still with my neighbour listening to the radio – came the messages from Canada, Australia, South Africa: and they all said: ‘We are with you. You are not alone.’ And the feeling that they were with us was simply amazing … we knew that the whole Empire was behind us.
Within minutes of the announcement the Sabbath hush was broken by the eerie wailing of sirens, unmistakably sounding the alert. Frances Faviell, who, together with a group of friends in her studio and in common with the entire nation, had just finished listening to Chamberlain’s broadcast, suddenly woke up to the fact that this time it wasn’t play-acting. The party scattered, Frances to her landlord’s reinforced shelter in the rear courtyard of her building at 33 Cheyne Place. As a trained first-aider, should she go to her post? By the time she’d made up her mind to set out, the all-clear was sounding its warbling note. The Cheyne Place community gathered in the street to compare notes – ‘I saw neighbours who never spoke to one another chatting excitedly’ – and it was soon revealed that the alarm had been false, triggered by the sighting of a lone plane, ‘one of ours’. Later, Frances walked in Battersea Park with a friend. They gazed in bemused wonder at the massive silver barrage balloons bobbing above them, iridescent in the sky ‘like drunken fish’. She counted eighty of them from her vantage point on Battersea Bridge. ‘The scene was so peaceful … It was impossible to realise that these silver roach in the sky were there because we were at war. War seemed too remote and archaic a word to contemplate.’
In Streatham, Pat Bawland, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an itinerant confectionery salesman, and her young brother were at Sunday church. Pat’s feckless mother had insisted that her children attend regularly – it was one way of ensuring they got enough to eat, as the deaconess could be relied upon to give food handouts to the poorer families. ‘My brother was in the choir. Mum and Dad had told us that if the warning went we were to come home immediately – and while we were there on that Sunday morning the siren went; it sounded in the middle of the service. So I got up and grabbed my brother out of the choir stalls and took him out of the church and ran all the way home.’
Meanwhile, in Barrow-in-Furness, the forty-nine-year-old housewife Nella Last reacted to the declaration of war with the realisation that she could not share her feelings with Will, her husband. ‘Sunday, 3 September, 1939. Bedtime … Today I’ve longed for a close woman friend – for the first time in my life.’ An image came vividly to Nella’s mind. It was ‘July, before the last crisis’ – 1938. The Lasts had been visiting Portsmouth, and hundreds of young sailors, ratings, had arrived with the fleet from Weymouth in response to the military build-up. Nella saw the look on their faces – ‘a slightly brooding, faraway look. They all had it … and I felt I wanted to rush up and ask them what they could see that I could not. And now I know … All I can see are those boys with their look of “beyond”.’
Nella’s moment of intuition serves to locate a point of no return. The onward march of history was carrying the men beyond our shores, beyond family, home and all its comforts, to an uncertain destiny – to a place where the nation’s women could not follow them.
The next day Nella Last had a bad headache: ‘Monday, 4 September, 1939 … a cap of pain has settled down firmly and defies aspirin.’ Nella had two sons. Cliff, the younger, was twenty-one. He would be joining the Army as a PT instructor. Her diary shows a woman trying to keep a domestic lid on the mounting fear of losing all she held dear. There was the cleaning to do; the tidying and the washing. More urgently, Nella felt the need to contribute, so she sat down to sew cot blankets for the evacuees out of remnants. A plan now took shape in her aching head. The garden would have to go. She would keep hens on half the lawn and grow vegetables on the other half.
Domesticity seemed to Nella Last and thousands more like her to be under fundamental threat. Her life up to now had consisted of creating a home for her family and preparing their meals, of knitting, needlework and cosy evenings around the hearth. War struck fiercely at all these things. More than any ideology or notion of sovereignty, the preservation of her own world in Barrow-in-Furness was of paramount importance to Nella. Only when she felt sure that the semi in Ilkley Road and all it represented was safe could she contribute to the greater work of winning the war for Britain, and this she would do in the way she knew best: using her skills as a mother and housewife.
Patience Chadwyck-Healey was short on such skills. Nobody had ever taught her to boil an egg or sweep a hearth. She could dance, and she could ride a horse to hounds. Best of all she could drive a car, and in 1938 this had qualified her to join the FANYs. The approaching conflict filled her with mounting excitement. The FANY authorities had promised to keep Patience informed about her mobilisation, and the thought of it set her pulse racing: ‘Hurrah, I’m already organised to be in the FANYs, and I can drive, and I’m going to be called up!’ Now, at last, Patience had something real to do, but when would it start? For the first time in what had been a mainly ornamental life, she could envisage serving a greater purpose. ‘The first two weeks after Chamberlain’s declaration were the longest I’ve ever spent. The days passed so slowly. I kept thinking, “Hurry up, for goodness’ sake, the war’ll be over before I get called up!” Anyway, finally, on my birthday which is in mid-September, I got a telegram to say “Please report to Bovington Camp by noon tomorrow.” And I said to my parents, “I have no idea what to expect, but this is something I’ve got to do …” And by the 20th September there I was, in khaki, and for me that was the beginning of the war.’
The Children
The evacuation of Britain’s children was an undertaking that had been long anticipated. Arrangements had been made, surplus accommodation identified, camps built. Many city families didn’t wait for the declaration of war to start sending their children to safety. The exodus had started in June. By September a figure approaching 3.75 million people (children, their mothers and their teachers, and expectant mums) had moved from areas of the country regarded as unsafe to areas regarded as safe. At the end of August Frances Faviell watched carloads of children jamming the Chelsea arteries – ‘toys, perambulators, dogs, cats, and birds all piled in with them or balanced on top of them’. But some of the pugs and canaries had to be left behind. There were queues at vets’ surgeries for pets that couldn’t accompany their owners to be put down.
Goodmayes, near Ilford, the home of fourteen-year-old Nina Mabey, was uncomfortably close to the docks. For Nina, the evacuation of her school to Suffolk couldn’t come too soon, but not because she feared for her own sa
fety. From an early age Nina had been a storyteller, a creator of invented lives; her appetite for books served only to increase her discontent with suburbia, and her vivid imagination conjured up a ‘dazzling future’ in some aristocratic country mansion where people fell in love over candlelit dinners. The reality of her arrival in Ipswich a few days before war was declared was, inevitably, a disappointment. ‘I was billeted on a family who lived in a council house and were definitely “common”.’ Nina’s experience was standard; the reluctance of the well-to-do to house evacuees is well documented. A fellow pupil was billeted with her in this inferior house; they shared a bed, and the last night of peace was made extra memorable by the unfortunate girl having her first period. There was blood all over the sheet, and Nina, who knew about these things, had difficulty persuading the totally uninformed teenager that she was not dying. The girls did their best, creeping secretly to the bathroom, to wash the sheet out, but it remained stained. Next day they sat in the garden drinking fizzy lemonade, listening to the Prime Minister’s announcement and worrying about the sheet. Not long after this the school relocated to Wales and new billets, which years later were to provide a setting for the wartime story Carrie’s War (1973), which would bring Nina fame under her married name of Bawden.
In Liverpool, as the Germans rolled into Poland, the Forrester family were visited by the local schoolmistress, a tweedy spinster with false teeth, who explained that the younger children of the family would be safer away from the city. Little Brian, Tony, Avril and Edward stared as she explained that they could choose between being sent off with their class or staying with relatives in the country. The government would provide an allowance for the evacuees’ board. Two maiden aunts in nearby Hoylake agreed to take Tony and Edward, while Avril would be accommodated by a nearby friend of the aunts. Small suitcases were packed, goodbyes said. ‘I will never forget their tight, white little faces,’ recalled Helen. Poor Brian was packed off with the school to Wales, where he was billeted with a postman.
If any picture encapsulates those early days of the war it is the heart-wrenching images of small children clutching teddy bears, labels round their neck and gas-mask boxes strapped to them, gallantly grinning at the camera as they wait to board special trains. Behind each picture lay a tale of soul-searching, uncertainty and loss. Few mothers wanted their little ones’ safety on their conscience, and yet sending them away felt like a violation of their deepest instincts. In a sense, sending their children away denatured them as women. Mrs Lilian Roberts obediently tied her children’s gas-mask boxes on strings and pinned their names to their lapels before delivering all five, aged between five and thirteen, to catch the bus to the railway station. ‘The police on duty told us to turn our backs, so as not to upset the children if we could not hold back the tears. We had no idea where they were to be taken, and it was a most dreadful feeling, losing my five children in one day.’ Mrs Roberts had to wait several days before she heard where her children had been taken. They had been dispersed around Sussex between Brighton and Hailsham. ‘With the children gone, I felt completely at a loss.’
All over the country little flocks of desolate six-year-olds arrived, not knowing where they would be sleeping that night. The evacuee hosts were equally unprepared for what to expect. Though superficially the entire undertaking was a model of calm organisation, in the circumstances many of the best-laid plans collapsed. In the cities, the children had been loaded unceremoniously on to whatever trains happened to be waiting. Friends were separated, schools scattered. Dirty, hungry, tired and bewildered families arrived at unknown destinations after hours spent in crowded trains with no food or toilet facilities. Dismal scenes ensued as the evacuees were taken first to ‘dispersal centres’, then paraded before the householders commandeered to take them in. The diarist Frances Partridge recalled one scene at Hungerford in Berkshire:
The bus came lumbering in …
[They] stood like sheep beside the bus looking infinitely pathetic. ‘Who’ll take these?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Oh well, I can have these two but no more,’ and the piteous cry, ‘But we’re together.’ It was terrible. I felt we were like sharp-nosed housewives haggling over fillets of fish.
Nothing except the widespread certainty of serious and imminent danger could have persuaded Britain’s housewives that such an upheaval to their lives was a necessity. But if there were any sector deserving of praise throughout the evacuation proceedings, it was surely the WVS.
The Women’s Voluntary Service had been set up initially in 1938, under the chairmanship of the formidable Stella, Marchioness of Reading. Stella Reading was more than a chairman – she was the founder and inspiration of one of the largest voluntary bodies this country has ever seen. Already in the 1930s such organisations were on the increase. This was the era of the ‘do-gooder’, the ‘Lady Bountiful’, the charity ball and the charity pageant. With vigour and single-mindedness Lady Reading now marshalled the energies of legions of Christian, patriotic and unselfish women. In September 1939 there were 165,000 members of the WVS, by which time the organisation was already making far-reaching plans for the feeding and care of thousands of evacuees. By 1942 that number would grow to more than 1 million – all dressed in green tweed uniform suits with red piping. From the outset these ladies (and ‘ladies’ they mostly were: at least 60 per cent of them came from income groups A and B) dealt with the domestic nuts and bolts of the war. They played to their perceived strengths as women, making innumerable cups of tea. With zeal and a vengeance they cooked, clothed, knitted and sewed, washed, mothered, nursed and organised as the circumstances demanded. They set up an official sock-mending scheme for soldiers. At Lady Reading’s behest they neglected their own housework in favour of ‘the national job’.
A total of 30,000 children were looked after by them. Evacuees were sent to the WVS to be deloused, anointed for scabies and given clean clothes if required. One WVS member claimed to have escorted a total of 2,526 under-fives and travelled 126,490 miles in three years. A typical WVS lady was Mrs Warren of Cambridge: ‘When I saw all those hundreds of little children taken away from their mothers … a lump came into my throat,’ she said, whereupon she promptly accepted nine into her capacious home. She then took on the task of disinfecting their heads, laundering their socks and feeding them. She collected clothes for them, and at night she patched their knickers. Her two maids helped out and reprimanded the children when they walked on Mrs Warren’s flower-beds.
Helen Forrester’s little sister Avril was lucky. Removed from her impoverished family, the child was put into the care of a benevolent lady, and for the first time ‘knew what it was to have good, new clothes bought for her, sleep in a properly equipped bed and be decently fed.’ But evacuation was an imperfect solution. The uprooting of children from deprived, but familiar, backgrounds required huge adjustments. Rene Smith, a respectable newlywed living in Wolverhampton, got her choice of two little girls ‘with fair hair and blue eyes, please’. The children arrived in rags: hand-me-down dresses beyond any repair, underclothes in shreds, crawling with lice. They smelled foul, wet the beds, didn’t know how to eat with cutlery and had never seen domesticated animals. Rene launched herself into caring for her ready-made family. She bought them brand-new clothes and fed them up, and soon saw the rewards. ‘It was most heartening and gratifying to see them develop into two plump, healthy, well-behaved, really very nice little girls.’ History does not relate how the nice little girls’ parents reacted to this transformation.
Class collisions of this kind weren’t always so happily handled. The Tyson family took in a couple of little boys aged six and nine. They had come from a poor area of Manchester, and Joan, the daughter of the house, was dismayed at their savage state. At mealtimes they preferred to sit under the table than at it. Evenings were spent delousing the boys with a fine-tooth comb with newspaper spread out below to catch the nits. From time to time their parents would come to visit, always arriving drunk. These were common themes
: the evacuees ate fried eggs with their fingers, never washed, slept under the beds, urinated against the walls and used incomprehensible language. House-proud women experienced a culture clash as feral children who had never seen toothbrushes or hand-towels were thrust into their nice middle-class accommodation. Rural communities felt invaded by loud-mouthed city evacuees who drank and swore. Soon village shops were selling out of Keating’s insect powder, soap and disinfectant.
For their part, the city women couldn’t get used to country ways. Who were these uncivilised bumpkins? Where were all the cinemas? Where on earth could you get your hair permed? Was it really three miles from the nearest bus stop? And how disgusting it was to have to use an earth closet. But in the various billets she stayed in over three years, Nina Mabey was primarily dismayed by the lack of books – ‘What did these people do for pleasure? Did they read only in bed? But there were no books in the bedrooms either.’
Worse, there were horror stories - accounts of hostility, neglect, abuse, starvation. These were a minority, but even where ‘foster’ parents were kind and loving the separation and dispersal of families wrought damage. ‘Despite much kindness,’ wrote Helen Forrester about her little brothers and sister, ‘… none of the children came through that traumatic time without scars.’
The Darkness
The radio reported alarming news. The first ship to be sunk in the war was the SS Athenia, a passenger liner torpedoed off Rockall on 3 September, followed less than a fortnight later by the sinking of HMS Courageous in the Atlantic, with the loss of 519 lives.
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