Friday 10th May
Today Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. It may be a good thing to put down how one felt before one forgets it. Of course the first feeling was the usual horror and disgust, and the impossibility of finding words to describe this latest Schweinerei by the Germans. Then came the realisation that war was coming a lot nearer to us – airbases in Holland and Belgium would make raids on England a certainty … I think I was rather frightened, but hope I didn’t show it, and anyway one still has the ‘it couldn’t happen to us’ feeling … Winston Churchill will be better for this war – as Hilary [her sister] said, he is such an old beast! The Germans loathe and fear him and I believe he can do it.
On 14 May Rotterdam was obliterated by bombs. The Belgian border with France was the next obstacle ahead of the Nazi advance, which for Clara Milburn meant only one thing: would Alan’s regiment, stationed in France, cross the border into Belgium? If so he would find himself in dreadful peril. The new Prime Minister’s unambiguous message resonated with Mrs Milburn: ‘You ask what is our aim? I can answer it in one word, VICTORY.’
Warm spring day followed warm spring day. The Milburns worked in their garden. The war news grew ever more grave, as Allied troops pulled back. Alan’s twenty-sixth birthday fell on 18 May. The night before, just as she was dropping off, Clara had the sense of a visual image pressing against her closing lids. She saw a face, which at first she couldn’t identify; fighting sleep, she attempted to focus on the features before it faded from her vision. For a moment it cleared, before being lost to the shadows: it was Alan.
On the morning of his birthday she pedalled into Balsall for their rations, pinned a poster discouraging waste on to the WI notice-board and returned to her gardening. ‘All day long we were thinking and talking of Alan, recalling other birthdays when he was a little boy and invited the three dogs to tea in the nursery!’
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Refugees from the Low Countries were starting to arrive in London. Frances Faviell went to Chelsea Town Hall and offered her services as an interpreter. Among Frances’s many talents was an impressive linguistic ability. She spoke Dutch, having lived in that ‘kindly, tolerant’ country for more than two years; its language was closely similar to the Flemish tongue, and she was confident that she could help. The people’s plight tore at her heart; here, for the first time, was the desperate human face of war: terrified, frozen, sick and shocked. Inevitably, the majority were women with children. They had fled to the ports and begged for a place in any boat which would have them. Now it was Frances’s task to explain as far as she could what would happen to these unhappy refugees. At Dover the stalwart women of the WVS had seen to their immediate needs: hot drinks, blankets, first aid. In London an appeal had been answered with donations of clothes and other domestic essentials. Frances helped with their distribution, before taking on the next job of cleaning the disused houses allocated to them. She and a group of volunteers got pails, soap and brushes, and spent several days on hands and knees scrubbing them out. Soon the Flemish women under Frances’s care were clothed and housed; from now on she would share her time between refugee duties and the first aid post for which she had trained.
At the FAP there were quiet times when she could draw or read. But helping the displaced women fleeing from their ruined lives left Frances Faviell with very little time to herself, and from now on she laid all thought of her work as an artist to one side.
Joan Wyndham, aged seventeen, was of another type, breathlessly and insatiably interested in her own love life and the artistic milieu which furnished it. So on 1 April 1940, eager for new experiences, she signed up at Chelsea Polytechnic to study Art. From the outset everything looked extremely promising:
the students began to arrive: young men slouched in with hair flopping over their foreheads, lots of well-developed healthy girls with flat feet, in dirndls and brightly checked blouses. They fell on each other’s necks with cries of ‘Nuschka darling!’ or ‘Bobo!’ and so on …
– kindred spirits, clearly.
That spring, as the home front accustomed itself to the new rations and feverishly listened to the bulletins, Joan was modelling clay under the tuition of Henry Moore, attending life-drawing classes and adoringly pursuing Gerhardt, the moody German sculptor she had met at a party the previous autumn. ‘I would die for him tomorrow.’ Gerhardt was non-committal, but there were distractions: Jo, proprietor of the Artists’ Café, for whom she felt ‘a certain tenderness’, and Rupert – ‘devastatingly attractive’. Anyway, there were serious worries about Gerhardt, who was fearful of being interned. ‘If I’m not … and the Germans come, will I be able to shoot myself before they can get me? You know of course that I am Jewish?’
Gerhardt also took time to advise Joan: ‘You know it’s time you went to bed with someone.’ Since this well-intentioned recommendation appeared not to include him, it spelt the blighting of all her hopes. On 14 April she wrote: ‘I wish I was dead.’ But flirting with Jo, art school and drunken studio parties made life bearable. As Churchill’s leadership hung in the balance at the beginning of May, Joan found a new interest: Leonard, a painter who wore green trousers and sandals and explained to her about masturbation. But he wasn’t moody and handsome enough to be Joan’s type, so when he started groping inside her blouse she made her excuses and left. Instead she drifted back to Gerhardt’s studio – if he couldn’t love her, perhaps he could be her friend? That bright May afternoon everything was bursting into bud. As the sun dropped they stood on the balcony overlooking the Chelsea treetops. The vast blimps bobbed in the night sky, while across the Channel the German juggernaut was crushing everything in its path. ‘I don’t think they’ll ever raid London,’ said Gerhardt.
With Gerhardt off limits, Joan got her sex education where she could. She had her breasts caressed by Jo from the café; then there was an energetic kissing session with Leonard, who was amazing when it came to sheer technique. Though she turned down an offer to touch his penis, Leonard was a fund of information, demystifying orgasms, fellatio and unusual sex positions ‘with scholarly enthusiasm’.
Monday 27th May
The Germans are in Calais. I don’t seem to be able to react or to feel anything. I don’t know what’s real any more …
The bombs, which I know must come, hardly enter my fringe of consciousness. Bombs and death are real, and I and all the other artists around here are only concerned with unreality. We live in a dream.
Joan Wyndham’s frank introduction to the facts of life place her in a minority, but the dreamlike, dizzying quality of those days was shared by many. During the Phoney War bombs and death had seemed remote; but in spring 1940 they were remote no longer, and everyone was talking about invasion.
In the Face of Danger
Urgent times demanded urgent responses. ‘Everyone is getting married and engaged,’ wrote one young diarist in April that year, while also recording the reaction of a columnist in the Daily Express, that ‘any girl [who] ends up in this war not married … is simply not trying.’
In 1940 there were 534,000 weddings: nearly 40,000 more than in the previous year, and 125,000 more than in 1938. The brides were younger too – three in every ten were under twenty-one. At this time, before men’s long absences abroad made nuptials impossible, there was a peak in the phenomenon of the hasty war marriage. The world seemed so full of danger that prudent delay simply looked pointless – you could be dead if you waited till tomorrow, so better to seize the day. Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister, set the tone. As he hurtled round the revolving doors of the Ritz he managed to get the friend galloping through in the opposite direction to give him a phone number for a blind date. He rushed to the phone, called the number and promptly inquired of the young lady who picked it up what her name was and what she looked like. ‘I’m Pamela Digby … Red-headed and rather fat, but Mummy says that puppy fat disappears.’ Churchill was charmed. Three days later they were engaged, and within a month they were married. No wed
ding bells, however, as that would have signified a German invasion.
Margery Berney was another young woman who launched hastily into marriage at this time. Ignoring the promptings of ambition – for since childhood Margery had known she would be somebody – she took the conjugal plunge with an army officer named Major William Baines after an exceptionally brief courtship. Their wedding was followed by an equally brief few months together before her major was posted abroad. ‘People become reckless in the face of danger,’ was Margery’s only comment on their impromptu commitment.
Seizing the day might turn out all well and fine, but war weddings were often beset by worries as to whether both parties would actually make it to the ceremony. In the emergency climate of spring 1940 the forces refused to release their men for leave under any circumstances. On 10 May, the eve of her planned wedding to Victor, her RAF sweetheart, young Eileen Hunt made her way to King’s Cross to meet him, only to find the station closed and swarming with police and soldiers. All leave had been cancelled; there would be no wedding. Heartbroken, clasping her bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley, Eileen went home and cancelled church, car and flowers. But her brother and Victor’s brother were not so easily deterred. They rushed up to Victor’s base near Cambridge, kidnapped him and hid him on the floor of a borrowed van, which they then drove at breakneck speed back to London. Eileen’s plans went into reverse; she put on her bridal gown and hastened to the church, where Victor appeared, and they were married without more ado. There was just time for the family to toast the couple, before Victor was bundled back to Cambridge and sneaked into his camp. A month later Victor and Eileen finally managed to get some time alone together – at the start of what was to be forty-nine years of marriage.
Afterwards, the newlywed Eileen returned to her job with Grubert’s furriers. The company had contracted with the Red Cross to make musquash coats to be shipped out by the Merchant Navy to aid Russian children. As the war news worsened, so women sought to contribute to the best of their ability. The qualifications of trained women were at a premium, and nobody now doubted that nurses, first-aiders, volunteers and forces auxiliaries of every kind were going to prove indispensable; but with the fear of invasion growing daily, ordinary females from all backgrounds now added their voices to the patriotic clamour. ‘Women want to be partners in the nation’s war effort,’ claimed an article in Woman’s Magazine. Mrs ‘NOT TOO OLD AT 46’ pleaded to be allowed to join the anti-parachute corps – ‘I, for one, would gladly offer my services.’ Miss E. de Langlois of Ewell wrote with a suggestion for wires to be suspended between pylons ‘to prevent parachute troops reaching the ground’, while Mrs Gilroy of Rudwick wrote to the paper calling for a ban on iced cakes – ‘a luxury we could dispense with’. Mrs Hope of Torquay added her voice to the numbers calling for ‘aliens and Pacifists’ to be rounded up and interned. The propagandising tone of the press aimed at women was relentlessly upbeat, stressing the gay willingness of countless women to give of their best. Typically, such journalism was aimed at cheering on factory workers, who, already at this stage in the war, were regarded as key to the anti-German effort:
WAR WORKERS’ SUNDAY DASH
Hundreds of thousands of women rose early from their beds and rushed to work … with a smile.
There was no grousing at the loss of leisure. Everybody wanted to get on with the job …
‘My boy friend is in France with the B.E.F.’ said one girl working in a fuse factory, ‘so I’ll work 15 hours a day if necessary.’
Probably the morale-boosting, chin-up message helped. Despite the general willingness, there is evidence that at this stage the speed of events left many women bewildered, shocked and subject to mood swings. Mass Observation took daily soundings in late May 1940. On the 18th women were much more worried than men, with reactions ranging from terror to incomprehension. On the 21st morale had improved slightly. On the 22nd anxiety and depression among women hit a new low; some had weeping fits. This survey also showed that working-class women were on the whole more bewildered by events and unable to give a name to their emotions, whereas middle- and upper-class women were coherent in expressing their anxiety. A response from a Birmingham housewife must have echoed the reactions of many after Belgium surrendered:
A BLACK DAY. We need all our prayers now … the 1 o’c news has made me feel sick … I don’t think France will give in, but neither did I think Belgium would. We must win – we must win, I could not live beneath a brutal power. I said to my husband Sunday, I would die fighting rather than live the life of a slave.
At this time the news on the radio was so dreadful that many just stopped listening to it. The distress in Europe was dreadful to witness, but worse still was the prospect of a German invasion. Fear of the unknown dominated. The average housewife, accustomed to leaving difficult decisions about politics and world affairs to her husband, was simply out of her depth:
So cruel. I don’t know what’s going to happen now, I really don’t. It seems all up. You don’t know what to do for the best. I don’t know whether to send my children away, or not … I don’t know whether to apply for a shelter or not. I think perhaps I ought to join the ARP; then I think I’ve got my duty to the home first. Oh dear …
A shattered secretary, used by the advertiser to show that only Horlicks can help with war stress.
The writer Naomi Mitchison was not one to duck problems, intellectually at least. The Mitchisons were well-off and middle-aged, and from 1939 Naomi, who was expecting her seventh child, had been safely ensconced in Kintyre, a fishing village in rural Scotland. As Socialists, she and her husband Dick both hated the war while knowing it had to be fought. Day by day Naomi’s wartime diary grapples with the issues of work, war, love, motherhood and the future. In May 1940 she was sick and experiencing nightmares – ‘almost inevitable’. In the light northerly summer evenings she had leisure to read, and a book about the history of the Scottish kirk set her thinking about ideology and hate. ‘Must there be hate in order to be life?’ As France retreated before the invasion, what did it tell its young men as they prepared to die for their country? The early Scottish martyrs had been certain of heaven. Was courage dependent on superstition? Was the cowardice that she felt a luxury, to be shed if her own family were threatened? Dick and her oldest son were in London at this time, potentially in danger. She had her unborn child to protect. ‘Would I hate if my immediate family were killed? … I don’t know. But I rather doubt it.’ She and Dick agreed that, as committed left-wing activists, they might have to flee the country if the Germans came. Naomi found herself imagining an Atlantic crossing in a herring boat, wondering how much luggage she could fit in alongside the diesel oil. ‘It seems fantastic …’ Everyone was talking about German agents landing – would they come disguised as clergymen or nuns, as many people thought? Naomi tried to look coolly at the likely outcome of an invasion, and concluded that she would almost certainly be sent to a concentration camp. On 30 May she noticed that she had bitten her nails very badly, ‘a thing I have not done for months’.
Naomi Mitchison’s contemporary, Frances Partridge, also took a committed and rational stance to the war at this time. She and her husband, Ralph, were pacifists. They lived in Wiltshire with their small son, Burgo, and for much of the war their home was a refuge for their many London friends who came to Ham Spray House for the intelligent conversation and plentiful food it offered. Throughout, Frances was writing a searchingly honest diary:
May 15th
In no time – days even – we may all be enduring the same horrors as Holland and Belgium. We talked about suicide … R. said we could easily gas ourselves in the car, all three of us. We were still talking of this as we went along to the bath, and of how happy our lives have been, and so has Burgo’s, though there has been so little of it …
My greatest preoccupation is with the question of how to get a supply of lethal pills …
May 19th
The perfection of the weather is getting on
all our nerves. It is too phenomenal and everything super-normal is unnerving; also it’s impossible not to remember that it is ideal weather for air-raids. The German advance into France goes on …
We all sank into our private worlds of despair …
These two examples of the reflections of women intellectuals on the 1940 crisis raise fascinating questions about women’s attitudes to war. Frances Partridge and Naomi Mitchison were both deeply thoughtful, educated individuals, and they were products of their time. Both had benefited from the advanced, emancipated atmosphere of the 1920s, which had brought women the franchise and opened up the world of active politics and other hitherto ‘masculine’ concerns. They saw no reason for ‘womanish’ submission. They rejected war and all it stood for. In Frances’s case, she refused absolutely to play any part in it. Both women could see that the Nazi threat had provoked a military response which was bound to cause terrible loss of life and huge unhappiness. Against this, all their instincts as thinking people, but also as women and mothers, recoiled. They would save themselves and their families, or they would turn on the car and gas themselves. Was this a kind of intellectual paralysis, reserved for the over-educated minority – thinkers not doers – or was it the involuntary reflex of every woman who has ever lived and loved to save, to hide and to protect? Organised violence revolted such women; the expression of hate through force offended against the deep-seated need of their sex to build nests and to nurture. ‘Can we also not love?’ cried Naomi Mitchison. But if the wartime leadership had been female, how would it have responded to Hitler? The despairing reality that now had to be faced as the Nazi armies rolled inexorably across northern France was, simply, how to stop them. Intellectual toughness was no longer enough, and nor was loving. History was now on the side of the doers.
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