I suppose an average of seven hours out of every twenty-four is spent in shelters.
Suburban, secure, settled Londoners are on familiar terms with the wail of sirens, the crash of guns, the whine of bombs, the thud of explosions. ‘Have you done the black-out?’, ‘Have you got your gas-mask?’ take the place of pre-war remarks – ‘Have you got your umbrella?’, ‘What about your hanky?’
Getting to work next day was a question of ‘if’ not ‘when’. After a night huddled in the cramped Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden Phyllis would set off for her job at the bank in Bishopsgate, vaguely optimistic that she would arrive sometime, somehow. As often as not this meant accepting a ride on the back of a lorry-load of cauliflowers or fish boxes – ‘a far more interesting start to the day than being packed tight in the train’. You banged on the back of the driver’s cab when you wanted it to stop. ‘One never knows whether on arriving at work the bank will be still & standing or down to the ground.’ Sometimes Phyllis travelled by a boat service that had been laid on to get city workers into town from Greenwich Pier; for miles, blackened carcasses along the river banks were all that was left of the once towering East End warehouses. By every route, smoking shells, ruined buildings and smashed glass, overlaid with serpentine coils of hosepipe, testified to the night’s bomb damage. ‘It was hard to believe that what I was seeing could be real. Yet, with a lump in my throat and tears welling in my eyes, I knew that it was.’
For some, the heartbreaking vision of their capital in flames was mingled with awe at the strange impersonal beauty of destruction. ‘Magnificently terrifying,’ was Madeleine Henrey’s reaction. ‘A lethal fairyland,’ wrote another woman, describing the city bathed in the milky light of thousands of incendiary bombs.
Night after night the population of London adapted to the raids by becoming subterranean. In the city’s basements and cellars they huddled, in back gardens they burrowed into their Anderson shelters, or squirmed beneath their table-top Morrisons. With the prospect of hours of danger, discomfort and sleeplessness ahead of them, the female shelterers went prepared with the essentials: money, door-keys, a torch and, of course, make-up. By now, objections to women wearing trousers were beginning to seem irrelevant; but Woman’s Own readers were advised to purchase a dressing-gown with pockets capacious enough to carry an entire beauty kit: cleansing wipes, powder cream (‘which in an instant takes off all the shine and leaves you matt and composed’), powder puff, smelling salts, sedative tablets, comb and lipstick. The message was ‘Stay lovely.’ Two young Bermondsey women made a pact that they would not be found dead with their hair in rollers. ‘If the sirens went … we took the rollers out. And put them back in when the All Clear sounded. Sometimes this could happen as many as three times a night.’
Thousands perforce herded into the damp and insanitary public shelters, but even vaster numbers queued to descend into the Underground, thronging its stairs and platforms, seething and stinking. The character of life in each shelter often depended on the marshal running it. There were quiet shelters, drunk shelters, courting shelters, fighting shelters. The indefatigable Mass Observers reported on a woman running one section of a shelter at Stepney, holding forty people. Every day this energetic lady made it her business to take all their bedding home, hang it out to air and bring it back in the evening after dinner: ‘I see to it all for ’em.’ The neighbouring section was run by a firm-handed woman who took pride in keeping the peace: ‘We ain’t had no fights here, not on my platform.’ Air-raid warden Barbara Nixon was a regular visitor to one cheerful shelter run by a Mrs Barker, who had carried her gramophone in. The noisier the raid, the louder the music, and everyone would join in uproarious choruses of ‘Roll out the Barrel’ till three or four in the morning. Since sleep was mostly impossible, singing offered a morale-boosting alternative. Fidgets and nerves were held at bay, too, by smoking and knitting, both staple activities for 1940s womankind. Prayers and psalms helped to calm the fearful. One woman nightly drank herself insensible on brandy. But Flo Mahony’s brand of downbeat fatalism was a more typical response: ‘I don’t think we ever really realised the danger. I can’t ever remember being afraid. They would say, “If there’s a bomb that’s got your name on it, you’ve had it,” you know?’
Nevertheless, incoherent distress often took hold, as recorded by Mass Observers in a public shelter during the Blitz:
‘I’m ill! I think I’m going to die!’
‘If we ever live through this night, we have the Good God above to thank for it!’
‘I don’t know if there is one, or he shouldn’t let us suffer like this.’
’I’m twenty-six. I’m more than half way to thirty! I wish I was dead!’
Such terror was not irrational. The death toll was already high, as we have seen, but the figure almost doubles if we include numbers of those wounded: 63,000 of them (48 per cent) were female. One woman had to be taken to hospital suffering from uncontrollable grief. Her husband, son, daughter and son-in-law had all been killed in one bombing raid. It was enough to drive anyone out of their mind.
While the bombers droned overhead a surreal parallel life co-existed above the huddled masses in the underground shelters. The grandes dames of society, evicted from their West End mansions, took refuge in the Dorchester. The writer Fiona MacCarthy, who had been an habituée of the hotel since childhood (it had been built, and was owned by her great-grandfather, Sir Robert McAlpine), explains:
The Dorchester was said to be impervious to bombs because of its reinforced concrete structure. It was widely believed that any bomb that hit the building would just bounce off again.
Here, a life of smart dinners and cocktail parties continued side by side with the evacuated riff-raff (tarts, commercial gentlemen, off-duty airmen) who had made their way to its once-decorous corridors in search of an impregnable refuge. The ballroom was strewn with mattresses. One of those who moved in was Lady Diana Cooper, wife of Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information. Each night she descended, carrying her treasured diamond dolphins, trembling diamond spray, £200 in cash, her passport and make-up essentials, to a cubicle in the subterranean Turkish bath and slept there (with the aid of a sleeping-pill) till the all-clear came at dawn. Then she returned to her roof-floor suite for another hour’s doze if she could get it. Service remained prompt and courteous. The staff brought in early-morning tea and The Times; flowers and messages were delivered. She would breakfast in bed, deal with phone calls and write to her twelve-year-old son John Julius, who had been evacuated to Canada (‘I wish, I wish I could see you. Send me all the snapshots you can of yourself, or I may not recognise you, darling, darling’). Then it was time to dress, and ‘buzz off to the Ritz for a drink with one or more of the boys’. At the Dorchester, the Coopers’ social life was on tap: everyone who was anyone was staying there. ‘We semi-dress for dinner much more smartly than we would in days of peace.’ Above the competitive din of the bombers, the Hyde Park guns and a cacophonous dance orchestra the Coopers and their friends dined in the luxury-liner restaurant, ‘lulled by Chianti’.
The gaiety of London’s night life defied the Blitz. ‘Restaurants and dancing had all gone underground,’ Verily Anderson recalled. The 400, the Florida and the Berkeley were humming. But in March 1941 eighty people dancing at the cavernous Café de Paris – thought to be safe, owing to its depth below Leicester Square – were killed by two 50K landmines which exploded on the dance floor. The band was playing ‘Oh, Johnny! Oh, Johnny! How you can love!’ For a second, as the bombs fell, the dancers stood immobilised; then crumpled, dead, in sprawled heaps. ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and his fellow musicians were among those killed by the blast. ‘The best swing band in London gone,’ mourned Joan Wyndham.
*
While London blazed, Mary Cornish lay in bed in a Lanarkshire nursing home. The overnight wonder of her rescue from Lifeboat 12 had started to be replaced in the papers by more pressing news. But the beauties of the Scottish scenery were res
torative. Gradually, the sores on her mouth were starting to heal, and massage was helping her circulation to recover. Her sister Eileen, brother-in-law Ian and flatmate Mabel had all visited her and, fed on buttered egg, milky drinks, creamed cauliflower and chocolate pudding with cream, Mary was regaining weight and recovering in peace. In October she was able to write to her sister that she had slept ‘straight through … with no horrid boats or other nightmares, which was marvellous’. The numbed exhaustion was giving way to a renewed appetite for life: ‘Still more cheering, I’m not half so unintelligent, & perk up quite naturally from time to time … almost without effort!’ Already Miss Cornish was focusing on a return to her teaching job at Wokingham, making her base with Ian and Eileen near Midhurst. There, in the Sussex countryside, she would gently regain her fitness working on the land for a local farmer. Elizabeth, her eight-year-old niece, remembers being warned off the subject of her Aunt Mary’s terrible experiences: ‘We were told we must be very quiet and not slam doors and not on any account to talk to her about what had happened, because almost all the girls she’d been looking after had been drowned. It had been a terrible shock to her.’
In September 1940 Mary Cornish’s story competed with the air raids for front-page space.
Tough, spirited and stoical, Mary Cornish herself was reluctant to indulge in recollections of her Atlantic ordeal. Later that year she told her story to the author of a short book about the City of Benares, but after that, for better or worse, she barely ever spoke of it again.
Taking It
Already, in a year of war, women had come a long way. In 1939 Frances Faviell had been painting flower pieces and portraits in Chelsea. In the autumn of 1940, during a heavy daylight raid, she and Richard Parker were married; they spent the first night of their wedded life putting out incendiaries. By November she was spending almost all of her time doling out soup to rescue workers, caring for refugees and – as a trained VAD – at her first aid post. Like many others, she was evolving.
One night of heavy air raids the trains weren’t running on Frances’s usual route home. The explosions seemed to have quieted down, so she walked home through a grid of residential streets. She was in uniform. In one of the side streets Frances passed a group of people beside a recently destroyed building; there seemed to be a crater in its basement, but it was mostly filled in with rubble. A voice called out to her, ‘Nurse!’ She stopped and went over. One of the people was a well-built woman, also in nurse’s uniform, another was a doctor, the other two were wardens. She now became aware that there was a terrible sound coming from the depths of the crater, seemingly underground; dreadful screams could be heard issuing from a crevice among the debris: ‘Someone was in mortal anguish down there.’
‘What are your hip measurements?’ said the large nurse. Frances was small and slender – ‘thirty-four inches’. Her shoulders were the same. She would fit into the hole. They could lower her head-first into it to assist the man trapped below. The doctor now instructed her. She must remove her coat, and also her dress; the fabric might catch in parts of the unsafe debris and bring the whole thing down. First, dressed in her blouse and regulation voluminous black knickers, she must descend with a torch to see whether it was possible to administer morphia. There was barely an inch of leeway either side; she must keep her arms close to her sides, her body as rigid as possible, and grip the torch in her teeth. The two wardens now seized her by the thighs, and lowered her. From below came a long, ghastly, animal screaming. ‘It was as if I was having a nightmare from which I would soon waken.’
The torch showed me that the debris lay over both arms and that the chest of the man trapped there was crushed into a bloody mess – great beams lay across the lower part of his body – and his face was so injured that it was difficult to distinguish the mouth from the rest of it – it all seemed one great gaping red mess.
Below, the hole was cavernous. Frances was able to remove the torch from her mouth and speak the soothing words she had been taught: ‘Try to keep calm – we’re working to get you out.’ But the stench was almost overpowering, and she was afraid of being sick. They pulled her up. ‘On my feet I felt violent nausea and vomited again and again.’ Once the bout had passed, the doctor explained to her what she had to do next. He gave her a small bottle of chloroform and a cotton mask; being careful not to inhale it herself, she must apply it as close as possible to the man’s nostrils – or what was left of them. They lowered her back into the hole, and she did as she had been told.
‘Breathe deeply – can you?’ A sound as from an animal – a grunt – came from the thing which had been a face. She held the pad firmly over him. ‘Breathe deeply … deeply … deeply …’ There was a small convulsive movement of revulsion … another fainter one – and then the sounds stopped.
There were other bodies in the hole; Frances couldn’t tell how many, but she could see the grisly fragments. Near to passing out with the stench and the chloroform vapour, she called out to the waiting team, who pulled her back up, gagging and retching, to vomit repeatedly on the pavement. ‘Thank you, nurse. You did very well,’ said the doctor. It was enough; she had played her part, and it was time to go home. On the way back to Chelsea she stopped to vomit at intervals until she reached her door, where her devoted housekeeper, Mrs Freeth, was waiting up, and administered brandy and tea. Little by little the uncontrollable shivering died down, but nothing could erase the memories: ‘I had never seen anything like that horror in the hole.’
The Blitz brought the atrocities of war into ghastly close-up. There were, in 1940, many men who recalled the 1914–18 slaughter. But far fewer women had had contact with the unspeakable carnage that can be inflicted by explosive projectiles. Frances Faviell seems to have been unusually unfortunate in this regard. Having studied anatomy at the Slade School of Art, she was sometimes sent out by her FAP Commandant to perform the nauseating task of piecing together bodies dismembered by blast, in preparation for burial. ‘The stench was the worst thing about it’; that, and the problem of finding all the bits and making them fit. There were almost always too many limbs, and insufficient other members, and the injuries were unspeakable. Frances told of Connie, a warden friend of hers who had had to move a man’s body with a chair leg driven right through it. The air-raid warden Barbara Nixon encountered the pitiable remains of a baby on the street after it had been blown through an upper window. It had burst open on striking the street. Images like this could never be forgotten. For Edith, an ambulance driver working in the ‘bombers’ corridor’ at Gillingham in Kent, the trivial impressions stayed with her – like a woman’s ‘sensible shoes’ protruding from a stretcher, or the purple coat of another woman found in the rubble of her bombed home; much later they located the victim’s remains under the kitchen table. Edith had them wrapped in two army blankets and carried into the ambulance – she noticed how the dead woman’s long, wavy brown hair hung over the edge of the stretcher. They took the pieces to the mortuary. The blankets were needed back, but had to be abandoned; they had been ruined by the tangle of pulped guts and crushed meat that had once been her vital organs. ‘I could not stop retching.’ In south-east London, newlywed Dianna Dobinson’s flat was destroyed by a landmine dropped by parachute. The mines caused horrifying damage: ‘people were just blown to pieces.’ Dianna saw bits of bodies that had come to rest in the branches of trees, which themselves had been stripped of leaves. Later, carts arrived to gather up the grisly fragments and take them away. Seventeen-year-old Londoner Cora Styles soon became acclimatised to such sights: ‘When I went to work in the mornings you’d see piles of brick rubble, perhaps with an arm sticking out or a leg – I got so that blood, guts and what have you didn’t have much effect on me. I knew a man who would go round with a basket collecting the bits, trying to put them together. He picked up somebody’s head and the eyes were open; it nearly landed him in the loony bin.’
Common as such gory sights became, they were not universal. But few were spared
the brutal sight of homes, hearths, personal belongings, clothes, treasures and souvenirs indiscriminately wrecked and exposed by the bombs. Elizabeth Bowen emerged from an air-raid shelter to the sight of a gashed-open apartment block: ‘Up there the sun strikes a mirror over a mantelpiece; shreds of a carpet sag out over the void.’ One might see the cross-section of a bathroom, with a towel laid out ready on the tub waiting for its occupant, an assortment of stockings draped in a tree-top, remnants of dresses hooked over broken rafters, twisted light fittings at the bottom of the garden. Wedding presents, kitchen equipment, books lay scattered among the wreckage and matchwood.
Here, a woman might feel her very identity dismembered, as loved and cherished objects, things long desired and ill afforded, things hoarded, collected and enshrined were hurled from their alcoves, blasted from their cabinets and smashed to smithereens. Pre-war woman was equated and identified with the home. Part of her perceived task in life had been to embellish it, to beautify it. Hilde Marchant, a journalist who wrote an account of the Blitz in 1941, witnessed dispossessed and injured women in a hospital after their homes had been bombed:
They wanted to get back home, though their homes were damaged and broken … Though they were scarred, there was still that vivid picture of peace in their own kitchen. It is more than a sense of possession. It is more than just the female desire to protect the working husband. Home was something regular and real, home was the shape they had grown.
‘When I saw my house with the roof off and the windows blown inside out, it drew me out by the roots,’ said one of the women.
Keeping calm and carrying on – an illustration from the Fire Party Handbook showing how to put out incendiaries.
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