Or perhaps you could. In her account of life in the ATS, Hilary Wayne reflected that putting on uniform had a transformative effect.
I think we not only looked different, we felt different … I personally felt less self-conscious … The fact that we were all dressed exactly alike gave me the comfortable feeling that, whatever happened, I could not be conspicuous.
And it could be better than that: for its wearers, uniform served as a guarantee of respectability, inviolability almost. Drivers, for example, gave you lifts and bought you meals. ‘I never had any trouble at all,’ recalled a nurse who like many others regularly thumbed rides when she was in uniform. Eileen Rouse came back to her native Plymouth after six weeks’ ATS training in Honiton, pleased as punch with her new clothes: ‘Oh dear me, I thought I was the cat’s whiskers with me shirt and me tie, and I don’t mind telling you, me mum and dad was proud of me when I came home!’ For Pat Bawland, a childhood of poverty, hunger and pawn shops had been followed by work as a lowly invoice typist on fifteen shillings a week. Putting on the uniform of the Wrens was for her a crowning achievement:
I’d always had hand-me-down clothes. When I actually was supplied with my uniform, it was wonderful – the quality of it!
Pat’s time in the Wrens had given her a precious, and enduring, self-esteem:
Going in the Wrens changed me. I learned that, though you could be proud when you’re wearing rags, you can do better when you’re smart. And the beautiful lace-up shoes! – I polished them till they shone! I was the smartest one in our group. And being in uniform I became one of many the same. The only difference was in our speaking and our jobs, but we all sat down to the same meals. I didn’t have to lie about my dinner. I didn’t have to lie that I’d had breakfast. And I didn’t have to think about pawn shops any more. I could live like a normal human being.
Few servicewomen seem to have had their new self-respect dented by the continued mutterings about immorality. The pride, esprit de corps and the sense that being in uniform gave, that one was part of something bigger than oneself, all contributed to the reality of wartime emancipation. Flo Mahony’s feelings were typical of many:
In my uniform I was confident to go anywhere and do anything. It was quite different to being a civilian. In a way it was the making of me. Wearing a uniform, you felt part of something bigger. And you really felt you were somebody.
The Lowest Form of Life
The Women’s Land Army was regarded by many as being at the bottom of the status pile; the clothes were inferior, and the work would ruin nicely kept hands. Even so it had special attractions. Some fearful recruits saw it as an escape from the bombing, others as offering a less regimented life with fewer brass buttons to polish.
Twenty-year-old Jean McFadyen from rural Argyllshire felt she was a nobody. Her decision to join the Women’s Land Army was based on her humble view that this service was the right level for her. But she too was among the approximate 40 per cent of women who chose it because she actually liked the smart uniform:
I wouldn’t have minded if I thought I could have got into the Wrens or the WAAFs, but I didn’t want to go into the ATS. I didn’t like the uniform! That horrible khaki!
So one day I was out walking through the central part of Edinburgh and I saw a cardboard cut-out of a girl in uniform. They were recruiting for the Women’s Timber Corps. And when I saw the cut-out I thought, ‘That’s for me, that’s the uniform I want’. So I went in and volunteered.
Till 1942, Jean’s world had been confined to the sculleries and pantries of the lairds and moneyed individuals who employed her in Argyllshire and Edinburgh. Jim Park, her boyfriend, had worked in a biscuit factory but had been conscripted into the 51st Highland Division; the relationship had not developed as far as a commitment before he went abroad. Knowing that her own call-up was imminent, she was one of many who decided to leap before they were pushed.
The Timber Corps was a section of the Land Army. Jean was handed a registration card; she still has it. It proclaims: ‘You are now a Member of the Women’s Land Army. Your Country Welcomes your Services.’
Peggy Scott described the Land Army girls in British Women at War. Scott presented a version of them as free spirits who preferred rosy cheeks and a windblown hairstyle to the buttoned-up presentation of the ATS. Cleaning out pigsties held no horrors for this type; her motherly instincts stood her in good stead caring for animals and milking cows, and the fresh air did wonders for her complexion. In the evenings there was time to take up water-colouring, and in spring to rhapsodise over the antics of newborn lambs. In reality the Land Army, especially the Timber Corps, was far from being a pastoral soft option.
Jean McFadyen was sent to a remote area of Aberdeenshire, where she was trained in the use of tools and the basics of forestry work, including axe-swinging. The girls were issued with work clothes – a greatcoat, bib-and-brace denim overalls, a mackintosh, Wellington boots and two pairs of thick woollen socks – all a far cry from the smart ‘walking-out’ uniform that had attracted Jean on the cardboard cut-out. ‘The get-up did absolutely nothing for our vanity!’ The girls lived in communal huts, working and eating together. Their diet, she recalls, was principally spam, and mince. They slept in rows ‘army style’, alternately head-to-toe. ‘Your head would be at the bottom of the camp-bed with two pairs of feet on the beds either side of you. If you were caught moving your pillow up the other end you were in trouble … Lots of the girls cried themselves to sleep every night. We had blisters on our hands and feet.’
Once the training was over they were sent out to start their duties. Meeting Jean today, it is hard to imagine such a slight, bird-like woman undertaking such arduous work. Some of the girls worked in sawmills using chainsaws; but Jean was out felling, cross-cutting and snedding* the timber by hand.
In summertime we started very early, but in winter we didn’t leave the camp till 8 in the morning. We had up to an hour’s drive away from the camp on an open-topped lorry before we got to our place of work. The first winter I was there it was freezing, and when I came home I couldn’t walk because my legs were rubbing against the damp denim. The next day I went to work wearing my pyjamas underneath my overalls! And that work was not easy. I had a sore back, sore legs, sore arms – and massive muscles!
Despite being skinny and barely five foot tall, Jean took her share of the weight, lifting whole felled trees and throwing them on to a stack taller than herself. It could take a dozen girls heaving together, always with two ‘heavyweights’ at either end, to get each trunk up on to the stack. They loaded the lorries, and two girls drove them to the station, where they were then unloaded on to the trains. Jean took her turn too with the sawmill teams – ‘I was always scared I would lose my fingers … it was known to happen.’
Despite the hardship Jean never regretted her decision to join up:
The war opened up life for me. I escaped from my mother’s eye. And I met people my own age, which I would not have done had the war not happened. I’d have probably gone on in service, and finished up an old maid.
For even in rural Aberdeenshire there were social compensations: on Friday nights the girls jumped off the lorry, fought for the bathroom, donned a dress, then walked three miles to the nearest village, where there were dances that lasted till one or two in the morning. By 1942 attractive men were in short supply – ‘there were farmer boys, wee laddies … But we danced with each other mostly. There was always a live band with accordions and fiddles, for reels and Scottish dancing.’ On Saturday afternoons they caught the bus into Aberdeen and went straight to the picture house. Jean’s trips into the city, thronging with servicemen, gave her a taste of bustle and activity: ‘it was a bit more fun, a bit more life, as it were’ (though she still felt incapable of entering a pub – nice Scottish girls simply didn’t). Jim, her boyfriend, was far away in North Africa with Monty’s Eighth Army; she felt no obligation to hold every soldier or sailor at arm’s length for the duration. ‘I was not abo
ve a kiss or a cuddle, no, that was permissible! We had a life!’
Nevertheless, the girls scrambled every evening for the post to see if letters had arrived from their sweethearts. There’d be giggles at the acronyms on the backs of envelopes: HOLLAND, for ‘Hope Our Love Lasts And Never Dies’, or ITALY, for ‘I Trust And Love You’. It was Jim’s mother, however, who contacted Jean to tell her that her son was missing after the Battle of El Alamein. Days of suspense followed, before she got the news that he had been captured by the Germans. ‘It was horrible. But it was happening every day to somebody. Not that that helped.’ Jim spent the three remaining years of the war suffering mistreatment and malnutrition in a POW camp in Yugoslavia. Jean kept in touch, but she had her life to get on with:
Ach, there were lots of good times. And it opened up my life. Mainly, it was the comradeship that made it. I worked with the same group for most of the time I was in the Corps, and I made great friends with them. We were all in the same boat.
Though her forestry work made a huge contribution to the war – providing everything from pit props to coffins, telegraph poles to armaments packaging, Jean was only marginally interested in the war effort:
I don’t think we thought deeply about what we were doing or why we were doing it - we were just doing it! We were there to have fun.
But where the job made a real difference was in her own sense of self-worth. The war had turned her into a somebody:
The war changed my life completely. It gave me confidence. I know now that anything men can do, women can do better.
Kay Mellis was another young Scottish woman who left a life of narrow horizons and through war work discovered a new side to herself. She was billeted in a hostel with seven other Land Army girls, and conditions were as tough for her as for Jean McFadyen. The accommodation was in a courtyard harness-room with horses on one side, a braying donkey on the other and rats everywhere, which chewed their clothes. The work made no concessions to her youth or lack of strength:
We had to do whatever a man could do, there was no question. We thinned turnips with hoes – but the men used to always take the best hoes. And if your hoe was too big, it would rub between your forefinger and your thumb. Sugar beet we had to pull out by hand … We got sores, and calluses; you used lanolin to soothe them.
But three years of back-breaking farm work also boosted Kay’s confidence in her abilities:
At the beginning we were told we were useless – coming from the town with our soft hands and posh Edinburgh way of talking. But I must admit that, when I could thin neeps a bit better, and lift tatties a bit better, it did make me feel really good. To think: ‘Oh, I can do as good as you now.’
‘Why does it always rain?’ A Kentish land girl’s view of cabbage-cutting. Here as elsewhere, there is no differentiation between men’s and women’s work.
Another propagandising publication about the Women’s Land Army appeared in 1944. It was written by Vita Sackville-West, who, with her love of the land and keen appreciation of young women clad in boots and breeches, would appear to have been the perfect choice of author for such a work. Sackville-West’s account of the WLA in Scotland complements Jean’s and Kay’s experiences, telling of ‘townies’ lifting potatoes, Scottish shepherdesses, the pleasures and perils of milking a cow and the satisfactions of rat-catching. And she described the life of the Timber Corps girls, romantically cut off from civilisation among the deer and the wild Highland scenery – ‘Man’s foolish war had penetrated even this.’
A less eulogising picture of the Land Army appeared after the war was over. Shirley Joseph described her 1946 memoir as ‘an Unofficial Account’. In it she told of insanitary living conditions and lack of fresh food; of working seventy-hour weeks, with one week off a year. She told of dung-spreading, tractor-driving, ploughing, loading and five o’clock starts. ‘I felt more tired at the end of the day than I had thought humanly possible’ – and yet the farmer who employed her regarded her as a shirker. Surviving as a land girl required, in her view, robustness, genuine love of the country and lack of ambition. ‘It is not necessary to be well educated or intelligent in the Land Army. In fact, the fewer brains and more brawn you have, the more the farmer likes you … Land girls are the lowest form of life in the eyes of many farmers.’ Several other accounts confirm this picture: bullying farmers, misery and exhaustion. Monica Littleboy held out on a chicken farm in Norfolk for six months before quitting for the WAAFs. ‘I was working with one man and a boy and thousands of chickens for company … the dust, confusion, dirt and noise had to be seen to be believed … at five o’clock I cycled back 4 miles … worn out and ready for bed.’ The artist Mary Fedden chose the Land Army because she thought she would be safe from the bombs, but her Gloucestershire farm was close to an aircraft factory: ‘we were bombed every night for a year … When the farmer was beastly to me I would go into the shed and sit among the calves, and cry,’ she remembered.
But Shirley Joseph conceded that the experience had value. Communal living had made her broad-minded. The social mix encompassed girls from every conceivable walk of life and, exposed to all kinds of explicit narrations, she soon dropped her conventional outlook: ‘If my mother could have overheard some of the conversations I listened to!’ Like Jean McFadyen and Kay Mellis, she felt that her time with the Land Army had educated her, though she did not feel that the experience was likely to be of long-term value:
A girl can’t milk a typewriter any more than she can drive a tractor for a dress shop …
It is true that she will see, in all probability, a new and different side of life. She will undoubtedly be a sounder judge of human nature. She will have learnt self-reliance and self-confidence; and never to take things at their face value …
But such knowledge and experience are not exclusive to those who serve in the Land Army. They can equally well be gained in any of the women’s services.
Officers and Ladies
Shirley Joseph felt the main benefit of her time in the Land Army was its democratising effect, and many of her contemporaries would have agreed that social mobility increased during the war. Before the war, the distinctions between maid and mistress were set in stone. Patience Chadwyck-Healey would no more have chatted informally to Jean McFadyen, Pat Bawland or Flo Mahony than she would have fraternised with her mother’s cook. Now in the FANYs Patience, and many like her in the other services, found herself not only polishing the same brass buttons and bashing the same squares as her social ‘inferiors’, but having to question her ingrained feudal assumptions:
During the war it was very interesting. One found oneself on an entirely new level of meeting people. I remember particularly one little person (well, she was a little person, actually), and I said something like: ‘Where are you from?’ and she had a slight accent of some sort, and she said ‘Oh I was a parlour maid’. So I was quite interested, and I thought: ‘This is some sort of revolution! Here we are sharing a dormitory together.’
And I learned how nice people like that were. One had never been able to talk to them before. But bit by bit talking to them became the norm. You know, we were all doing a job. In fact, they were very often better at the jobs we were asked to do – you know, when we were asked to clean the room or something.
And then eventually, when you became an officer, you also met women above you, who probably would never have crossed your social horizons – because perhaps they were qualified in business, for example. So one’s rather narrow social circle was hugely expanded. Which was all for the good … It was a sudden jump – people who’d been miles apart had to come together and work together.
Patience’s reflections certainly give an indication of social upheaval, though her observation that ‘we’ were just hopeless at cleaning out rooms compared to ‘them’ shows that there was still some way to go. The little parlour maid’s accent was perhaps too much of a giveaway, just as Christian Oldham in the Wrens couldn’t help noticing the unhygienic habits of some of her
more ‘interesting’ dormitory-mates:
Some were wedded to their vests, which they had been wearing all day, keeping them on under pyjamas before they tucked down for the night. Putting your bra on outside your vest then of course comes naturally. The intermediate stage – washing – was passed over.
Christian, as in love with her morning bath as her dorm-mates were with their malodorous undergarments, found their BO offensive, though she tried to put it delicately:
The vest enthusiasts were rather more prone to this affliction than others.
Many accounts remark on how the ‘lower orders’ were also noticeably afflicted with bad language, crudity and vulgarity. But, quick to redress the balance on such observations, Christian commented that, overall, these were superficialities. Like Patience Chadwyck-Healey, she had grown up with narrow horizons and was glad of the opportunity to meet and mix with girls from across the social spectrum. Could ‘the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady’ ever be sisters? In Christian’s friendships and working relationships there was one common factor – ‘that was their integrity’. It had nothing to do with status, smelly vests or being ‘born on the wrong doorstep’. ‘I just realised that some people were true to their word and some were not.’ But these ex-debutantes were speaking from a position of privilege. (Christian herself had secured her coveted post in the Wrens through the good offices of her grandmother, who played bridge with somebody who happened to be Vera Laughton Mathews’s brother.) It cost them little to speak of settling down harmoniously with parlour maids. For Audrey Johnson, a lower-middle-class girl from Leicester, early days with the Wrens served only to remind her that she had joined the elite women’s service:
Millions Like Us Page 19