Frances’s deeply held posture towards the war – and that of the many who held her views – still begs many questions. Her diary does not offer an alternative view of how the Nazis could be held at bay, nations protected, nor how militaristic governments could otherwise be discouraged than through armed resistance.
*
By 1943 the war had begun to seem interminable. From the time the Americans entered the war Churchill was never in doubt of an Allied victory. The Germans’ disastrous campaign in Russia and the Allies’ success at El Alamein and in East Africa increased this confidence; nevertheless the longed-for Second Front, designed to attack Hitler’s Atlantic Wall on the north coast of France, still seemed impossibly distant. Day by day, it was still hard to endure the prolonged absence and heartache occasioned by the war. ‘Cliff seems so far away,’ wrote Nella Last in March, ‘sometimes a sadness beyond tears wraps me round.’ ‘Three years today since Alan was made a prisoner of war – but it’s no use moaning,’ wrote Mrs Milburn sadly on 28 May.
Anne Popham’s lover Graham had, despite her misgivings, joined the RAF as a trainee pilot. They corresponded with eager frequency, with Anne’s letters full of heartening news and gossip about her London friends and her new day job on the picture desk at the Ministry of Information. At this time she dared to hope that, once his divorce came through, she and Graham might make a life together. In her fantasies they were gardener and housekeeper to the owners of some wealthy estate. ‘I just wanted us to live together, somewhere.’ Then in June 1942 the letters from Graham dried up. Concerns about their future as a couple had been replaced, for Anne, by concern for his safety. The ensuing months passed in a state of miserable uncertainty as to his whereabouts; all she knew was that he had been posted abroad for training – but where? Her plight, in those days before easy international communications, was all too common. Across the nation, women were living for letters:
22nd July
I am sitting by the gas fire … after the inevitable disappointment of homecoming. As I come in the gate I try to prevent myself thinking of the possibility of there being a letter, but I can never suppress a glimmer of excitement and hope which always turns to dullness as I open the door. But it can’t be long now.
Please keep safe my sweetheart and remember you are the dearest thing in my world – I love you very much.
August 26th
Darling I still haven’t had a word from you …
September 17th
I am all at sea – at this rate I don’t know whether I should send you my love for your birthday or wish you a happy Christmas … I think of you and love you more and more.
In late September Anne finally got the news that Graham was safe in South Africa at an air school in the Cape. Early in ’43 he was back in England. Graham’s RAF pay now enabled him to employ a solicitor to start divorce proceedings with his estranged wife, naming Anne as co-respondent. All would soon be in place for them to marry. Over the next six months the letters track Anne’s fluctuating hopes as he was posted from Yorkshire, to north Wales, to Nottinghamshire.
22nd April
Darling I suppose some sort of move is due again in your life. I only hope it will be southwards this time.
17th May
Is there any chance of you getting off …? Please let me know.
16th July
I think I will drop into my lonely bed now … I will get Saturday & Monday off & could add another day of my own & go up on Thursday night … Good night my dearest darling.
And then the letters stopped.
On the morning of 10 August she was in her office when the Ministry doorman called her and said, ‘Somebody wants to see you.’ It was Ruth, her flatmate, and she had a telegram. Graham’s Wellington bomber had crash-landed at RAF Ossington in Nottinghamshire, killing the entire crew.
More than sixty-five years after that dreadful day, Anne tried to recapture what it felt like to be twenty-seven and to lose the dearest thing in her world:
It’s very odd what one remembers and doesn’t remember. I’ve blotted out the misery of it. It was too painful. I thought that’s the end of everything I hoped for, the end of the world really. I remember thinking, I’m a widow …
But you had to face it I suppose. When someone dies, you have to look after yourself. And somehow, I don’t know how, I really can’t tell, but one just had to survive.
6 The Girl That Makes the Thing-ummy Bob
The Kitchen Front
Three years in, the war machine had become dictatorial. It commandeered everything that came its way, ruling, processing, shaping people’s lives. Every day the newspaper headlines updated the campaign news with the latest from Japan, RAF sorties, new naval targets in the Atlantic, fighting in Russia, in the Philippines, in Burma and in North Africa. But the inner pages allowed no let-up. Advice alternated with directives, opinions with commands. March 1942: 250,000 20–21-year-olds will be directed to the ATS … clothing coupons will be cut … fines will be imposed on paper-wasters … soap flakes will go further if used to wash woollies in rain-water … the buffet at Euston station will cease to serve rolls with butter … Put your pennies in war savings, sow your peas now, recycle rubber, rear rabbits for food …
Rationing was no longer a novelty, it was a way of life. From onions to sanitary towels, toothpaste to toilet paper, there was no escaping from the urgent need to economise. Coffee, pepper, eggs, marmalade, mixing bowls, knitting needles, hats, hairgrips, shoes, elastic and a myriad of foods and commodities dependent on petrol, scarce raw materials, imports and labour were all now in short supply and getting scarcer, as were contraceptives, ping-pong balls and alcohol. Wedding rings were becoming hard to obtain. New mums hoarded nappies and safety pins. A convocation of women’s magazine editresses was assembled to put the ‘tragic’ case of the large women in need of elastic corsets who had written to them in despair; sadly, the rubber shortage made their case hopeless. Goods were of poor quality: needles broke and saucepans dented. Anyone lucky enough to come by a bottle of sherry cherished it and laid it by for Christmas. Bananas, toffees, oranges and chocolate were becoming a distant memory for many children. And to a very large extent the burden of coping with these shortages fell on women. Everyone agreed that women needed to join the services and the wartime workforce; nevertheless, the assumption continued unquestioned that it was a woman’s job to feed everyone, to look after children and to care for the home.
Coping in the kitchen: literally, a battle.
Getting her family clothed, her housework and shopping done and meals on the table in the time left over from other duties drew on a high level of resourcefulness and ingenuity. Of these, meals took priority.
How laborious life was. Shopping for food had become a thankless chore requiring patience and stamina. Rage stirred in the heart of the housewife as she waited in the bus queues for the vehicles that would convey her to market, for to have the pick of the stalls she must push to be first on the bus. Each carried her shopping bag on her arm, for paper bags were wasteful and had been outlawed. But in Barrow-in-Furness, where once the countrywomen had set up their stalls of new-laid eggs and home-produced honey in the market square, Nella Last now lamented the sad change; the joyous scene of old was reduced to baskets of muddy cockles and a few warped beets, for which ‘grim-faced women’ queued and pushed. Vere Hodgson, a brisk middle-aged spinster living in Notting Hill Gate, recorded her pursuit of an onion: ‘such a struggle’. When she finally got hold of one it was ‘a victory indeed!’ A great deal of agonising was expended on the question of how to get the best out of your ration book. Did you spread your custom round several shops to improve your chances of obtaining the sought-after lemons or eggs that you craved, or did you patronise one shopkeeper in the hope that he would put you first in line for two ounces of coffee or a quarter of sultanas when they came in?
Choice, where it existed, became ever more limited. Before the war you could have taken your pick from 350 varieties o
f biscuit, from Garibaldis to chocolate wafers. This had come down to twenty, most of them plain Maries. And in spring 1942 the white loaf disappeared.
Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, headed an immensely successful propaganda campaign to persuade the population to eat within their means. With the emphasis on nutrition, the nation’s health improved. The challenge now was not to combat hunger – there was generally enough food, of a kind that caused one WAAF to put on two stone during the course of the war – but to make oatmeal, parsnips, barley, spam, potatoes, potatoes and more potatoes taste appetising without the delicious but scarce ingredients required to ginger them up. Clever cooks eked them out with un-rationed curry powder, Oxo, Daddies sauce or salad cream. Six ounces of salt cod mashed up with potatoes and Worcester sauce could make a nice fish paste – ‘a nutritious picnic treat’ according to one food writer. Substitution was the cook’s key strategy: parsnips for bananas, milk and margarine for cream, dried egg for everything. Unrationed offal was put to good use. Woman’s Own gave recipes for Brain Cakes and Brain Soufflé; the Daily Express Wartime Cookery Book offered Sheep’s Head with Caper Sauce. But if you weren’t adventurous enough for such exotica, food could seem unremittingly starchy and beige.
Nella Last was proud of her thrift. ‘I cut my quarter of beef up small, and lightly fried it with a cut-up leek, added a carrot and a slice of turnip, diced, and simmered it all very slowly for two hours. Then I added sliced potatoes and seasoning, and cooked till all the liquid was absorbed. I had soaked dried peas in the pantry, so I added them with the potatoes; and if look and smell are anything to go by, it’s a very good lunch,’ she recorded in her diary in March 1942. But she felt she had to conceal her cheese-paring ways from her husband. Wars might rage and the roof might fall in, but Will Last’s meals had to be on the table three times a day. With no milk to be had and sugar scarce, she thickened a water custard with cornflour and sweetened it with honey. ‘When I served the pudding, I said carelessly, “Oh, I’ve made clear honey sauce for a change.” I know that one, he doesn’t like economy dishes – if he realises they are economy dodges!’
Today many working women rely on ready meals to reduce the burden of food preparation. But, despite their availability in the 1940s, the Advice Division of the Ministry of Food discouraged the use of packets and tins, exhorting the housewife to draw on willpower and make stern resolutions, such as:
I shall use canned foods as little as possible, keeping them as an emergency supply.
I shall not grumble when the butcher does not have the particular joint I want; I shall take the next best thing and be thankful to get it.
The part played by the housewife in reducing consumption was fully recognised by the government, which expended much energy in persuading her to be frugal. Every effort was made to inject some fun into our stodgy and increasingly vegetable-based diet; jolly ‘Dr Carrot’ and hearty ‘Potato Pete’ appeared in recipe books and advertisements. ‘Try cooking cabbage this way,’ begged the literature, while competitions were mounted for the best wartime cake recipe – without sugar. Appeals and propaganda were effective (though was anyone fooled by recipes for ‘mock apricot flan’ made from carrots?), but the best persuaders were women themselves.
In 1942 the home economist Marguerite Eave married RAF gunnery officer Bob Patten. Due for call-up herself, Marguerite Patten resisted the pressure to volunteer for the WAAFs; in her pocket she had a letter from the Ministry of Food requesting her to assist their operation at a Food Advice Centre in the Cambridge area, a job which played to her extraordinary strengths both as cook and communicator. All big cities now had such centres. As soon as the wedding was over, she joined the all-female staff of organisers, dieticians and demonstrators to promote good wartime nutrition and economy among housewives:
As far as I know there was not a single man doing that job. Men weren’t trained for it.
But what was so important about the Ministry of Food Advisers was that we didn’t wait for people to come to us, we went to them. I remember that first Friday evening when I reported for duty in Cambridge I was told, ‘Get your stall up early in the market square, Marguerite, because you’ll want a good pitch.’ ‘The market?’ I thought. Well, I’d never given a demonstration in a market before and I said so. ‘Well now’s your chance to begin,’ I was told by the organiser very briskly.
But markets were just one way of reaching them. Many rural branches used mobile caravans that opened at the front, you see? – with a counter for demonstrations … and we got out to welfare clinics and the outpatients’ departments of hospitals and so on.
These ‘outreach’ demonstrations gave Marguerite Patten a special insight into the housewife’s wartime predicament:
What we found out was that the worst thing for the British was having to do without meat. The one thing the women always asked was, ‘How long do we have to put up with this?’ As a nation in those days we loved our Sunday roast, with plenty of meat, but just two vegetables: potatoes and cabbage. Or carrots, or Brussels sprouts, but never both together. But in wartime we had to do a complete change around and fill the plate with a selection of vegetables.
But you know those women were much more competent as cooks than they are today, because they had learned to cook watching their mother. They weren’t experts, but they knew the basics. You could talk about a white sauce, or mashed potato, or tell them to do a roast, and they automatically understood.
‘We never went without food, ’cause we had good mums, didn’t we?’ agrees onetime WAAF Flo Mahony. A generation of women who, like Nella Last, remembered the previous war had the resourcefulness to deal with shortages and they taught their daughters to be like them. Flo was brought up by her mother not to throw anything out. ‘Our mums could make a piece of meat last for about three days, which today nobody could do, and they’d know what to do with the bones after that. If you had a war today people would starve.’ Eileen Rouse says that her mum was the same. ‘Oh, we managed, love. My mother was a very thrifty person; she could make our two ounces go round – well, you had to. My mum always used to get a bit of fat included with the meat from her ration so she could get some dripping. It wasn’t a lot, but it helped the butter out, see? And I can honestly say that I don’t ever remember being hungry.’
Clocking On
Where cookery was concerned, the nation’s women had a deeply entrenched fund of know-how, adaptability and – at times – low cunning to see them through. It came from listening and sharing with each other, as women do, but it also came from their grandmothers and their great-grandmothers. Many of them simply knew, without really thinking about it, what to do with a carcase, how to make custard, chop suet, render dripping, bottle damsons, pickle beetroots. They went nutting, and blackberrying. To many, economising was nothing new, it was bred in the bone, and part of their identity.
What was new was combining being a thrifty housewife with a job in a factory sewing uniforms, or making aircraft, or barrage balloons, or munitions, or chemicals and explosives; trying to run a home while working on the buses; keeping up with the chores while clocking on as a post office worker, welder, engineer, or shipyard worker. By 1942 there were roughly three times as many women in work as there had been in 1939.
One of these was Zelma Katin. Zelma was married, forty years old with a fourteen-year-old schoolboy son and living in Sheffield. She had been attempting for years to get a job but, charring aside, there was nothing much available for an intelligent married woman. Then the war came, and suddenly she found she was wanted. It was a pity, she reflected, that this eagerness to enlist her services had only manifested itself in a time of mass destruction and loss of life; nevertheless she was willing to help the war effort and went down to the Labour Exchange. There she was asked, as a non-mobile woman, to choose between factory work or transport:
I thought of the heat, noise, electric light and airlessness of a munition factory and then I thought of the fresh air that blows from the Yorkshire
moors across a tramcar platform in my city.
And so I became a clippie – a tram conductress.
The selection process for this job was a formality. The shortage of transport workers was by now so desperate that the Department would have given the work to a one-legged old age pensioner, but Zelma had to undergo a medical and a mental arithmetic test. By now she was starting to worry about how on earth she would cope with working a full week at the same time as looking after her house and her young lad. But when she asked whether it would be possible to work part-time, she had to endure a humiliating lecture from the patronising lady supervisor, who rebuffed her request in cut-glass accents. ‘The country was at war, she said, it was my duty to accept the job that was offered me, and my boy was old enough to look after himself.’
In the event, Zelma was put on the early shift, starting before 5 in the morning, which theoretically left her free to do housework, shopping, and cooking from mid-afternoon, when she came off duty. In a letter to her husband, Louis, who had been called up to the army, she described her day.
The alarm went off at 3.30 a.m. By 4 she was up, washed and combed. Her shoes were polished and her uniform buttoned. At 4.25, having breakfasted on Weetabix and strong tea and packed a flask, a jam scone and a packet of cigarettes, she left the house. Her son was asleep, and the moon was still up. She travelled to the depot and clocked on at 4.45 a.m.; by 5 she was on board her electric tram where, for the next four and a half hours, with a small break for tea at 7, she was on her feet, seeing passengers off and on and collecting fares. Zelma noticed with amusement that the starting-out time of her passengers was in inverse proportion to their social class. The early birds were the ‘proletarians’ – factory hands in boiler suits; these were followed by neatly attired shop assistants, clerks and professional workers; next came the middle-aged men who employed them, sober-suited and well brushed. A second wave followed the first: the rank-and-file wives and mothers bearing shopping bags, seeking bargains at Woolworth’s or at the grubby market, and finally the ‘ladies of leisure’, their perfume wafting past her as they alighted from the tram on their way to purchase 20-guinea frocks and silk stockings from hushed and hallowed down-town emporia. At 9.30 Zelma had precisely forty-eight minutes’ break: time to queue in the canteen for a starchy meal, tea and a slice of parkin, eat it, dash to the toilet for a quick wash and brush-up, before another four hours on board her tram. Back to the depot by 2.45 p.m. to count her takings – she had sold 1,051 tickets – and clock off. Which left the remainder of the day to sort out some small difficulty with her son’s school at the local Education Office, collect shoe repairs, do the shopping and stagger home by 4 … only to wake from her armchair with a start at 6. There was tea to prepare and eat, clearing up to do, a letter to write to her husband abroad, the beds to make and the floor to sweep. At dusk she retired, but first she set the alarm for the next day’s early start.
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