*
Times were changing. For women in wartime, the wages of sin were often automatic dismissal, but no longer always automatic disgrace. Meanwhile, male attitudes remained predictably primitive. In time-honoured fashion, men continued to achieve a mental disconnect between their sexual and emotional needs. The pin-ups of bosomy Hollywood starlets and scantily clad cutie-pies adorning army accommodation and Spitfire fuselages played into a fantasy driven by lust and loneliness. So did ‘Jane’,* the Daily Mirror’s famous curvaceous cartoon blonde, credited with boosting troop morale every time her skirt got caught in a door or she lost her towel on the way to the shower. And if centre-fold girls didn’t do enough to quench a man’s libido, there were plenty of real-life vamps out there ready and waiting to do their bit. Servicemen away from home could take a ‘pick’n’mix’ approach to the locals, the amateur fun-lovers and the so-called ‘good-time girls’. If you were in a hurry, or in transit, you consulted the graffiti on the toilet walls at barracks: ‘Try Betty, she’s easy’ and so on. Ex-WAAF Joan Tagg remembers that when she was stationed at Oxford ‘there was a girl there called the camp bicycle. I didn’t know who she was, but all the boys there who needed her would have known.’
‘Jane’, with only a union flag to preserve her modesty.
Where there are soldiers there are camp-followers. Wherever it might be, at home or abroad, the army attracted another, shadier army of women cashing in on a captive market and (in Britain) a law which turned a blind eye to the activities of street-walkers. The blackout favoured their dubious trade; in London they were dubbed the ‘Piccadilly Commandos’. The numbers of such women reflected the increase in conscripts and, to the dismay of the health authorities, venereal infections showed a parallel proliferation. In the first two years of the war new cases of syphilis in men were up 113 per cent, in women 63 per cent. With the arrival of the GIs such diseases reached almost epidemic proportions. Outside Rainbow Corner – the American servicemen’s club on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue – the ‘Commandos’ were like bees round a honeypot; one US staff sergeant recalled how they swarmed round the darkened West End:
The girls were there – everywhere. They walked along Shaftesbury Avenue and past Rainbow Corner, pausing only when there was no policeman watching … At the underground entrance they were thickest, and as the evening grew dark, they shone torches on their ankles as they walked and bumped into the soldiers murmuring, ‘Hello Yank’, ‘Hello Soldier’, ‘Hello Dearie!’
Apparently they often issued a supercharge of $5 – ‘to pay for blackout curtains’. Sex was on the streets as never before. Less recognised is that some of these prostitutes were themselves servicewomen. Flo Mahony was a WAAF who shared her accommodation at her Swanage base with a pretty young woman named Phyllis, who regarded the nearby men’s camp as a business opportunity:
She was a WAAF driver – a great friend of mine, and she had been a prostitute … Well, she would get dressed up and go off out at night. We covered for each other – and obviously we all guessed. She had red cami-knickers, she’d always got perfume and she’d always got talcum powder – things which were quite difficult for us to get. We never talked to her about it, but she went with servicemen I suppose. We all liked her, and she was no trouble to us.
The army was also a two-way traffic for sex workers: the services might offer an escape route to women trapped in a degraded profession – ‘I’ve been working in London for years as a prostitute,’ one of them confided to a fellow recruit, ‘and I joined up to try to leave it all behind me.’
The Wages of Sin
Meanwhile, four years of war had not shifted men’s deeply rooted presumptions as to what they felt owed by women. On the one hand, they wanted to go to bed with them. And men could be selfishly persuasive if they wanted sex with married women: ‘A slice off a cut loaf ain’t missed.’ On the other hand, they wanted to be mummied, fed and looked after. They expected fidelity, modesty, domesticity and duty. Scattered over battle fronts from Mandalay to Mersa Matruh, husbands and boyfriends now nurtured the dream of coming home to find their domestic goddess fantasy intact. But things were changing. Disturbing clashes often resulted:
‘How can I be sure she will be true?’
‘Every time my husband comes home on leave I am terribly thrilled. But when we meet it is nothing but silly little squabbles.’
‘My wife is working on a farm and I am in the Army … Each time I come home I see her being very friendly with the farm men. I feel angry and suspicious.’
‘He asked me to clean his army boots for him.’
In 1939 there had been just under 10,000 divorce petitions. Now, not surprisingly, divorce rates surged. Women – and men – often embarked hastily and ignorantly on marriages which they then repented. But the millions of wives working in factories and army camps didn’t have time to keep the home fires burning. The domestic goddess had hung up her apron and donned overalls or battle-dress. She was out earning good money and she was placing her duty to her country above her duty to her home. By 1945 that figure had increased to 27,000 petitions, 70 per cent of these on grounds of adultery. Had it not been for the conviction among many respectably brought-up girls that ‘hanky-panky’ was wrong there would surely have been many more.
But if innocence, trust and tradition got misplaced along the way, well, there were compensations. Making love in the crags or amid the bracken, dancing the rumba, spring nights and beautiful young men all helped to banish the miseries of war – and who would blame anyone for trying to do that?
*
Jane Howard’s baby daughter Nicola had made an inauspicious start to life in 1943. Jane had endured a wearisome pregnancy and gave birth three weeks early after a long and agonising labour. In the following weeks she tried and failed to love the screaming little scrap who had cost her such pain and fatigue. ‘I’d not wanted her enough and was no good as a mother.’ She put her love affairs before her child at this time, and many years were to pass before her maternal feelings eventually matured.
Babies, however, were very much wanted by the powers that be. Before the war, there had been much wringing of hands over the decline of the birth rate in Britain. By 1939 it had dropped to below replacement levels, with 2 million fewer under-fourteens than in 1914, and a worsening situation developing by 1941. With worries about a shrinking and ageing population the correspondence columns of the press were deluged with anxious letters, of which the following are typical:
14 March 1942
Let us see a state-sponsored plan for the systematic increase of our population before it is too late.
9 October 1942
What are we doing about our … birth-rate, the increase of which must be considerably curtailed by the fact that innumerable husbands serving in the forces have been sent overseas for the duration of the war?
One explanation given for the statistics was that parents were too filled with gloom about the future to go forth and multiply. Mass Observation interviewed a young woman – a midwife – who angrily accused the authorities of trying to persuade women to breed more soldiers as cannon fodder: ‘I think it’s horrible. They don’t want the babies for their own sakes at all, just for wars.’ However, the 1943 figures, when they were published, showed an unexpected turnaround. Nicola was one of 811,000 babies born in the UK that year, a rise of 115,000 from 1941 figures. After that, the figures continued to increase. The analysts breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed that the practice and profession of motherhood would not go into irreversible decline and that we would not, after all, be overtaken by the fecund Germans. (When Naomi Mitchison’s daughter-in-law told her she was expecting a baby at this time, Naomi’s reaction was: ‘It’s one in the eye for Hitler.’) An explanation for much of this boost was that large numbers of young people born in the last, post-First World War baby boom were now reaching maturity. There was also the fact that 1939–40 had been a peak year for marriages. However, included in that 1943 figure of 811,000 birt
hs were 53,000 babies who were illegitimate – a figure also set to rise as the war progressed.
Behind the statistics lies a multitude of sad case histories. On 23 March 1943 Nella Last confided to her diary the upsetting tale she had been told that day by a complete stranger at the WVS centre. This woman had burst into tears without warning; Nella fetched her a glass of water and listened while she unburdened herself: ‘I feel I’m going out of my mind with worry.’ Her twenty-three-year-old daughter, it appeared, was a married Wren, whose husband had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk. However the girl had no intention, it seemed, of repining; she was always the life and soul of every party, and it now transpired that she was five months pregnant. Between sobs, the mother told Nella that she and her husband were being torn apart by their daughter’s predicament; the father, in a great rage, accusing her of being a slut, with the mother inclining to believe her daughter’s tale: that she knew nothing of how this had happened and must have been ‘tight’ at the time. Nella sat with her and did her best to soothe her, but the poor woman was distraught.
Unmarried servicewomen who fell pregnant were duly noted on a POR, or Personal Occurrence Report, then issued with ‘Paragraph 11s’ and dismissed from the force. In the WAAFs, for example, ‘it was a fate worse than death to get pregnant – you were out!’ One ATS officer posted to the Orkneys commented on the extreme number of ‘Para 11s’ issued in her company – inevitable, she suggested, given that there were no fewer than 10,000 men on the island in two ack-ack brigades. However it could be hard to tell if the girls were pregnant, as the ATS uniforms were oddly bulky and could hide a multitude of sins. One girl was heard screaming in her hut; she was packed off to hospital with a case of ‘severe constipation’, where it turned out that she was giving birth.
Far worse was the nightmare ordeal suffered by QA Lorna Bradey, who in 1942 was based in a Cairo hospital. While there she got a surprise message from an old nursing friend who had come down on leave from her hospital in Eritrea. ‘Could I come at once to her hotel … urgent.’ Lorna went down as soon as she was off duty and found her friend lying on the hotel bed, bleeding copiously. She had become pregnant by a very ‘high-up’ official and had travelled to Cairo for a backstreet abortion. To Lorna, who had studied midwifery, it was immediately plain that her friend could die at any moment and must be got to hospital. The friend begged her not to betray her secret, leaving Lorna no choice. She massaged her uterus, packed her out with towels, and obtained black-market antibiotics. ‘Sepsis was the thing I feared most. I made her swallow a good handful of these.’ Throughout the night Lorna sat with her, taking her weakening pulse, mopping up as coagulating blood and fragments of placenta came away from the welter of redness between her legs. At long last the antibiotics took hold, and the bleeding slowed. Lorna, having saved her friend’s life, visited her over the next week as she improved, after which she returned to her unit – ‘weak but alive’ – and well enough to spin a tale about ‘gippy tummy’. Despite Lorna’s stupendous efforts, this friend broke off contact with her after the war. She knew too much.
Barbara Cartland stressed, however, that pregnant servicewomen like this were in a tiny minority. In her view, it was only surprising that there weren’t more illegitimacies in the services, considering the danger and proximity that men and women underwent together.
Civilian women were often fair game for the soldiers. Seventeen-year-old Vivian Fisher’s husband first deserted from the army and then walked out on her. Left on her own, Vivian took consolation in the arms of a soldier serving with the Royal Engineers; she had a baby girl by him, but he too beat a retreat. ‘I was devastated … it took me a time to get over the hurt.’ Her next baby, a boy, was born to Jimmy, an attractive GI who promised to marry her and take her back with him to America. She would have gone had her errant husband not returned unexpectedly. Another woman whose husband was abroad slept with a GI and got pregnant but decided her lover must not know, otherwise he would never let her go. Heartbroken, she finished with him, while suffering torments at the thought that she was also deceiving her absent husband.
Distance could cause terrible misunderstandings. A soldier based in Iraq went to his brigadier in great distress, having received the following cable from his wife: SON BORN BOTH DOING WELL LOVE MARY. He hadn’t seen her for two years. The brigadier did his best to comfort the poor man, who departed – only to return shortly afterwards waving a letter which explained everything to his entire satisfaction. ‘It’s all right, sir, it’s not her it’s my mother. She’s a widow. Must have been playing around with some man.’
The agony aunts did their best to respond to desperate women like this one who wrote in about their infidelities:
My husband is a prisoner of war, and I was dreadfully depressed and lonely until I met two allied officers who were very sweet to me. Now I realise that I am going to have a baby, and I don’t know which is the father.
Do anything to avoid hurting your husband, advised Woman’s Own.
Motherhood in wartime carried its own particular burdens. Pregnant mums (dubbed Woolton’s ‘preggies’ from the minister’s concern to distribute rations among the ‘priority classes’) didn’t get extra clothing coupons. They were expected to let out their existing dresses to fit, though with their green ration books they were first in line for extra milk, meat, eggs and orange juice concentrate. Bombs were blamed for miscarriages; babies might be born in air-raid shelters or under tables in the blackout; traumatised and exhausted, their mothers often found their milk supply dried up.
If you took the decision to evacuate your children for their safety there was the pain of separation. But Madeleine Henrey and her husband decided to stick it out in London for the duration. Little Bobby, born in summer 1939, grew up to the sound of exploding bombs, and his loving parents, who had already had to take the dreadful decision to leave Madeleine’s French mother behind in German-occupied Normandy, were reluctant to split up their family more than they had to. The Henreys had taken a small flat in the Shepherd Market area of Mayfair; it was modern and solidly built. With a very young baby, Madeleine was not expected to take on war work; she spent her days wheeling the perambulator down the shrapnel-strewn pathways of Green Park, with Pouffy the Pekinese snuggled into Bobby’s coverlet. She got reproachful looks from some of the local Londoners who thought her misguided for keeping the child in the city, ‘but he grew plump and rosy-cheeked, oblivious of the thuds that woke us from time to time’. After a while the market costers and other shoppers got to know Bobby as ‘the child who would not be evacuated’ and treated him as a kind of mascot. When Robert Henrey returned from his office at the end of the day, he was often greeted by strangers giving him cheerful updates on his small son’s progress.
Verily Bruce was another young mother who had no misgivings about her role in the war. In August 1940, when she married Donald and became Mrs Anderson, she reflected that she had now found her ‘real aim in life’. She continued to harbour writing ambitions, but despite Donald’s ministry post she was mostly kept too busy to fulfil them. Pregnant during the Blitz with the first of her five babies, she took up knitting ‘tiny garments’ and found the work so soothing that she was able to ignore the bombs. In spring 1941 Verily was awaiting the birth in a maternity home in Esher, in the next bed to Julie, a lively and loveable Cockney evacuee. Verily had Marian ten days after Julie’s little boy James was born. The mum network quickly proved valuable for them both. Julie was lodging with a horrible landlady who made her wash the baby’s nappies in a bucket in the yard; she was miserable. The Andersons had a spare room. Why shouldn’t Julie and her baby move in with them?
‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely!’ she said. And then she came back and said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t do it …’ And I said, ‘Oh, but it’s all arranged, our babies are going to be brother and sister …’ At which point she burst into tears and said, ‘You see I’m not married.’ ‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘that’s nothing! All the more rea
son why you should come.’ So she did, and she was absolutely wonderful, because I was very ill after the birth, and she just took over both babies until I was better and could help. And she could do the housework very much better than me!
By the time air raids on London resumed Verily had two small children. Three-year-old Marian found that the bombing provided a thrilling distraction from bed-time. As newborn Rachel slept beatifically in her cot she would bounce excitedly on her parents’ bed listening to the bombs whistling over St John’s Wood:
‘One two three and a –’
‘Bang!’ she shouted with delight as the bomb exploded.
‘More bangs?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Oh, the woos,’ she said regretfully of the all-clear, knowing it meant she must return to bed.
Soon after, Verily and her two small daughters evacuated to Gloucestershire and set up home with a couple of friends who were there, working as land girls. Their husbands were abroad, and one of them had a young baby. Cockney Julie and little James joined them, and Donald came when he could. While her friends were out milking cows and lifting turnips, Verily took lodgers, did the cooking, looked after the dogs and ran a kind of women’s baby co-operative for all four children.
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