Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  In newly liberated Belgium there were pleasures for the taking. Alcohol, clothes and perfume were plentiful, and the QAs were thrilled to rediscover their feminine side, shopping and partying. Joy at this time was on the rebound, and she had seen too much suffering to feel that life owed her anything. On the face of it Ron – good-looking and breezy, with a touch of the suave cavalier about him – seemed a good bet. He was a slick and able dancer, plus, he had no ties. And so they dated. As he twirled her around to the strains of Glen Miller, Joy failed to detect Ron’s severe and meticulous side. When it became apparent that her superior officer rank meant that he couldn’t go into her mess, she – unlike him – took it in her stride. For in reality, this was a man who cared deeply about rank and who, as a Supply Corps sergeant, liked everything in boxes. The army, with its rigour and clockwork precision, suited his character. From Joy’s end of things, Ron was a nice man who owned a fast car and was ‘a charming companion’. And now that the Allies seemed to be beating back the enemy, there was perhaps room to have a bit of fun, to take a glimpse into a happier future.

  As it turned out, there was little time for dreaming, as the Germans counter-attacked against the Allied advance, taking advantage of their overstretched supply lines. In Eeklo, the QAs took in victims of the Ardennes Offensive, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with over 47,000 Americans wounded, and 19,000 killed.

  But nothing could have prepared Joy Taverner for the ordeal still to come, as she and her fellow nurses continued to support the army’s inexorable advance into Germany.

  9 No Real Victory

  Dim-out

  Brixton, south London, Friday 23 June 1944. For the last ten days, Miss Florence Speed, diarist, and author of Blossoming Flowers (1942), Cinderella’s Day Out (1943) and Exquisite Assignment (1944), had found it hard to concentrate on writing her escapist romances for the women’s light fiction market. Seven days after D-day, powerful explosions rocked south-east England. From launch sites in the Pas de Calais, the Germans had begun a bombardment which threatened to exceed the damage of the Blitz. South London lay directly in the path of these V1s, or ‘pilotless planes’ – soon to be christened buzz bombs or doodlebugs. Deafeningly noisy, the most sinister and impersonal aspect of Hitler’s mystery weapon was the way that its engine noise cut out shortly before impact. Round the clock, for most of June, there were to be approximately a hundred of these deadly explosions every day.

  Since the beginning, Florence had been keeping a tally of bomb raids, numbering each one. In the early hours of that Friday morning she was woken by the sound of sirens. She picked up her bedside diary, and started to document the raids as they happened:

  0210 The last notes of the sirens woke me fifteen minutes ago. Since then three of the flying bombs – no four, another has just gone off, – have just exploded … Raid 732

  A new type by the sound of them … one hardly hears them before they explode – It’s gone off. Six in a quarter of an hour.

  Seventh audible. Going to be a nasty night.

  Gone off.

  0225 Very nasty near one & one scarcely heard the thing before it was down. There’s a 1000 lbs of explosive in each.

  0555 All Clear going. In intervals of sleep counted 14 bomb crashes.

  0655 Crump again but not so near.

  0730 All clear

  0755 Warning Raid 755. Crump …

  Miss Speed got up and dressed. After breakfast she went shopping, but by 10 a.m. there had been another twenty raids. She got home and, with a rather shaky pen, recorded ‘Raid 776’.

  1454 Siren. Raid 777

  1501 Crump.

  Nuisance, as I was typing.

  But can’t stay put under my great window. Ninety per cent of all air-raid casualties are due to flying glass.

  1515 All clear.

  1645 Sirens. Raid 778 …

  1740 Hearing another of the darned things coming … There was a terrific biff. The house shook … A great column of smoke was rising skywards from the direction of Camberwell …

  1829 Raid 779. Oh! What a joyful life …

  2055 Warning Raid 780

  2100 A Crasher down already. Had been in bed only 40 minutes. Looks as if we’re in for a good night again.

  2130 All clear.

  2155 Raid 781 Had just dozed off & think I didn’t hear them.

  2332 All Clear.

  Across the south-east of England it was the same story: sleepless nights, air-raid warnings, streets deep in debris and broken glass. ‘London is in a chastened mood,’ wrote Vere Hodgson, describing the apprehensive atmosphere that pervaded the capital:

  Saturday 8th July

  Buses half empty in the evening. Marked absence of people on the streets. Thousands have left, and many go early to the Shelters. Children have been going in hundreds.

  A curious hush fell on the West End. The ‘up-for-the-day class of woman’ who used to visit London for a perm and a little light shopping had been frightened off. Night after night people slept in their clothes, prepared for the worst. Those who didn’t flee the city retreated to the underground again. ‘I don’t like these Bombs nearly as much as I did the old ones,’ one charlady was reported as saying. Unlike in the Blitz, these bombs fell in broad daylight. You might be on your way to work, or shopping; when you heard their sinister growl, you sprinted for safety. Tragedy became commonplace. Hospitals were bombed. A queue of mothers and children, bombed out of their homes, was waiting to be given clothing when another bomb fell on them. Another hit a Lyons Corner House crowded with lunchers. On 18th June 121 members of the congregation of the Guards Chapel, practically next door to Buckingham Palace, were killed, and seventy injured.

  Churchill acted as far as possible to resist what Vere Hodgson called the ‘Horrible Things’. Here the secret army of sentinels at Bletchley Park played their part. As code-breaker Mavis Lever remembered:

  Doodle bugs were the worst, terrifying. Well, to start out, the flying bombs – which had engines that cut out at a certain distance – were hitting Central London. Though I didn’t know it of course, I was passing information to the Germans through our double agents, who had to get them to believe that most of the stuff they were launching was hitting targets north of London. And that would persuade them to reduce the cut-out. So then they were all hitting South London. And my parents lived in Norbury in South London, and their terrace was hit, and a neighbour killed, as well as several people I knew there … And I had no idea when I went home and it was bombed that it was anything to do with me! – that I had helped it happen by putting out double-crossing information.

  By autumn 1944, with Germany appearing to be on the back foot, and the Allies making steady, if slow, progress across northern Europe, the V1 attacks represented a deeply depressing setback. But not everybody found them so.

  In 1943 ATS kine-theodolite operator Doffy Brewer had been posted to a gunners’ practice camp at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. Valuable work, as it turned out, when the pilotless planes started to hit London. ‘The world of AA was rejoicing … At last, here was every gunner’s dream.’ All the rehearsals, the calculations and simulations were paying off. These targets moved at an undeviating height, on an undeviating course. Coastal guns in south-east England were – along with RAF fighters and the balloon barrage – the most effective defence against Hitler’s terror weaponry. Doffy and her friends were ‘in the thick of things’, caught up in the general enthusiasm as the men they had helped to train brought down V1s by the thousand. ‘Success was phenomenal. Never had such an AA operation worked so well.’ More than half the V1s were brought down before they could reach their target.

  The rejoicing was short-lived. In August Doffy’s unit was summoned by ‘the brass’, and told with great solemnity and secrecy that British reconnaissance suspected a new weapon of being developed. It would be a long-distance rocket, capable of enormous destruction. The kine operators were to pack their bags. Based just outside Dover, their new job was to scan the skie
s for the giveaway smoke trail that would reveal the new rocket’s launch site. The ATS girls moved into their seaside accommodation, which had a flat roof, with a panoramic view over the Channel. They shared out the watches, always on the alert, scanning the seaward horizon, on which Calais was distantly visible. At the sight of that tell-tale plume of smoke, they would call out ‘Fireworks!’ ‘Big Ben’ was the code name for an identifiable target that could be photographed. With luck, that would enable them to calculate with pinpoint accuracy the location of the launch pad. An immediate phone call to nearby RAF Manston would then give our bomber pilots the coordinates they needed to destroy the missile and the rocket site.

  Three weeks later, Doffy was at home on leave with her parents in Romford when she read in the paper that an enemy bomber and its entire payload had crashed on to a gas main. According to the report, there had been a huge explosion and fearful casualties. ‘I was sure. I was sure that this was it.’ Next day the paper reported two more giant explosions. Two more heavily laden bombers had, apparently, crash-landed on to two more gas mains. Doffy was not fooled and, as soon as she could, hurried back to Dover. There she found the girls jubilant. One of them had seen it: gazing out eastwards, she had spotted the rocket’s unmistakable smoke trace as it zig-zagged up from the horizon, not over the Pas de Calais but over Holland.

  ‘If only we kine girls could have stopped them. It was a nightmare of frustration.’ But the V2 rockets had transportable launching equipment and were fired from platforms that were virtually undetectable. There was something both fearful and arbitrary about them; nobody could tell when or where they were about to land, and if you knew, you were probably dead already. The attacks persisted until March 1945.

  ‘Horrible creatures are Germans,’ reflected Clara Milburn.

  *

  With painful slowness, the enemy was being defeated; everyone knew that the war would be won: no, not by Christmas, but next year, sometime. The Home Guard was disbanded. In September 1944 blackout restrictions were relaxed: something of an anti-climax, as the country now adapted to the ‘dim-out’. Civil defence outside London was becoming redundant. There were other straws in the wind. In November ice cream crept back on to the menu of some London restaurants for the first time since 1942. Occasional batches of oranges started to reappear in the shops, and as Christmas approached there was optimism about the turkey supply. But the word ‘victory’ rang a little hollow, as Allied troops in northern Europe and Italy failed to maintain the momentum of D-day. Over 1,000 British troops had been killed in the costly failure of Arnhem; ‘We all thought the war was so nearly over and now we hear of such sacrifice of lives it makes me miserable,’ wrote Mass Observation diarist Muriel Green. ‘I suppose we are taking victory so much for granted it makes such disasters seem worse.’ Twenty-three-year-old Muriel was working in a hostel for factory workers; over Christmas she noticed that the word ‘victory’ was used by few people in her hostel. Instead, they raised a glass to ‘peace’. ‘The war seems to have got to the stage where more fighting only seems waste … Fighting seems to spread fighting; there is no real victory.’

  Swamped as she was by army bureaucracy, ATS officer Margery Baines also took a jaundiced view of the Allies’ progress in Europe. Her own battles with authority were starting to invade her waking hours and affect her health. In 1944 Margery suffered a nervous breakdown. The Army’s medical officers, with an infallible instinct for the illogical, pronounced that the only cure for Margery’s ills was motherhood. Having added up one and one and made three, ‘they discharged me and allowed my husband home on compassionate leave’. Self-evidently, no other feminine concerns could compete with the future of an infant. Once safely pregnant, it was back to civilian life, to queues and shortages. ‘Like other Britons, I was now faced with the prospect of peace. And a sad business it was too.’

  Knowing that peace was coming made women start to weigh up what it might hold in store for them. Maggie Joy Blunt, a single woman aged thirty-two, had been keeping a diary for Mass Observation since 1939. When younger, Maggie had aimed high, hoping to become an architect. When this ambition foundered she pursued journalism, but the war had intervened and since 1942 she had been working as a publicist for a light alloy aircraft firm. She continued to hope for marriage but was now wondering about the prospects of earning a living:

  June 25th 1944

  The question that is in everyone’s mind is – what will post-war conditions be like? … It will be a ghastly scramble for work …

  October 11th 1944

  I read somewhere the view that the change from war to peace would be so gradual we should hardly notice it. It will not be anything definite and spectacular like Lights up, Bananas for all, unlimited fully fashioned silk stockings at 2/6d a pair and everyone with a job they like and able to afford their own plot and bungalow.

  Most of the older generation just wanted to return to ‘normal’. For them, ‘normal’ meant the same as before the war. Barbara Cartland questioned a middle-aged married friend who had spent her war earning good money in a factory: ‘What are you going to do when the war is over?’ This lady had no desire to go on with her job. ‘Have a good spring clean,’ was the reply. ‘If you only knew how sick I am of coming home dead tired and staying up half the night to get the housework done and the clothes mended … It’s home for me.’ For this lady, the coming peace didn’t hold out any more ambitious prospect than washing the curtains and turning out her cupboards. In summer 1944 some Mass Observation interviewers went to Gloucester and asked a group of working-class women what they hoped the next ten years of their lives would be like. The answers were vague: ‘Don’t know. Really I don’t.’ ‘Well, it’s all according.’ ‘I’m not good at answering questions.’ Abstract aspirations had no place on these women’s mental map.

  Writing in 1953 (in Lady into Woman), Vera Brittain analysed the condition of a generation of housewives at the end of the Second World War. She felt that British women were very much to blame in their failure ‘to be intelligent about the future’. Society had indoctrinated them, middle- and working-class alike – as she explained – with the idea that homes, husbands and children should be their prime concern. Total war had then anaesthetised what moral sense they might have left, bombing and bludgeoning them into submission and meekness. Life for the housewife had become a dreary round of food queues, rations and coupons. So steeped was she in ignorance of politics, so unintelligent about the future, that she herself had become part of the menace to civilisation.

  Vera Brittain’s scorn of the humble British housewife echoes and foreshadows the cry of feminists past and present, that women can and should have a special relationship with peace. As the bearers of the human race, all their instincts cried out against killing and destruction. And yet somehow, faced with war propaganda and with the difficulties of organising for peace, women had become dumbly acquiescent, resigned to their own incapacities.

  It is easy to sympathise with Vera Brittain’s anger at their apathy. How depressing it was always to be fobbed off with an apologetic ‘I’m not interested in politics. Looking after the house and children takes up all my time.’ If only women could be helped and encouraged to detach themselves from the ‘tedious small-change of wartime existence’ and engage with the world of politics and reform then world peace would surely be within the grasp of humankind?

  In Lady into Woman, Brittain exhorts her sex to give their energies to what she calls a ‘women’s service for peace’, while disparaging housework and childcare:

  Not even two World Wars … had convinced some women that the duty of keeping their homes clean and their children tidy was small compared with the moral obligation to be intelligent about the future.

  But for the majority at the time it wasn’t easy. Domesticity was completely central to most women’s lives. Feeding, tending and caring were the outward form of woman’s life-giving instinct, her very social identity. The war-weary mother of seven waiting for lambs’
hearts or an ounce of cheese, the suburban matron hoping for synthetic cream: both were in their own way doing what they could to improve their lot in difficult times, to nurture their dependents, to ‘keep the home fires burning’. How could they raise their heads above the daily grind and find the mental freedom to challenge militarism? How could they muster the arguments needed to attack government spending on armaments and call for the money to be spent instead on education and health? In 1944, just surviving and looking after their families took most of the energy that women possessed. They were chronically tired. Working for peace could wait – till peace itself came.

  The National Effort

  ‘What would you be doing, if it wasn’t for the war?’ Doffy Brewer’s friends would ask each other.

  ‘Oh, I’d be …’

  And we all stared at one another, trying to imagine what peacetime was like … It was like staring into empty space …

  Our personal aims had gone grey. All the colours had faded away.

  Meanwhile, they gritted their teeth, they dug for victory, they bathed in five inches of water with a line on the bath to show the fill-up limit, they lived off one tablet of soap a fortnight and wrote letters to their loved ones on both sides of the thin, fibrous wartime paper. They did without sweets, they did without petrol, their meals were dull and starchy. They made do and they mended. It was called the ‘National Effort’.