And now, in the summer of 1945, Ursula looked on with mounting disquiet as the election campaign proceeded to confirm all her worst fears. She predicted class warfare, culminating in revolution. The nation seemed to be turning its back on Churchill, though he had saved the world for them. She caught a glimpse of the old man in his car looking pale, weary and shrunken, ‘making the V sign which was already very out of date’. Nobody was cheering him. Fearful for the outcome, Ursula offered her modest services to the Tories but shrank at the sight of the sullen young men from the opposition staking out the Conservative committee rooms. With their shabby clothes and aggressive postures, they seemed hostile and full of rage. ‘ “Vote Labour. Vote Labour. Vote Labour,” they muttered.’ Nevertheless, Ursula set out in a spirit of patriotism. Canvassing round Chelsea, she knocked on the door of a surly woman who told her she wanted a new government because she couldn’t get rusks for her baby. Ursula, a practical woman, brightly suggested that she bake bread crusts in the oven. It had worked for her when her own son was little. But her well-meaning advice was met with black looks.
’Think I have time for that?’ she challenged. ‘Besides, the little bastard isn’t worth it.’ … She was furious with me for being kind. ‘The likes of you have never had to work,’ she said, and went away growling: ‘Vote Labour. Vote Labour. Vote Labour.’
What kind of a fair world was this, reflected Ursula. Surely this was no way to help one another? On another doorstep she tried to explain to an unwelcoming woman that the rich were bled so dry by taxation that they could pay no more. There were no rich people left. Her own earnings, Ursula admitted, were ravaged by the taxman at up to twelve shillings in the pound, which went to support individuals like her. ‘More fool you!’ came the tart rejoinder. It was all utterly discouraging.
In Reading on election results night Ian Mikardo invited all his volunteers and supporters to a party and rewarded them with large quantities of whisky. Everyone got roaring drunk. But Nina Mabey couldn’t be there. It was the height of summer, and in the Shropshire village where her mother was now based she was needed to help with mail deliveries while the postman got his harvest in. And so she heard the news as she pushed her bike up the hills and freewheeled down the vales of the Welsh borderlands, her letters and parcels in her basket. After the three-week wait, the results were announced in a cascade of hourly bulletins. Farmhouses and cottages alike had their windows open; from inside, she could hear the election results being broadcast across the valleys and pastures:
‘Labour gain,’ the wireless said. ‘Labour gain, Labour gain …’
Nina could barely prevent a foolish grin from breaking across her face at every halt on her route, hardly stop herself from asking the farmers and smallholders she met what way they had voted. In any case, this Montgomeryshire constituency was true Liberal heartland, its outstanding MP Clement Davies the leader of his party.
Later that day she got the full picture. It had been a Labour landslide; the party had won an effective majority of 146 seats over all other parties combined. Ian Mikardo had gloriously justified all their efforts in Reading by bringing in a majority of 6,390 over his opponents. The Tories were wiped out. That evening Nina stood in Montgomery’s market square and listened to Clement Davies’s victory speech, in which he generously conceded to Labour’s spectacular win. He spoke passionately of tolerance and goodness, wisdom and hard work. She was immeasurably touched:
Tears of joy ran down my face. It was all coming to pass. The new world, the new day, was dawning.
For Nina, the promise of clear blue skies was being fulfilled.
Naomi Mitchison had come down to Kettering for the count. Dick Mitchison won his seat with an impressive majority, and his wife and supporters were euphoric. As the scale of the Labour victory became apparent, Naomi grabbed a couple of gladioli from a vase on impulse and stuck them in her hair.
Some Tories, like Virginia Graham, tried to see the funny side. ‘We went to the Ivy on Election Night so we all felt a bit giggly,’ she wrote to Joyce Grenfell, now back from the Middle East. But the fun of addressing her chums as ‘Comrade’ suddenly started to fall flat. ‘I suppose that if the tumbrils are coming they make so much less noise than bombs we can’t treat them seriously.’ Others were less amused. The Conservative Member for Barrow-in-Furness had lost by 12,000 votes. Nella Last called in at the WVS; her organiser, Mrs Lord, was distracted with anxiety. No doubt about it, trouble was in store. There would certainly be civil uprising and riots now that the ‘soldier vote’ had trounced the ‘Tory dog’. Mrs Lord’s trembly voice rose in hysteria. Nella gave her two aspirins washed down with a little sherry in a medicine glass.
Ursula Bloom felt full of dread. She feared for her country which was now going to be led by inexperienced politicians. State controls would foster inertia in men’s souls. And what presumption to treat her class as idle parasites. In particular, she felt affronted by the implication that she herself was a lady of leisure. She had worked hard all her life. It enraged her. To her, the ‘new world’ coming into being felt full of loathing and envy, and it was a world which she now had to grow old in.
The revolution had begun.
Little Boy and Fat Man
Politics were swept off the front pages thirteen days after the Attlee victory, when the morning papers carried news of the atomic bomb which had been dropped on Japan from those deceiving blue skies. A ‘RAIN OF RUIN’ had descended from the air, reported The Times on 7 August. Next day the Daily Mail told readers: ‘Hiroshima, Japanese city of 300,000 people, ceased to exist at 9.15 a.m. on Monday morning … While going about its business in the sunshine of a hot summer’s day, it vanished in a huge ball of fire and a cloud of boiling smoke.’ Three ladies from Southampton promptly penned a deeply felt outburst to the editor of The Times:
Sir, – The use of the atomic bomb on Japan must surely appal anybody whose natural feelings have not been entirely blunted by the years of war …
The argument that war can be ended by increasing the destructiveness of weapons has been shown again and again to be fallacious … It is for people everywhere to say: ‘This shall not be.’
Yours, &c., VIVIEN CUTTING; MAVIS EURICH; OLIVE C. SAMPSON.
‘It’s a new kind of bomb, darling, for the benefit of mankind.’ How could one explain the atom bomb to the next generation? What kind of world were they growing up in?
Their heartfelt letter was published on 10 August, the same day that the paper carried a shorter report of the follow-up attack: ‘ATOM BOMB ON NAGASAKI – SECOND CITY HIT’. The Americans had code-named their two nuclear bombs Fat Man and Little Boy; those who developed these unknowably destructive weapons did not, it seems, consider that they might possess any feminine attributes. On 14 August the Japanese surrendered.
Thelma Ryder felt nothing but relief. The war was really over now, and Bill would be released.
I thought it was wonderful really, because we’d had enough of war. I thought – anything that will end any war, anywhere … After all, they’d asked for it hadn’t they? – you know, what with the terrible things they’d done. I know it was horrible for them, but it had been horrible for us too.
Many felt the same. ‘At last, at long last! The day we have waited for nearly six long years has come round,’ wrote MO diarist Muriel Green. On Wednesday 15 August the flags and bunting came back out again, and happy crowds gathered in front of Buckingham Palace. The royal family made more balcony appearances, and more fireworks were let off down the Mall. There were bonfires, parades and street parties. Children were treated to unforgettable spreads: jellies, hot dogs and cakes. Eileen Jones, a twenty-three-year-old munitions worker in Eccles, Lancashire, celebrated by quitting her job. Her brother Albert had spent three years as a POW in the Far East. After five years of twelve-hour shifts drilling parts for submarines on inadequate pay, she’d had enough. Albert would be freed now, so she walked out, rejoicing.
But the obscene destruction caused by th
e atom bomb made it hard for many others to replicate the enthusiasm they had felt three months earlier on VE-day. One despairing woman took to her bed for a fortnight, and a respondent to Mass Observation wrote: ‘It casts a gloom over everything, and its terrifying possibilities make nothing worth while doing.’ Ursula Bloom spent the morning of VJ-day rushing round Chelsea trying to buy enough bread to see her household through the holiday period. The shops were all shutting, with no information as to when they would reopen. Ursula was slipping ever deeper into a mood of profound gloom and fear about the future. Would mankind never learn? ‘Fear rose like a flagrant weed in our hearts. This was not victory!’ Nella Last felt the same. ‘Tonight I thought of the dreadful new bomb – we will always live in the shadow of fear now … I’ve a deep sadness over my mind and heart like a shadow, instead of joy the war has ended.’ Frances Partridge, who had felt a quiet elation after VE-day (‘surely it’s only logical that pacifists – of all people – should rejoice in the return to Peace?’) felt sickened when she read an account of the after-effects of the atomic bombs. Victims unhurt at the time of the explosion were falling sick, with bleeding, rotting flesh and nausea, followed inevitably by lingering death. What kind of world was her child growing up in? He was only ten …
I thought with despair of poor Burgo, now so full of zest for life and unaware of its horrors. My own instincts lead me to love life, but as I read on, a desire welled up in me to be dead and out of this hateful, revolting, mad world.
Shortly after the bomb was dropped, the Daily Mail columnist Ann Temple offered a ‘Woman’s-eye view’ of the new atomic age. Reactions to the cataclysm were, she argued, split along the lines of the conventional sexual divide: the male, as a natural hunter and killer, looked on with awe and exultation; the female, at heart a preserver, begetter and guardian of life, felt a deep fear. But women were also endowed with great intelligence and wisdom. Our nation would be short-sighted indeed if it failed to deploy these characteristics. In 1945, women’s increasing empowerment and influence gave only grounds for optimism. Today, the town council; tomorrow, who knows, the United Nations? Yes, women could save the world.
And yet the deeply embedded consensus that women’s proper destiny was wifehood and motherhood continued to block the way ahead. Churchill’s coalition had held out against all attempts by the female labour force to achieve equal pay with men. And when the scale of the British post-war economic calamity became apparent – for with the American lend-lease arrangement terminated the country was running on empty – the political patriarchy was in no mood to embrace sex equality in the workplace or anywhere else.
Haunted
On VJ-day Lorna Bradey was invited to a celebratory party in her home town of Bedford. A huge bonfire was lit. Lorna gazed into its flames, absorbed by her private memories. Over five years of war, she felt she had lived volumes. 1940: Dunkirk – fleeing from the German invaders down the crowded highways of northern France as bullets sprayed the roof of their ambulance – Messerschmitts dive-bombing the decks of their fleeing vessel; 1941: the tropics, blue bays and jacaranda trees – Tobruk harbour, and the dawn escape across grey, foam-flecked seas back to Alexandria; 1942: Cairo and the desert, the background to a horrifying drama as she saved the life of her friend, bleeding to death after a backstreet abortion; 1943: Italy, the high emotions of the operating theatre at Barletta: amputations, burned-away faces – the parties, the kisses, dancing with Henry on the Adriatic shore; 1944: Mount Vesuvius erupting, Capri …
I seemed to be standing on the outside looking in.
In August 1945 Lorna felt like a spectre at the feast.
For Phyllis Noble the end of the war brought on an overwhelming existential melancholy. For two years she had been working as a meteorological observer in the WAAFs, during which time she became romantically entangled with a handsome navigator named Adam Wild. As ever, Phyllis was at the mercy of her emotions. Her love affairs were in a complete mess. She loved Adam and was sleeping with him, but Adam didn’t love her; meanwhile Philip Horne, a married officer at her Norfolk base, had declared his passion for her: ‘Forget that twerp Wild and marry me – when I’m free, that is!’ At the same time she continued to be haunted by the memory of her relationship with her earlier sweetheart, Andrew Cooper, to whom she had lost her virginity back in 1942. She knew Andrew still held a torch for her. In light of her other failed romances, she now hoped they might be able to pick up where they had left off.
But her hopes for a renewal were to be dashed. After VJ-day they met. It emerged that during the time they had been apart Andrew too had had one or two light-hearted relationships. Whether they were physical ones she did not inquire, but surmised that they probably were. In any case, they were both adults now, what was to be lost by being open about such things? So she told him about Adam Wild.
It was a mistake. Andrew reacted with resentment and dismay. ‘He had remained faithful to me and, in spite of everything, had hoped and believed that I would have remained faithful too.’ Later, she received a letter from him, telling her that she was vain, empty and superficial – a ‘despicable creature’ – and breaking it off for good.
Phyllis now felt utterly drained. The dislocations of war, her turbulent passions and her own lack of a personal compass had beached her. Dispersals of friends and family were upsetting; in 1944 a V1 had hit Lampmead Road, where her beloved grandparents lived. Though the poor old couple survived, their cosy home had been destroyed, aspidistras, ornaments and all: ‘It was the end of an era.’ The damaged remnants were carried on a handcart round to Uncle Len’s, and Gran and Granddad sadly took up residence in a top-floor flat with no garden. Phyllis watched their decline with pity and dismay.
I fell into a mood of trepidation and gloom. I had recurrent nightmares about death, represented by skeletons and threatening people in black, and with so many people moving out of my life I felt bereft and uncertain about the future.
Peace, far from offering a new start, had slammed the door in her face.
Helen Forrester too felt that life had been merciless to her, but on VJ-day she celebrated with the rest. The office workers at the Liverpool Petroleum Board were given a holiday, and Helen joined five of her single girlfriends. They smartened up – as well as they could, in their threadbare dresses and heavy utility shoes – and went out for a day’s fun. Along the way they found a friendly demobbed soldier to join their gang, and someone suggested having their picture taken. The soldier was just for show, unclaimed. Two of the girls were ‘fancy-free’, and two engaged. Another had lost the man she loved. Nobody except Helen was in mourning for two dead lovers. Later, the picture seemed to encapsulate that time when, after enduring six sad, bitter and laborious years, the wartime generation of women stood – wearing bright, forced smiles – on the threshold of a new world.
I smiled for the photographer, but I remember that I wanted to scream at the unfairness of life.
Surrounded as she was, Helen felt angry, lost and dreadfully alone.
*
There were 60,000 British POWs held in Japan, and by the beginning of September 1945 news began to filter through from officials that the camps were being cleared and the prisoners evacuated. By now it was also known that many of them had been brutally treated. Was George Symington one of them? Monica Littleboy’s memories of her tall, slim, handsome boyfriend with his cultured manners and easy charm seemed so long ago; 1939 was a world away. In 1945 Monica was starting a new life; she left the FANYs, went to London, secured a promising job as a programme assistant with the BBC and began dating a confident, attractive man who also worked in radio. Then, one evening in the autumn of 1945, the telephone rang at her digs. The operator put through a call from Southampton Docks. Disbelievingly, she heard the voice of George Symington:
It was as if a life had suddenly come back from the dead … a voice from the past …
George wanted them to meet. Monica now found herself struggling with a mixture of emotions: curiosit
y, tenderness, unease. Full of misgivings, unprepared, she agreed to see him.
He arrived in a taxi, with kit bag and all … He stood there. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was not the young man I had known. I was stunned. Misshapen, pitted, scarred. Only the eyes were the same.
I looked at this hulk of humanity and my heart bled.
Somewhere inside this wasted frame was the man she loved. Pity flooded her; pity born out of the past, fed by memories. It was a pity that would change the course of her life.
Thelma Ryder was luckier when Bill got back from Japan. She saw and was shocked by the cinema newsreels which showed the men’s condition – ‘It was terrible to see them, you know, their thin bodies and their bones showing through’ – but she was spared the immediate sight of her fiancé, who had been starved and on his release weighed barely seven stone. Bill was restored to health over several months before setting out on the long sea voyage that would take him home, at last, to Plymouth:
He didn’t get home till Christmas 1945.
I went up to the station to meet him. Well they told me the train was coming in on one platform and I was waiting there, but it came in on a different one. And there was me galloping up the platform – and Bill was with his mates. And they said to him ‘Look, there’s Thelma coming – look at her – she’s like a racehorse!’ I couldn’t get there quick enough.
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