Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  There is wistful affection in Thelma’s voice as she remembers their reunion:

  Yes, I recognised him. Even though his hair was cropped short – they had to keep shaving it off because of the lice and all that, you know. And then I got on the lorry that they sent for them and went up to the barracks with him. And then he came home to my place to stay.

  But you know I never heard him complain. He’d say, ‘They were only doing their job, like we were.’ Bill was never bitter; he never bore any malice. But I said, ‘Well, we never treated our prisoners like they treated you.’

  And he was just lovely … We were married in 1946, and we were happy for twenty-nine years.

  11 Picking Up the Threads

  Demob

  When the war ended Shirley Goodhart left her post with an aeronautical engineering company and moved in with her mother-in-law in Blackburn. In autumn 1945 all her thoughts revolved around the return of her husband, Jack, who was still in India with the Royal Army Medical Corps. She longed to have a ‘normal’ family life, and at twenty-eight was increasingly desperate to start a family.

  December 31st 1945

  Found myself dreaming of 1946 and Jack …

  On New Year’s Day 1946, filling in the heading for her new Diary (Mass Observation requested its contributors to give minimal personal information), Shirley found herself wondering what to put under ‘occupation’. For four years she had written ‘aerodynamist’. And now?

  ‘Nil’ sounds as though I am idle, which is far from the case. ‘Honorary Housekeeper’ was the best suggestion, or ‘Honorary Mother’s Help’!

  The following afternoon she helped out a busy friend by taking her baby to be weighed at the clinic:

  Felt most maternal, so much so that I nearly cried when I saw a reflection of myself and the pram in a shop window.

  Jack was lobbying hard to be demobbed. On 5 January Shirley got a letter from him to say that he was applying for compassionate leave ‘because we want children’. She tried not to speculate about his return. Finally in mid-February a telegram reached her: COMING HOME STOP WRITING. She was now full of hope that he would be back by mid-March:

  I just can’t believe that he is really on his way home – and won’t be able to believe it until I see him. I live from post to post. What will tomorrow morning’s letter bring?

  Shirley had overestimated. Two days later the telephone rang:

  I heard Jack’s voice. He had just arrived in London, having flown home. I still won’t really believe it until I see him, which won’t be before tomorrow afternoon.

  February 21st

  Jack phoned me from Preston when he changed trains, and I went to Blackburn to meet him. He looked just the same, except that he is browner than I have ever seen him. We met just as though he had only been away for a few days. I had been pretty confident before, but now I am quite sure that we are not going to have to make any difficult adjustments after our three years’ separation. Very soon we shall have forgotten all about those three years.

  February 22nd

  It’s so nice to have Jack to cook for, and to eat meals with someone who has a good appetite …

  Twice today I’ve tried to read the paper … but Jack is far too disturbing.

  February 23rd

  Jack and I are just about deciding that it is really true that he is home, and not merely a dream. It really is quite as wonderful as we had ever imagined.

  All the satisfactions of peace are present in the picture of the Goodharts’ happy and apparently seamless reunion: Shirley’s diary conveys her profound pleasure at their easy compatibility and harmonious domesticity. This was, surely, how it was meant to be.

  Shirley Goodhart was one among millions of women who welcomed their loved ones home over the course of the long, slow demobilising process, in many cases after four or even five years of absence. A whole six years had gone by since the outbreak of war. But whereas in peacetime six years may slide imperceptibly one into the other, so that the minute, cumulative differences wrought by time blend, barely noticed, into a person’s overall appearance, war had altered many of its victims almost beyond recognition. Physically, the greying hairs, the crow’s feet, the thinning skin and in many cases the injuries and illnesses told their own tale. Some were thinner, others were fatter. Sallow city-dwellers had been transformed into sunburned plough girls with calloused hands. But the turbulent times had made an even more profound mark on attitudes, beliefs, hopes and assumptions. Whatever their wartime experiences, few had emerged unscathed – but many felt that they were entering the next period of peace as, essentially, different individuals from the ones they had been when the last peace came to an end in 1939.

  Britain’s wartime women had changed from occupying the passenger seat to driving the car. And that made them feel a new sense of power. Ex-FANY Margaret Herbertson speaks for all of them:

  We weren’t so naive. No doubt about that at all. The great thing is, we grew up. We’d met a lot of people and could size up people much more. We’d stretched our minds a good deal I think, and we’d learnt a lot …

  – which was surely an understatement.

  Mike Morris could intercept messages from enemy aircraft, Mavis Lever could crack their codes, Doffy Brewer could calculate how to train guns on missiles, Doris Scorer could repair the wings of Typhoons, Pip Beck could talk down an air crew, Christian Oldham could track the courses of battleships across the Atlantic, Flo Mahony could drive a six-ton truck, Jean McFadyen could fell a fifty-foot tree, Frances Faviell could bring relief to pulverised victims in blitzed craters, Lorna Bradey could work round the clock saving lives, Joy Taverner could endure the concentration camps. Other women could weld the hulls of destroyers, fly Spitfires to their appointed aerodromes, help gun down Messerschmitts, rescue the crews from burning planes, train submarine crews to fire torpedoes, even operate behind enemy lines in occupied France. Countless more women contributed by taking on the jobs that the men had left behind: in transport, in shops, in factories, in hospitals, schools, ministries and offices across the country. Unheroically, but stoically, innumerable women had over the years endured the loss of their homes, coped with shortages, brought up their children without help, volunteered their time and energy to the war effort. Emotionally, too, the war had made many claims. Loneliness, anxiety, fear, grief and horror had invaded their tranquil world. In war, many of them had indeed ‘learnt a lot’, including that there was more to life than domesticity.

  Innumerable hopes were now pinned on the ability of our leaders to make the world anew. The great powers regrouped after the Potsdam Conference, the first General Assembly of the United Nations gathered in London, Attlee’s Labour government set out to reinvent the British nation, and slowly but surely the army was demobilising. Between them, what kind of future would they make for those millions of women, weary of war, but filled, nevertheless, with hope, and the knowledge of their own powers?

  *

  ‘The rejoicing had gone sour on us before it ever began,’ recalled Ursula Bloom. She was writing of the devastation of the Japanese cities by two atomic bombs. For many, their ominous destructive power drained all the pleasure from victory. Commitment, promises and plans for long-term happiness seemed less relevant in a world that held such deadly scientific horrors.

  Then, on 19 August 1945, with the shocking news of the bombs only just sinking in, President Truman announced the peremptory termination of the lend-lease agreement which since 1941 had kept the British war effort afloat. Officials were sent to Washington to try to persuade the American Treasury – hostile as it was to Britain’s new ‘Socialist’ government – to loan £3.75 billion. The country was in debt as never before. Woman’s Own columnist Rosita Forbes gave her readers a pep-talk about the deficit: ‘Governing is only housekeeping on a bigger scale. Had you thought of that? If every week you spent more than the entire family pay-roll, you’d soon be in a fine mess, wouldn’t you? England is in exactly the same state as the housew
ife going out on Saturday evening with her shopping bag and a good part of the weekly wages in her purse. For no country can spend more than it earns … We can’t just pick money like blackberries off the hedge.’

  Meanwhile, in the corridors of Westminster, grand plans were taking shape for post-war reconstruction. Public appropriation of large portions of the British economy were one aspect of the Socialist dream. The other was the Welfare State. In March 1946 the Minister of Health and Housing, Aneurin Bevan, placed his National Health Service Bill before Parliament, while Ellen Wilkinson was working to realise the dream of free secondary education for all, as laid out in ‘Rab’ Butler’s 1944 Education Act.

  But the first hurdle to be overcome was demobilisation. Five million men and women reported to their demob centres, pocketed their service gratuity and clothes coupons or, in the case of the men, joined a queue at the clothing depot. Half a million of that number being sent back to ‘Civvy Street’ were servicewomen. Some of the first to qualify for release were married ATS women. Even those who weren’t yet married jumped at the chance of skipping ahead of the queue. One uniformed bride-to-be announced: ‘I’m going to make out my application form before the wedding, then dash up the aisle, out of the church, and drop it in the nearest letter-box!’ But the majority had to wait their turn, and, from June 1945, the whole vast unwieldy process would take an interminable eighteen months.

  Nurse Helen Vlasto had returned from Egypt in summer 1944. She was not released from her service as a VAD attached to the Royal Navy until spring 1946. She spent that year and a half based near Portsmouth, at the Haslar Royal Naval Hospital.

  At Haslar, the main operating theatres were situated deep underground. Staffed largely by VADs like Helen, these gloomy, airless caverns were her workplace until she was demobilised. Here, masked and gowned, the nurses spent their working hours like troglodytes. Off-duty in the warmer months, they scampered for freedom on to the beach, gasping for air. But all too often in cold weather the girls huddled round the upright iron stove in the VAD mess, with letters to write, darning to do. Helen never forgot the fetid stench of those cellars, which reeked of Ronuked linoleum, stale cigarette smoke, malodorous girls and over-boiled vegetables. When Helen looked at her pasty face in the mirror, she felt she had crawled from under a stone.

  Slowly, the medical services were going into reverse, moving an inch at a time into the post-war phase. In the autumn of 1945 enormous numbers of sisters and nurses were still abroad, attached to units awaiting demobilisation. With casualties due to return, military hospitals like Haslar took on clearance duties to relieve the imminent pressure on short-staffed civilian hospitals. For Helen Vlasto, this meant long hours in theatre getting through a backlog of non-urgent operations: hernias, tonsillectomies and haemorrhoids. It was not fulfilling work.

  She felt moody and impatient: ‘We were all on a treadmill until we were released, and there was nothing we could do but keep on treading.’ Now, as the war wound down, her usefulness seemed to have expired. Memories of her debutante days – glittering hotels, swooning music and banked-up flowers – tugged at her. She was possessed by a craving for bright lights and luxury and jumped at any excuse to rush to London. Though they were faithfully corresponding, her long-distance romance with Surgeon Lieutenant Aidan Long, still out in the Far East, went on hold. Any boyfriend back from the various theatres of war would do, so long as he offered access to a touch of expensive, ‘pre-war’ living. Once up in town, Helen would slip into a gown, comb out her curls and do what she could to brighten her pallor with a touch of Coty. Then it was time to sink into the enchanted atmosphere of the Berkeley or the Mayfair; a spin of the revolving doors, and she was back ‘in Fairyland’, where piled carpets, the softness of silk-shaded lights and even the cosy ladies’ powder room created a heavenly retreat – ‘balm to my soul’. Helen’s ‘hotel’ phase did much to compensate for a nagging sense that time was passing, that she faced an empty future with no idea how to fill it and felt she had no practical qualifications for a career in ‘Civvy Street’. Had she wasted six years of her life?

  Women’s memoirs of the immediate post-war period demonstrate very clearly that feelings of isolation, nostalgia and apprehensiveness had begun to replace end-of-war euphoria. The urgent work that had given their lives value and meaning had been removed; with it had been extinguished what Nella Last described as ‘the white flame’ driving all their efforts: the desire for peace. But now that it had come, was that peace – with all its tantalising, indefinable promises of security and contentment – just a mirage?

  A wintry light filtered through the uncurtained panes of the Cadogan Street bedsit. Ex-Flight Officer Wyndham woke to the sound of her landlord’s sewing machine whirring gently and the distant thrum of London traffic. Shivering, she climbed out of bed and lit the gas fire, but the bathroom down the passage was freezing. Crouching on the hearth, she removed the wire pipe cleaners that served as crimpers in her hair and styled her dark curls, before repairing the ravages with Max Factor and Yardley’s Cherry. ‘Now I was ready to face the world.’

  After four years as a WAAF, Joan was completely free. During her last few months in the service the array of choices before her seemed like an irresistible menu for the future. She might become a teacher; or maybe let her legs get hairy, grow an earnest fringe and go to Oxford. Another scenario was to get a job selling clothes at Jaeger. If that failed, she and her girlfriend Oscar planned to start up a hamburger café. Then there was her thrilling new boyfriend, Kit Latimer; with him, finally, she had experienced ‘the big O’, and from then on their sex life had gone from strength to strength. Maybe they would get married and have babies (but what about the fact that he was penniless?). Life seemed to spread out its delicacies before her: countries she’d never seen, books she’d never read, people she’d never met, new loves. She wanted to devour everything, ‘with such an acute and all-consuming appetite that it gives me a dry mouth, a tingling tongue and a pain in the side of my head’.

  Two months later she was living in a room in Chelsea that cost £2 a week, with a battered gramophone, a stack of Fats Waller records, a dilapidated divan and her WAAF uniform dyed forest green. She had her £60 service gratuity, which would pay for the room till the following summer, but nothing to live on. Her only saleable skills were top-speed radar-plotting and commanding parade-ground drill: ‘not much bloody use to me now’.

  What to do with my day, jobless and faced by the awesome prospect of endless leave? I was beginning to realise that now I was no longer in the WAAF I would have to recreate my world from scratch every morning.

  I hadn’t realised I was going to feel so lonely, with no one to laugh or gossip with, no focus to my life.

  Money was the first priority. Joan decided against breaking into her £60, which was earmarked for the rent. She piled her old ballet books into a suitcase and set off for the Charing Cross Road second-hand bookshops; a couple of hours later, with twelve crisp pound notes carefully hidden away, Joan was on her way to the White City dog-racing track. There was one useful skill she had acquired during her years in the Air Force …

  Helen Vlasto was twenty-five in 1945; Joan Wyndham was twenty-two. For them, and many thousands like them, their time doing war work had moulded and fashioned the people they now were. For four or five years in many cases, their lives had had a structure imposed by authority. It was constantly impressed upon them that they were wanted and needed. Wren telegraphist Anne Glynn-Jones recalled ‘the feeling that you were doing a real job, a job that mattered, that took quite a bit of skill – I loved it’. Flo Mahony thrived off it. ‘Some people didn’t like regimentation, but I did – absolutely loved it. You just felt all the time that you were doing a worthwhile job.’ For Flo, her WAAF friendships, and the sense of purpose the service gave her, would remain for ever.

  And now, with peace, came the dismantling of the entire apparatus that had given meaning to these women’s lives. ‘Every week now people were leavin
g. An edifice seemed to be crumbling,’ remembered WAAF Pip Beck. Stoker Wren Rozelle Raynes spent the final days before Christmas 1945 in a state of nightmarish torment. For two and a half years her life had consisted of ‘a happy whirl of nautical activities … unimagined maritime bliss’. Now, at the age of nineteen, her world was being pulled from beneath her. She spring-cleaned her office, went for a demob medical inspection, attended her last pay-muster and packed. At midday on 22 December 1945 she was summoned before the commander to say goodbye:

  I had managed to get through the previous two days in a numbed sort of misery, but suddenly I felt I could bear it no longer … I … lost all control, and bursting into floods of tears ran blindly from his office.

  Wren Rozelle Raynes sketched herself setting out to seek her post-war fortune far from her beloved Portsmouth.

  Running on Empty

  But Jean McFadyen was only too happy to find, in the autumn of 1945, that her services were no longer required. After three years of sweat, toil, blisters, backache, chafing, chilblains and freezing Aberdeenshire winters in the Timber Corps anything seemed preferable. With Jim recovered from his ordeal in the prison camp, they decided to get married at the earliest opportunity:

  There was no question of a big church wedding or anything like that – it couldn’t be done in the time allotted, and we couldn’t have spent the money on it. Plus, everything was still on the ration.