Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  *

  Dolly Scannell took responsibility for, as she saw it, stepping out of line. She saw the dinner-plate incident as a wifely transgression, and felt only pity for Chas over his uncontrolled act of violence with the cut-glass bowl. There was a sexual deal at stake. Men were entitled to their anger over uncalled-for bacon rinds. Women were supposed to be modest and compliant.

  The apparent collapse of the deal made for good journalism. Ann Temple’s finger was on the pulse; heading her Daily Mail column ‘IS MODESTY NOW OUT OF DATE?’, she stirred up a reader controversy around a topic that clearly pushed a number of sensitive buttons. Had the war turned women into insubordinate hussies, smoking and swearing? What did men want? Female readers writing in to the Daily Mail took the view that men preferred modest women. The Cheshire mother of two adult sons wrote to say that her boys enjoyed the company of modern girls ‘with a real kick’, but that both were resolutely ‘pre-war’ when it came to looking for brides: ‘They are both firmly determined to choose old-fashioned girls with old-fashioned virtues for their wives.’ Another correspondent asserted simply that ‘An immodest woman is handicapped both in her personal and business relationships with men.’ Only one woman disagreed: ‘Modesty has to be out of date. How can a girl keep a modest manner when she has to maintain military discipline, or obey it … Think how in the last five years we have all been herded like cattle, crammed into rooms, houses, hostels, barracks, shelters … No privacy, no leisure, and no soap.’ But far more typical was Rose, from Durham, who expressed the view that ‘Most men like to draw out a woman’s charms, not have them thrown at them.’ Or dinner plates, one might add.

  Rose from Durham was speaking for a widely held view, shared by the self-help guru Kenneth Howard (author of Sex Problems of the Returning Soldier, 1945), who had no qualms when it came to defining respective sex roles. Husbands, Howard explained, were expected to be chivalrous, masterful and reliable. It was their responsibility to earn a living and make tough decisions.

  But in the normal household the woman’s job is primarily a dependent one, and it is right that it should be so … Her role is not primarily to go out and struggle with the world. She is not fitted emotionally or physically to do so … Her greatest asset is her weakness and her capacity for love.

  It is hard not to wonder where Mr Howard had been during the previous six years, while thousands of women were demonstrating their strength and competently struggling with a world full of danger and hostility. His sympathies are clearly with the scattered armies of men, for each of whom home was a rose-tinted memory; when he got back, ‘ ’er indoors’, presiding goddess of the hearth, would be there to meet him, the eternal feminine, surrounded by adorable clamorous children, bringing the pudding in from the cooking end. ‘He has been dreaming of his home and his wife, and looking forward all the time to getting back to things as they were when he left home … What he really wants is for things not to have changed at all.’

  And yet after the war the sexes were still poles apart, seeing each other, more than ever, through a distorting mirror. All too often, the man’s dream of home and wife was a fantasy. Justifiably, Kenneth Howard tried to warn his readers how false this picture could be:

  He conveniently forgets, for example, his wife’s irritating habit of having meals always ten minutes late; he forgets that the garden badly needs new fencing. To him it all seems like a perfect paradise.

  He also pointed out that their wives, when they got home, would not be how they imagined them. They might be fatter, or thinner, with more wrinkles, and rationing would have played havoc with their wardrobe.

  Howard also made an apt observation about war when he declared that ‘it is impossible to tell men to go and kill an enemy and risk their lives in doing it, and expect them at the same time all to be honest, chaste, kind and unselfish all the time’.

  For the ‘perfect paradise’ was tainted, too, by sin and betrayal.

  *

  Though marriage in 1945 was a far more durable institution than it is today, the war placed unprecedented strain on it. At 47,041 the 1947 divorce figures had nearly doubled in just two years.*

  Too many unions cracked under the strain of long absence, estrangement and, all too often, infidelity. There is no way of knowing how prevalent wartime adultery was, though there does seem to have been a general rise in illegitimacy and in bigamy cases. Reactions of returning British servicemen to their wives’ infidelity ranged from the big-hearted tolerance of Greg James, who smilingly accommodated two little cuckoos smuggled by his wife Lilian into the family nest during his absence in the Far East, to the murderous rage of Private Reginald Keymer, who strangled his adulterous wife in a fit of jealousy. Keymer was acquitted. This was far from being the only case of wife-killing by ex-servicemen; the Sunday papers greedily lapped up the lurid details, as tragedies piled up. Sergeant Albert Nettleton was given five years’ penal servitude for beating his wife, Ivy, to death with the iron. Father of four Private Cyril Patmore was also found guilty of manslaughter after stabbing his wife Kathleen to death on 4 August 1945; he escaped the death penalty after Kathleen’s adultery was cited as provocation. But on 28 May 1946 ex-serviceman Leonard Holmes was hanged after striking his wife Peggy on the head with a coal hammer, then, seeing that she was still alive, strangling her.

  Such sordid incidents have happened throughout history, but placed in the post-war context they acquire more than usually troubling overtones of dissociation and misogyny.

  For the waiting wife, the fantasy of a perfect husband was often just as illusory. One of the few things that had kept Margery Baines going during the bureaucratic travails of 1943 and 1944 was the thought that her absent husband, William, would admire her fortitude. She equated success as an army officer with success, in his eyes, as a woman. ‘I had to do well to please him.’ Margery’s ordeal in the ATS had left her in full retreat from all her bright dreams of leadership, and, after her breakdown in 1944, she felt like a failure on every front, with nothing to show for her efforts, her ambitions. There had to be something she could do. Becoming a mother had the merit of conforming to expectations. If she couldn’t run a platoon, then perhaps she ought to be focusing on what women were supposed to do and run a family instead.

  Misfortunes now accumulated. Margery found herself pregnant with twins; they were born in 1946, but one of the two babies was stillborn. Three weeks after her confinement, while she was still adjusting to the loss of her daughter, Major William Baines abandoned his wife for another woman. Since their marriage in 1940 they had spent barely a year together.

  At thirty-one when I was suddenly left with a baby of three weeks, and the world to face, I saw only finality and despair.

  Utterly humiliated, Margery felt that she had failed as a woman. Mysteriously, the sun continued to rise each day, and baby Gillian continued to breathe and sleep, but the collapse of Margery’s marriage caused her to feel annihilated. If she wasn’t a wife, she was nobody. To be somebody meant that William had to recognise her qualities. ‘Why hadn’t my husband seen them if they existed?’ Margery now channelled what was left of her self-belief into supporting her baby; as a single, husbandless mother, she was the victim of society’s hostility towards the scorned and spurned wife. She felt like an ‘odd woman’ – an outcast and a freak.

  The divorce figures in 1947 were tangible evidence of the mismatch between fantasy and reality; but innumerable unmarried women also succumbed to the emotional aftershock of war. The carefully controlled morals of generations of young women had been scrambled and derailed by wartime freedoms. More affecting than statistics are the repeated appeals sent by married and unmarried alike to the magazine problem pages. Here is just a handful, from the many hundreds sent to Leonora Eyles, Evelyn Home, Mary Grant and their ilk:

  I am going to have an illegitimate child, and I am afraid its father was a young Allied soldier whom my family liked and trusted as a son. I have now discovered that he was married all the time.r />
  I am ashamed to say that I have fallen in love with a new clerk in our firm. I am ashamed because I am already engaged to a boy in the Forces overseas.

  I am engaged to a boy I love very much. Since he has been away, though, I have been going out with an Allied soldier. I am now expecting a baby by him … What am I to tell my fiancé?

  The need was great, and the agony aunts did their best; the Marriage Guidance Council, first formed in 1938, now came into its own. Between 1943 and 1948 the volunteer counsellors in their small London office helped over 8,000 clients who were trying to unravel their matrimonial tangles.

  A great amount of breast-beating and soul-searching ensued about the future of the family – and civilisation itself. Government and the church wrung their collective hands over the nation’s moral laxity and the spread of immorality. For hundreds and hundreds of years, men and women had thought they knew where they stood. Had the war dealt that certainty a death-blow?

  A la Recherche

  From the evidence, both sexes still looked to an idealised past, hankering after a half-remembered world of grace and gallantry, of clinging subordination and virile authority.

  But could it ever return? Had too much changed? To many women, the world of 1946 was an alarming and dangerous one, one which was fast eroding their sense of who they were. Hardship and worry were their daily lot, relationships were being tested as never before, the institution of marriage appeared to be spiralling helplessly into crisis, their homes, their roles, their sense of meaning, their whole world seemed to have been exploded. Life was ‘all wrong’.

  They longed above all to rebuild the remembered past amid the wreckage of the present – in the case of Madeleine Henrey and her mother, almost literally.

  Shortly after the liberation of France, Madame Gal decided that the time had come to retrace her steps from Paris to the farm in Normandy that she had shared with her daughter Madeleine, her English son-in-law and Bobby, her baby grandson. The region was still littered with the charred traces of battle, and it was a difficult journey. Mme Gal walked into the house and nearly fainted from the stench that met her nostrils; the rooms had been vandalised and stripped of their contents. Cobwebs were everywhere. Ripped-out pages from Madeleine’s copy of the New Testament, desecrated with human faeces, lay in festering heaps in the downstairs closet. ‘What barbarians had passed this way?’ Gradually, she pieced together what had happened; Germans and local looters between them had defiled her daughter’s property and stolen every stick.

  Patiently and courageously, Mme Gal set about the slow task of cleaning the farmhouse. Every day that passed she made a little progress; in the evenings she knitted a patchwork quilt from scraps of wool and wrote to her daughter in England. VE-day came and went; Madeleine herself was still unqualified for a travel permit, but whatever she could afford in the way of tea-leaves, soap or chocolate she sent to her mother. Neighbours brought eggs and butter. In anticipation of autumn Mme Gal made jam from the fruits of summer, gathered faggots from the wood and stored charcoal for the stove. At last, in September 1945, Madeleine’s papers came through. Torn between anguish at leaving her husband and six-year-old Bobby and the joyful prospect of a long-awaited reunion with her mother, she set off for France.

  Madeleine would have to travel to Villers-sur-Mer via Paris. She took with her as much food and clothing as she could carry. Victoria Station was a seething Babel of foreign servicemen and charging porters; the train reached Newhaven at midnight. On the channel steamer Madeleine shared a cabin with a young Englishwoman travelling back to be with her French engineer husband. They talked of living through the air raids, and of the occupation. It was a squally crossing. The arrival at Dieppe next morning brought back memories of the 1942 raid: ‘The vessel cut through the swell towards the land where men fell that it should be liberated … In a few moments I would once again step on French soil.’ After endless formalities, Madeleine was able to board the Paris locomotive – ‘had it been chased by Spitfires?’ As they chugged out of Dieppe she caught glimpses of destruction: a half-sunken vessel emerging from the low tide, bombed pillboxes and blockhouses. The train gathered pace through a countryside blitzed and scarred: roofless station buildings, twisted girders replaced by Bailey bridges, blasted track. At last, a magical sunset view of the Eiffel Tower, untouched in its glory, and they were in the capital.

  Three days later, after ingenious machinations with the British Embassy had secured her a lift by road as far as Lisieux, Madeleine was on her way down the long poplar-lined arteries of France; speeding by the half-concealed wreckage of Tiger tanks rusting in ditches, the broken fuselage of a fighter impaled on the apex of a shattered farmhouse, two incinerated military trucks concertinaed into a burned-out tree trunk and an occasional destroyed aerodrome. Lisieux, when she arrived, was whitened rubble. From there she was collected by a neighbour from their village.

  We drove rapidly across the plateau by way of Blonville, and as we approached … I felt my heart thumping against my ribs. I was longing to catch sight of my own land.

  My mother stood framed in the entrance of the half-timbered house …

  I ran into [her] arms.

  That evening Madeleine and her mother walked together through the ripening orchards and out on to the high ground with its panorama over the Le Havre estuary. Here in June 1940 she and Robert had watched the invading Germans dropping bombs on the port, the day before their flight to England.

  What bitter, poignant memories were revived by the sight of this orchard, where [the] cows moved gracefully in the long grass, and where the hedges were filled with ripening hazel-nuts. The red autumn sun was breaking through the haze, and all was peace and content.

  So much had passed, so little had changed.

  But now there was work to be done. Madeleine became busy; she organised carpenters to do repairs and decorators to restore colour and brilliance to the house. She had the furnace overhauled and the windows reglazed; she begged and bartered for furniture and bedding; she dug the garden and got the cattle pond cleaned.

  As the year wound to a close Madeleine cut holly boughs, shook the icicles off them and carried them into the house for Christmas; her clogs clattered on the clean stone flags. Madame Gal was warm by the fireplace, tending a cafetière perched in its embers. The house smelled of lavender, burning logs, toast and coffee. Here, together, she mused, the two of them, mother and daughter, had wrought a miracle rebirth, an apotheosis of all that was womanly, maternal and good. The rescue of her farm from the spoilers and wreckers was an act of female creation. ‘The war was over and I had lived to see my farm handed back to me. Dreamily I thought about the future.’

  I still felt a young enough woman to brave new ventures … Life had so many beautiful experiences to offer … I was thankful for my femininity … How would the next so important phase of my womanhood work out?

  Down by the shore, the village church bells chimed the angelus.

  For Madeleine, the war was truly over.

  12 A Bitter Time

  ‘A Fine Type of British Girl’

  London, April 1946. On a sunny afternoon the romantic fiction author Miss Florence Speed strolled from her home in Brixton to Kennington Park and sat down on a bench in the walled garden to read her book and enjoy the daffodils. A group of small children were playing like puppies under the plane trees, yelping with happy laughter. Bees buzzed. On a day like this, the terrifying, deafening doodlebug raids which almost two years earlier had wrecked her sleep, night after night, seemed a distant memory. There was surely no more perfect way to relish the return of peace than to soak up the sunshine in a London park.

  But Florence had barely read a couple of pages when a middle-aged lady arrived, sat down heavily on the seat beside her and started to grumble. This person was seething with indignation about the world. ‘Disgusting,’ she said, indicating the happy band of youngsters, ‘that children are allowed in here. They’re so noisy and destroy everything.’ And sh
e spewed out a catalogue of complaints, starting with a description of a recent bout of ’flu from which she was recovering, proceeding on to her high blood pressure and thence moving into a litany of the various things of which she currently disapproved, including the government, Mr Bevan, food shortages, children in general and the young women of today. She also took a low view of America – ‘a horrible, dirty’ place, in her opinion. ‘It’s a nice country – to get out of,’ she declared. ‘The GI brides are in for an eye opener.’

  *

  Three months earlier, on the evening of Tuesday 8 January, a mob of those reprehensible young women had besieged the building on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue known as ‘Rainbow Corner’, screaming and weeping, as a little bit of the USA in London shut up shop for the last time. Since November 1942, the club had entertained 18 million American servicemen. Now, with the GIs heading for home, there was to be a final dance: the last jives would be jived, and the last jitterbugs jitterbugged. Eleanor Roosevelt, Anthony Eden and a starry line-up of performers were invited to attend. But the crowd was so dense outside that officials had to force a passage for the celebrities to enter. Many members of the public had climbed on to windowsills and lamp-posts to get a better view of the floodlit entrance. Traffic had to be diverted. A swarm of servicemen, policemen, hysterical girlfriends, passers-by and ‘Piccadilly Commandos’ became locked in a seething mêlée that see-sawed back and forth outside the club; fights broke out, and one woman fainted. The planned finale, with a band playing in the street, had to be abandoned; instead, they struck up their patriotic tunes, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘The Star-spangled Banner’, from the safety of a balcony. There were frantic goodbyes; many broke down. At midnight an American soldier came out and concluded the proceedings by nailing a board to the doors which for three years had never closed. It read: