Being a foreign correspondent did not seem to fit with being married.
Nina was caught unawares by the wifely duties now expected of her: shopping and cooking; toast was about her limit. Tentatively, she applied for a job as deputy editor on an industrial magazine and was offered it. The salary, £900 a year, ‘was £300 more than Harry was getting’. Worried that her mature husband would feel threatened by the earning capacity of his ‘schoolgirl’ wife, she went and sat in a news cinema in Oxford Street to think it over. Rising to leave after the newsreel was over, Nina felt groggy and fainted. She was pregnant. ‘Harry was pleased … I turned down the job.’ They couldn’t afford a nanny on Harry’s salary, so Nina would have to be a full-time mother. She lacked the courage to tell him what she would have been earning.
Or take the case of senior Wren Christian Lamb, née Oldham, who ‘only joined for the hat’. She had married her lieutenant late in 1943, but played her part in the planning of Operation Overlord, and until after VE-day continued to contribute as a working Wren. But in 1945 a dream came true for her husband, John Lamb, when he was given his own ship, HMS Broadway, to command. With the competition so unfairly weighted against her, Christian resorted to ‘feminine’ wiles:
I realised I had to take second place after that and must do something to regain my position. It seemed a convenient moment to announce that I was going to have a baby.
Christian now jettisoned all prospects of a career in favour of ‘a lifelong commitment to being a sailor’s wife’. Not that she had many practical qualifications in that field for, like Nina, Christian could barely boil an egg. Towards the end of 1945 John Lamb summoned his wife and new-born daughter to Gibraltar, from where he whisked them off on the next leg of their travels. ‘I never stopped following the Fleet after that.’ As a wife, Christian learned on the job and now thinks her wartime competence eased the transfer to full-time motherhood and home-making, both on ship and shore. She gave this new task all the enthusiasm she had given the old. At over ninety her gaiety and mental grip still make it easy to understand how attractive Christian must have been as a young woman. She loved travelling, found her new family adorable and relished the challenge of coping with their demands – from surviving a six-week journey to Singapore with three under-fives in a two-berth cabin to dealing with sickness caused by bad porridge in the middle of the Red Sea. ‘It was great, great fun. I loved every minute of it.’
Patience Chadwyck-Healey was another who slotted effortlessly back into the pre-war template laid down for young ladies of her class. Patience had been brought up by nannies and nursemaids and given a cursory education. Her mother’s principal activity was good works in the village; ambition was discouraged, and her life revolved around hunt balls and deb dances: in other words, the marriage market. Her wartime career in the FANYs, driving ambulances and staff cars, with responsibilities in the Blood Transfusion Service and the Bomb Disposal Unit (‘all marvellously worthwhile’) came to an end when she was demobbed in October 1945:
Well, I’d been very happy right up to the last days of my service. I thought I would miss the FANYs frightfully, but in fact I didn’t. Actually, not being there was absolute bliss. And in ’46 I began to think ‘Now what can I do?’
Patience went to stay as a long-term guest with a friend in Suffolk. To get through the days she took up the offer of unpaid work on a local smallholding, feeding chickens and hoeing beetroot. But in the evenings she scrubbed the dirt from her fingernails and joined the family’s social life:
During that time people were just getting back to what life had been like in the old days. Well, Suffolk was quite a social county, and it was starting to get back into its party-going mood, and there was Newmarket races, and drinks parties. And we used to gossip about this rather nice local family, named Maxwell … And it was there, you see, in the summer of ’46, that I met my husband. So that was absolutely splendid.
Peter Maxwell was a regular who had served in North Africa and Burma in the Highland Light Infantry. Patience was twenty-six, and her parents had no difficulty in accepting her soldier fiancé, who came from a family of famous rifle shots and passed all the social tests. They were married at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, on 30 November 1946 and honeymooned in Sussex with a week’s horse-riding. Two sons were born in the first three years of marriage; two daughters followed. Like Christian Lamb, Patience had no doubts or hesitations. The surrender of her independence came as a welcome relief, not a sacrifice. In truth, Patience’s entire upbringing had prepared her for this:
I was very happy to be an army wife, a camp follower. Peter always came first for me. And I was happy to be told what to do instead of having to think things out for myself … I never had a job again after I was married.
Frances Campbell-Preston was another military wife whose post-war life was determined by her husband’s career postings. Soon after his release from Colditz Patrick was sent to Greece; Frances made strenuous efforts to join him there, only to find he had been reassigned to Staff College at Camberley. The subsequent life of a camp-follower was to take Frances and her family to Scotland, then with the Army of Occupation to Duisberg, Berlin and Hamburg. The merry-go-round only stopped when Patrick’s health broke down.*
Tagging along in the wake of an ambitious ship’s captain or glamorous professional soldier gave these women what they wanted from life. All three of them married husbands who came with important military trappings, who felt entitled to call on their wives to dance attendance on them. The women did so happily, and, given the shaping of their formative years, it would be unfair to expect otherwise. But talk about marriage to women – of any class – born in the 1920s, and there is a strong likelihood that they will adopt the same unfaltering posture towards their life choices:
Pip Beck, ex-WAAF R/T operator in Bomber Command: ‘Being a mum and a wife was all I thought about at the time. That’s what I was, so that’s what I wanted to be. I didn’t look beyond. I was quite happy with it.’
Cora Johnston, née Styles, ex-Wren: ‘I remarried, and to begin with I was happy as a mum and housewife. I was houseproud. In those days after the war it took a long time to pull life back up again. You never thought about tomorrow or the next day. You just got on with it.’
Flo Mahony, ex-WAAF driver: ‘We just slotted back into our mothers’ shoes at that time. Women didn’t go to work when they were married like they do today.’
Eileen Morgan, née Rouse – ex Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant in the ATS: ‘I loved my time in the service, but to me getting married was starting again. It was another adventure. It was all new to me. I was my own boss, I could do as I liked, make my own decisions, rather than receiving orders. I had a baby, settled in, and made my own life. I had no regrets.’
The Wifely Thing
Fear, lack of education, hardship, loneliness and social expectation all combined at this time to propel women back into their pre-war identity. They sought the kind of approval in the eyes of men that wifehood and motherhood could guarantee.
Like so many, Margery Baines had turned her back on her ambitions. She did as she was told and had a baby, hoping to please her husband by conforming. If her husband had stayed, Margery’s story might have been different. But in abandoning her William Baines broke all the rules. In turn, she reinvented herself. Becoming a successful businesswoman was her survival strategy, and her salvation; it was also her rebuke to the limitations of a society which could only understand women as incarnations of the Madonna: passive, gentle and stoical. But when in 1946 Margery Baines turned her life around, she was motivated not by the attractions of power or making millions, but simply by the need to feed herself and her baby daughter. She really had no choice.
In her autobiography, Margery wrote that having a child forced her to ‘think big’. In 1946 she was living in a small flat in Portsmouth. Although at this time she had no qualifications beyond the shorthand and typing skills which had earned her a modest, living-at-home salary in her twe
nties, she knew she had to earn ‘a man’s salary’ to afford to go out to work and pay for a nanny. She started out taking in typing, but it didn’t bring in the £15 a week she needed. So with £50 borrowed from her father she opened a one-woman typing agency from a tiny rented room, 8 feet by 10 feet, in Mayfair. Eventually this would become the famous Brook Street Bureau, the first employment agency (in 1965) to be listed on the Stock Exchange. But in 1946, starting it up meant the anguish of leaving her daughter Gillian with the nanny from Monday to Friday and commuting weekly to London.
The need to build up something for her future made it necessary. This is the dilemma of every working mother.
These were days of constant worry and struggle, of twenty-hour-days sustained by strong black coffee, of rush orders, of post-war lack of equipment, of feast but – more often – of famine. Margery collapsed, and her little business went down with her. ‘I started again.’ This time Margery conceived the idea of sending out temporary secretaries and quickly landed a contract with the Monsanto Chemical Company. It was a turning point. Soon Margery was run off her feet, doubling as telephonist and receptionist, or office-girl and emergency temp. She applied the attention to detail, learned in her days as an army officer, to her staffing. Nobody was taken on to her books without being tested. She was thorough and stuck to her targets. The business expanded, she was able to advertise, and Brook Street started to place permanent staff as well as temps; this was another milestone. Though her business instincts were uninformed, they were sound; she kept her overheads low, concentrated on running things well and was soon making a surprising profit, most of which she ploughed back into the company.
As the money flowed, Margery rediscovered a new and bubbling confidence. ‘For the first time in my life I had found a job with scope for my energy and imagination.’ It was a joy to succeed, to support herself and to repay her father. After the years of toil and deprivation, she holidayed in the south of France with a girlfriend: ‘This was the first patch of gaiety I can remember since the break-up of my marriage and I was more than ready for it.’ But the real reward came when she went shopping with Gillian and, without flinching, spent forty guineas on a hand-embroidered pink crêpe-de-chine dress and matching coat for the two-year-old child: ‘the best London had to offer’. To be able, at that time of austerity, to exhibit her pretty little daughter, enchanting in pink and blue forget-me-nots, was the summit of Margery’s ambitions. Through Gillian, Margery could again feel like a good mother, a ‘real’ woman.
It was … a joyous splurge of money I had earned on the person I loved best in the world. And nothing I have bought before or since has ever matched up to it …
To walk my daughter out in all her finery enabled me to hold my head high.
Margery was able to put her broken marriage behind her and rediscover wells of energy. She applied the techniques and insights into people that she had learned in her army days to her business, and the Brook Street Bureau prospered. The pre-war ideal typist had been a combination of waitress, handmaid and dogsbody, underpaid and undervalued. The Brook Street secretary had progressed from those days. In describing her modern ideal, Margery still held up the girl who ‘anticipates a man’s moods … she must be there when he wants her.’ But she also stressed that it was a two-way traffic:
Personal consideration is everything in business. And a wise employer recognises that he should start his day by having a few minutes of personal chat with his secretary. He should ask after her boyfriend, or husband and children … If he strides into the office saying – ‘Take a letter, Miss Jones’ – then she says to herself – ‘What am I, a machine?’
‘Regard me as a feminist, not a suffragette, because I adore men,’ she would later write in her autobiography. Margery’s struggle, and her success, were played out against a backdrop of inequality and male condescension. ‘ “Well, well,” they would grin, “so the little lady’s a tycoon. And how do you shape up with a pan of bacon and eggs?” ’ Inevitably, Margery rose to such baits. But more often she made allowances, taking care not to wound male dignity, nor did she turn herself into a champion for women’s rights. In this she was very much of her time.
In 1948 Margery met a young barrister named Eric Hurst, and that year they were married; Eric, a balanced and intelligent man, supported his mercurial wife for many years. Margery would become a millionairess. But her second marriage, too, would finish in the divorce courts.
*
For all too many of the women in this narrative, a happy-ever-after ending was to prove elusive.
WAAF Pip Beck was demobbed in January 1946 and married her boyfriend Leo Brimson (‘Brim’) that summer; she was three months pregnant by then. Despite parental disapproval Pip had seen enough ‘immorality’ during the war to revise her views of what was morally reprehensible. In her eighty-seventh year, Pip – her witchy, roughly braided hair still black, her former beauty still discernible – has no qualms talking about her youthful lapses; she has shed conventionality. It is early afternoon, and she has come downstairs, unkempt in a pink towelling dressing-gown. ‘One saw so much of it – girls getting “into trouble”, as we put it, and being chucked out of the services. They weren’t “bad girls”, they were just unfortunate. I got more tolerant. My mother minded, but I didn’t; it was what I wanted. I was happy.’
But the Brimsons’ early married life was difficult. The agonies and ecstasies of Pip’s days in Bomber Command were behind her now: those fearful nights waiting for a mission to return, the heady wonder of flight, the all-too-brief lives and loves. The RAF wouldn’t release Brim, permitting him only short leaves for his wedding and the birth of his son. Pip stayed with her parents above their shop in Buckingham, hauling the pram up and down stairs. The baby cried ceaselessly, and she was permanently exhausted. Brim wasn’t there for her. ‘My mother’s post-war life was an anti-climax,’ their son Peter remembers. ‘For many years my father squashed her and treated her contemptuously.’ Brim, a clever but unimaginative man, failed to appreciate his wife’s love of poetry or take seriously her secret passion for writing. ‘She was under his thumb. With her it was always, “Brim says …” or “Brim thinks …” ’
After Cora Johnston’s husband was torpedoed on his ship she got a life-saving posting in the Wrens. Struggling to salvage a future from the ruins, Cora fell under the spell of John Williams, her handsome office chief. He took her out, flattered her, and when he was posted to North Africa with the navy they corresponded. But even that wasn’t enough to ward off the nervous breakdown which caught up with her at the end of the war. She was still only twenty-three. ‘I didn’t really know him all that well … I think the fact that I was deeply depressed and needed somebody may have had something to do with it.’ In November 1945 they married – ‘at that point I didn’t know what a monster he was’. But over time the ‘real’ John emerged. He was caught fiddling naval accounts, became alcoholic and used physical threats to control Cora. Later there were repeated infidelities. Cora kept her head down, brought up two children and finally left him – in 1989.
In the summer following her return from Germany, Joy Taverner married Sergeant Ron Trindles. During her first year as his wife, Joy also began to find out what the man she had married was really like. And he was not, as it soon emerged, someone with whom she could share the trauma of her time in Belsen. The newly wed Trindles, like Pip Brimson, moved in upstairs above her family’s tobacconist shop in west London. Joy now realised, in that confined space, that she and Ron were incompatible. Their whirlwind romance in Belgium in the early months of 1945 seemed impossibly distant. His charm and well-bred allure seemed all to have been a front. Joy – articulate, capable and imaginative – had married a man who appeared to have no interest in her, nor any initiative when it came to forging a career. In addition, his family from Northamptonshire turned out to be homespun and unsophisticated. Joy took on work to support him, but then she became pregnant. Their first child, Sue, was born in November 1946, b
y which time Joy was at the end of her tether. She told her mother she wanted to leave her husband. But there was to be no chink of support from that quarter. ‘You’ve made your bed,’ said Mrs Taverner, ‘and you lie on it. There’s never been a divorce in our family. That’s not what this family does.’ Joy caved in to circumstances. Ron got a passable, but badly paid job in an insurance company. She looked after her baby, cooked, and – in Sue’s words – ‘tried to do the wifely thing’, but, defying convention, went back to work as a nurse as soon as she could. For Joy, marriage never delivered; her animals meant more to her. She had witnessed what men were capable of, and it is perhaps unsurprising that she remained sceptical of their worth. ‘Men are what women marry,’ she wrote once, in an angry diatribe entitled ‘Useless Creation Man’: ‘they have two feet, two hands, and sometimes two women, but never more than one shilling or one idea at the same time … Making a husband out of a man … requires science, common sense, hope, and charity – mostly charity.’
In the end it was Ron who left. Unhappy but stoical, still haunted by the ghosts of Belsen, Joy shared her life with his for the best part of thirty years.
In the autumn of 1945, when Monica Littleboy encountered George Symington after his return from Japan, her heart bled for the wreck that he had become: ‘Misshapen, pitted, scarred … This was not the young man I had known.’ But trauma and hardship had not changed George’s feelings for her. These had kept him going and given him hope during his imprisonment; he persisted in seeking to revive their relationship. Gradually, compassion for his plight, and the rekindled flame of their old love displaced Monica’s initial shock and disbelief. And she soon found that those emotions shackled her to him as securely as if they had never been apart. Becoming wife to a man whose health and mental wellbeing had been eroded by war was not how Monica had once envisaged her future, but their past passion now exerted an inescapable pull. Did she feel a pang at the loss of her new boyfriend, her job at the BBC? Would she regret agreeing to marry him? When the time came she realised that they were bound together not only by love, but by George’s need, and her capacity to help him.
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