Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  A Love Match

  The hot summer of 1947, followed by an equally glorious (for some) royal wedding, made the belt-tightening and gloom of that year a little more bearable. Attlee’s government needed all the help it could get that August, when – owing to an export–import gap now estimated at £600 million – it was forced to announce that the country was back to a wartime economy, that tea and meat rations were to be cut, pleasure motoring would be abolished, and foreign travel suspended. The Empire, too, was falling victim to financial retrenchments. On 15 August 1947 the independence of India – the ‘jewel in the crown’ – was made effective. International anxieties resurfaced as the sinister terminology of the Cold War gained currency. Britain was weak and poor, its ancient might overshadowed by new powers.

  Anything that helped boost morale was welcome: a wonderful exhibition of French tapestries at the Victoria and Albert Museum was a highlight of the year for art-lovers. Ealing Studios started production of a run of heart-warming comedies, beginning with Hue and Cry, filmed on location in bomb-scarred London. Cambridge won the Boat Race and finally admitted women to full membership of the University. The shops were starting to stock expensive luxury goods again: artificial flowers, handbags and cosmetics.

  But sometimes it was hard to endure the de-energising diet. Shirley Goodhart found herself seized by longings for ‘large helpings of meat’, while poor Maggie Joy Blunt wrote a frenzied, mouth-watering paean to her favourite dishes of hallowed memory:

  Oh, those pre-war days! … Foie gras with whipped cream & hard-boiled egg set in aspic with green peas – Pineapple cream made with real fruit – strawberry meringue pudding … Veal cutlets rolled in beaten egg & grated cheese & grilled … Asparagus … I’m dribbling now.

  In September you could still bathe in the sea, and October saw a beautiful Indian summer – which perhaps compensated for the burdensome cut in the bacon ration, the railway ticket price rise, the selling of Government gold reserves to ease the debt and the worrying news that India and Pakistan were now at war.

  20 November 1947 was overcast and damp. The romantic novelist Miss Florence Speed was glad, however, that it didn’t rain. She and her sister Mabel listened on the wireless to the wedding ceremony of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten and, along with millions of listeners worldwide, heard the pair make their vows before the altar of Westminster Abbey.

  The whole thing was very moving. Mabel said ‘Why do these things always bring tears to our eyes?’

  Why? But it did …

  At dinner we had a little sherry to drink the health of bride & groom.

  On that grey day, Britain’s royal nuptials were a pageant of colour and hope, and a reminder that wars might come and go, but the magnificent traditions that made Britain great hadn’t changed. Dabbing their eyes, the two spinsters Florence and Mabel Speed felt uplifted and moved beyond expression. Princess Elizabeth’s big day locked down a prototype of aspirational post-war womanhood: follow my example, the occasion seemed to say, and catch your Prince.

  But average, imperfect young women like Doffy Brewer were simply outclassed. For five years Doffy had done her bit training gunners in the ATS, playing her part in the important defences against the V1 and V2 rockets. After demob in 1945 it was back to the family home at Romford, and teaching. She was twenty-seven.

  I was very ordinary, not particularly pretty, terribly shy – particularly with boys – and not grown-up enough. I remember reading a letter in a magazine – this girl was upset because she couldn’t get a boyfriend, and the agony aunt’s reply was: ‘Girls are like cherries: some ripen in June, some in July, some don’t ripen till October. Be patient with yourself.’ And I thought, ‘That’s me.’

  But Doffy’s philosophy had to compete with her mother’s tireless attempts to get her hitched.

  My mother had three men that she’d lined up for me. Oh yes, she was no slouch, my mother!

  The first was Ken. Poor old Ken. He took me out to dinner in the West End, and I ordered a salad, thinking I would appear dainty. But he was famished, so he ordered a meat pudding. And this marvellous vast salad arrived, alongside this minuscule meat pudding. Well, I wanted to laugh, but Ken was very solemn. He didn’t laugh about it at all. So I never went out with him again.

  That was one off my mother’s list.

  And then there was a chap who was on our staff at school. He was a bit creepy and pompous. He always seemed to have ‘wise’ words. I went into his classroom one day and found his ten-year-olds doing an old-fashioned writing lesson. He had them all copying these lines from the blackboard: ‘Something Attempted – Something Done – Has Earned A Night’s Repose.’ Oh dear! Well, I couldn’t marry a man like that, could I?

  And unfortunately the other one was married already, and I would never have married a divorced man, I just couldn’t do it. I really couldn’t.

  Doffy’s scruples, patience, and sense of the ridiculous were to keep her single for another twelve years. John Kerr – ‘the nicest man I’ve ever met’ – did not come into her life until 1959.

  *

  After losing two fiancés in the war, Helen Forrester had also resigned herself to a single future. Soon after the war ended, she got a job with the Metal Box Company. The packaging industry gave her career prospects, reasonable pay and a responsible, confidence-boosting position: it was ‘a fascinating world for a woman to be in’. But with no expectation of marriage she felt an underlying hopelessness.

  However, in 1948 Helen met the man who would become her husband: an Indian theoretical physicist named Avadh Bhatia. She did not write a memoir about this life-changing event. But in 1959 she published a novel entitled Thursday’s Child, which opens with the heroine, Peggie, breaking down in tears on hearing that her fiancé, Barney, has been killed:

  I was stupefied … It was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés …

  ‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I shouted in my agony.

  Helen’s son, Robert Bhatia, offers a caution about his mother’s first novel. ‘She always swore that it was not autobiographical.’ Nevertheless, he notes that she clearly drew on her relationship with Avadh Bhatia and his home country in writing Thursday’s Child.

  ‘Peggie’ meets ‘Ajit Singh’ at a Liverpool club set up to help the city’s numerous immigrants integrate with the locals. They drink tea together:

  I took a good look at him. He was dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy, grey trousers; his white shirt made his skin look very dark but his features were clear cut and delicate; both in expression and outline his face reminded me of a Saint in an old Italian painting.

  Ajit (like Avadh) is in Liverpool to study. Avadh, who came from a high-caste, privileged, traditional Indian background, had already received an advanced degree from the University of Allahabad and was now in England writing a thesis for his doctorate. In the novel their relationship develops slowly. Ajit invites Peggie to meet other members of the Indian community; in return he is asked back to the family home, though her broken heart is not yet mended. But the more time they spend together, the more Peggie grows to like and respect him. As a Hindu, he teaches her about Shiva, the destroyer, and Brahma, who creates. ‘So life is born anew and nothing is wasted.’ One winter’s day they walk out of the city by the sea wall, and eat sandwiches together in a sheltered hollow of the dunes. Gradually she confides in him and tells him of her past griefs. Ajit listens, then takes her hand:

  ‘Let me marry you. Let me show you what life and love can really be.’

  I started up as if to run away, but he would not let go of my hand.

  ‘Don’t go away. Hear me to the end.’

  I looked down at him and was astonished at the beauty which flooded his face; it was transfigured … I knew I was seeing something rare …

  ‘I have loved you from the first day I saw you …’

  Helen Forrest
er’s marriage to Avadh Bhatia was a deliverance. After the war the savour had gone out of Liverpool and all it stood for. As a choice of mate Avadh couldn’t have been more unconventional, nor represented more of an escape from the sorrowful stranglehold of her past.

  Soon after their marriage in Britain, the couple started a new life in Ahmadabad, the largest city in Gujarat, on the edge of the desert. In Thursday’s Child Helen Forrester evokes the shock of arrival amid the deafening bustle of streets, thronged with children and beggars, tongas, bicycles, camels and cars. Temple bells clanged and radios blared. In India she learned to bargain for everything, she learned to distinguish the rank smell of a jackal, to wear a sari and to give orders to the servants. She tells of the culture shock entailed in adapting to her new in-laws, and how she felt ‘pummelled by new experiences’. There was the vice-like heat to acclimatise to, and a landscape of cactus and sand. Monkeys lived in the mango trees, and an incessant creak came from the tethered ox whose exertions drew water from the well. She became accustomed to the sight of snakes, scorpions and locusts, and she caught dysentery. ‘Although I hardly realised it at the time, I was slowly becoming part of India. Each friend I made, each custom I learned to understand and tolerate, was a thread which bound me closer to her and made me part of her multicoloured pattern.’ Helen’s lifelong marriage to Avadh remained loving and supportive, based on profound communication. ‘How much I owe him for making my life anew,’ she wrote. ‘My cup runneth over.’ But, humbled after so many years of unhappiness, she never questioned Avadh’s precedence. ‘They always lived where his work took him,’ says their son. Eventually they moved to Canada; at the high point of his career Dr Bhatia was director of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Alberta. ‘My mother was a devoted faculty wife. And when she began to write, she did so in the last half-hour of the day, when other duties were done.’

  Today, Robert Bhatia remains proud of Helen’s capacity to transcend the misery and hardships of her early life:

  She got away from her terrible previous environment completely. But emotionally she never completely left it. She never truly got over losing two fiancés. Was she happy? How can I answer that? There was always a twinge of sadness and bitterness for much of her life. I think she was angry at the cards life had dealt her, and after all that she had experienced she sometimes had trouble relating to people who had not been through the war.

  Life had beaten her down, but she turned herself around. Her secret was her courage, and her maturity. She was talented, and yes, truly, she was a competent, strong, and successful person.*

  *

  The idea of marriage, whether within or outside her social tribe, was still problematical for Phyllis Noble. Again and again she had been caught up by her passions, but her greatest fear was that passion was a trap. She would end up like her mother, whose life – cumbered with shopping, washing and meals – had hit a cul-de-sac. But could she envisage a future without motherhood? In the autumn of 1947, when she embarked on her course of study to become an almoner – or hospital social worker – she was twenty-five years old. Her father had begun to mutter that she would soon be on the shelf. But Phyllis knew that there was time enough.

  Hospital social work was a small profession, but Phyllis had found herself on the end of a government-backed recruitment drive. Dwindling numbers of almoners needed to be made good, and many patients wounded in the war were in dire need of social rehabilitation. Once the new National Health Service came into being – scheduled for summer 1948 – the need would be all the greater. Phyllis was in at the beginning of a Labour-initiated sea-change in social services. The post-war world would see the obsolescence of the WVS-style Lady Bountiful, with her easy authority and ‘duchess touch’, to be replaced by full-scale professionalisation of the sector. Phyllis would be attending an ‘emergency’ course lasting just one year.

  For Phyllis 1947–8 was a year of profound intellectual release; of reading, self-examination and mental discovery:

  Sleep considerably delayed last night [she wrote in October 1947] by mental excitement consequent on Prof. Marshall’s lecture on ‘Social Structure’.

  Psychology lectures awoke unprecedented questions in her brain. She explored the agnostic writings of Winwood Reade* and read My Apprenticeship by Beatrice Webb. The Webbs’ extraordinary partnership – intellectual, ascetic, though childless – inspired her. Marriage could surely be something higher and better than slavery dressed up as sexual attraction. Sidney Webb was unprepossessing, but he was brilliant. ‘It is only the head that I am marrying,’ Beatrice had written. Together, they were guided by their socialist mission and their avowed aim to reduce the sum of human suffering; there was no hint of servitude or dependency in the Webbs’ relationship, which proved that there could be such a thing as a marriage of minds:

  [They] made me realise that there could be perhaps a form of marriage which was a beginning and not, as I had always feared, the end of life.

  Sometimes, Phyllis’s head was so busy she needed time to process her thoughts and find a perspective. She walked one November evening across London Bridge and crossed the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral. Six years earlier the same cityscape would have resounded to the detonations of high explosive and the ear-splitting rattle of anti-aircraft fire. The sky would have been alight with apocalyptic flames and criss-crossed with searchlights, with the Thames warehouses a blinding furnace, presenting a scene of terror as people scurried for shelter. Now the serene vision of a lofty plane tree silhouetted against the evening sky caused Phyllis to catch her breath – ‘[making] me gasp for the dear dead spirit’. Inside the cathedral an organist practised, the echoing chords enhancing the tranquillity:

  I could be calmed by the reflection of man’s transiency as an individual; yet power as a stream – represented, perhaps, by this imposing, strong, building. The sound of trains rumbled outside & pressed in. It was inevitably to minimise one’s own petty affairs, by reflecting how the scenery around those walls must have changed, & changed again, before reaching the present confused, noisy & dirty pass.

  Life, it still seemed to Phyllis, was a mess.

  As far as her own petty affairs were concerned, confusion prevailed; her new-found philosophy had not yet taken root. At a New Year’s gathering at the Strand Palace Hotel she was partnered with a charming married man who – it was explained – was on his own because his wife was expecting a child. In the early hours he burst into Phyllis’s bedroom, where, after some kerfuffle, she gave in to his energetic persuasion. Escaping from the hotel the next morning was potentially deeply shaming – ‘in the late 1940s adultery (or, in my case, fornication) in a hotel room was not taken lightly’ – but her seducer managed things with the utmost aplomb. It was clear he was a practised cheat.

  Dirt and poverty were also now part of Phyllis’s everyday experience. In January 1948 she was despatched to Deptford to do field-work with the Family Welfare Association. On the 13th she recorded her first home visit to an Irish slum family in her journal. ‘To think,’ she wrote, ‘[that] such squalor can still exist!’

  Surely I can never forget that smoke-filled room: the mouldy cabbage in the corner, the bowl with its dirty water, the toddler with transparent shirt and no shoes on the bare boards. And it will be some while, certainly, before I forget the shock of horror on hearing – ‘There’s another behind you’ – turning to see on the springs of the bed amongst the rags, that tiny 1 month old mite …

  We are still suffering from the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Equally true that two major wars have aggravated a vast problem …

  At present, I feel only the scratching against a stone!

  The next two months were to bring her up against a Dickensian London she had barely imagined, of hunger and ignorance, hostels and down-and-outs. The experience would shape her political convictions and her life’s work. In March, she made an investigative visit to a homeless men’s hostel in Kennington. One of the supervisors, a
good-humoured, enthusiastic and studious young man, showed her around, and they got into conversation about society and its problems. He was impressively eloquent, well read and well informed. That evening she wrote in her diary:

  Peter Willmott was extremely interesting. A person I should very much like to know!

  Peter, it turned out, was as attracted to Phyllis as she was to him.

  That spring of 1948, things moved very fast. Phyllis agrees now that it was unlike any of her previous relationships. From their first meeting she felt instinctively that this was someone she could be happy with. ‘It was a coup de foudre.’ That same day Peter Willmott had confided to a friend, ‘I have met the girl I want to marry.’ Their relationship progressed at breakneck tempo, and inevitably there were stumbles. Peter talked Phyllis into attending Mass at Brompton Oratory, though they were both staunch agnostics; it would be a cultural experience, he explained. But when she turned up in green slacks he expressed disapproval. Another time he objected because she licked her knife. Just how progressive was he, she wondered furiously. Was this middle-class young man, despite his professed impartiality and freedom from prejudice, just as class-bound and sexist as the rest of them? ‘But the magnetic spell between us quickly drew us together again. Being apart was too painful.’