Joyce's War

by Joyce Ffoulkes Parry

  June 5th 1940

  We are bound for London once again, having had orders to report to Millbank. The orders infer that we shall be leaving very shortly for the Middle East. We hastily re-pack our trunks and then as the days and weeks go by, we gradually have almost everything out of them again and, because it is so hot in London and we are so tired of wearing our grey suits, we thankfully get back into mufti again. Nothing very interesting occurs as war continues sporadically; we find ourselves down in the front hall one night, as the result of an air raid signal, but not again. There are the usual theatres: The Tempest, very beautifully done at the Old Vic, and some more opera and ballet at Sadlers Wells.

  The predominating feeling of all these weeks is lack of pay, which continues despite our efforts at composing missives to the paymaster, in turn cajoling, pleading, and threatening. We are at last given two months’ pay, and that pacifies us temporarily, but this soon goes and we get restive and sit down and write again to the paymaster. Before further combined and rather seething communications, the gentleman is moved to pay £11/7/- into my account. No one has any idea why as he owes me quite £7 in allowances. It became increasingly intriguing to us to consider how their minds work. Everyone is paid a different sum – when they are paid at all – and for no apparent reason, as we are all supposed to be either sisters or staff nurses. So it goes on, week after week. Our views on the War Office are unprintable. We occasionally agree and condescend to have tea with some misguided soul who thinks she is doing her bit for her country by entertaining his Majesty’s overseas troops and nurses. Once we rose so high as to have tea with the Countess of Clarendon and another day with the Duchess of Devonshire, which was all very illuminating one way or another. Mostly the other. All this time no letters from home at all (14 weeks). I hear through Auntie Clara that Mother has been very ill and is in hospital and so I send a cable to ask how she is and am very relieved to hear in about three days that she is almost better. With deadly monotony we report bi-weekly at Millbank, say, ‘Yes Matron’ when she calls our names and as quickly depart. We repeatedly hear rumours that we shall be going soon but ten weeks go by before anything does eventuate and then it is the same rush all over again, repacking and half the things we meant to do and buy, remain undone.

  August 12th 1940

  So now we pick up the threads from the start of this journal after a brief recap. I am writing on deck, on the port side, a lovely breezy morning. The sea is a deep blue, inclined to silver where the sun strikes the waves. The other ships of the convoy seem scarcely to be moving at all, but they stay with us faithfully. The only cruiser left with us goes nobly on ahead. One afternoon – I was sleeping in my cabin – before the other cruisers and destroyers left us, there was a great deal of excitement about a suspected submarine. It seems one destroyer suddenly dashed off, full steam ahead, and then dropped several depth charges. This is the only excitement so far, fortunately. The officers gave a dance on Saturday night and invited the nurses. I went to bed instead – it was too sticky inside. There was a church service yesterday afternoon. The troops stood outside in the blazing sun and listened most politely – as far as one could tell – to one of the worst sermons I’ve ever listened to. Blah! Last night there was a concert afterwards and community singing; usually the Scots element predominates at these functions because there are so many Scots on board – Scots Guards, Black Watch and so on.

  I leaned over the rails and watched the moonlight on the wake of the ship, gilding the waves to gold, the other ships like great phantoms gliding nonchalantly besides us. A strange sort of war indeed. This is as much like a pleasure cruise as any ship’s company could provide: sports on the boat deck, tennis, quoits and all the rest. We are allowed to wear mufti after lunch until dinner. The crew and the men are all in tropical kit today and look terribly cool and clean. Even the chairs in the dining room have the white covers on them. We have been having a far from polite discussion about whether we shall wear our tricolenes8 as mess dress or our white overalls. We stuck out for the tricolenes as the white drills will be so hard to launder. Also we have won our point, although whether it is worth it or not remains to be seen.

  The sergeants – who look more interesting than the officers – have invited us to a dance this evening.

  August 17th 1940

  Land again – Freetown, Sierra Leone. Mona and I have been sewing and ironing all day and by the late afternoon we realise that the ship’s engines are slowing down and that we must be in port or as near to it as we are permitted to be. We go up to the boat deck and a lovely sight greets us: a smallish scattered town nestling on a green hillside with rugged mountains beyond and banks of low white clouds in the blue sky. Ships and craft of all sizes and description are lying idly in the bay. It is unbearably hot, however, and memories of the Australian summer at its worst rush back to me.

  We are given quinine tablets because of the outbreak of yellow fever in Freetown. Also, after much alteration and labour generally we don our white overalls for dinner, as a gesture. It is lovely on the boat deck after dinner with a cool breeze blowing, for which we are truly thankful. This morning I awake to the cries of the local inhabitants below, endeavouring to sell their wares: bananas, coloured baskets, handkerchiefs and the like. Now and then they burst into song – The Lambeth Walk and other equally inappropriate ditties. They are not supposed to come alongside because of the fever and, to get rid of them, they are headed off with the fire hose. They look so colourful with their sleek black bodies and close cropped heads in their bark canoes. Without more ado than getting in and out of bed they leave their canoes and dive in after any sixpences that might drift that way. On the starboard side there is a curious looking tanker with a Chinese crew from which we are taking oil. Boat drills this morning, a new station again: number six.

  The news seems to be increasingly grave at home and in the east. Surely this will be a long war or else we will come out of it very badly.

  August 19th 1940

  Life on the ocean wave once again. We left Freetown about 8am yesterday. Mona and I had got ourselves out of bed with a supreme effort at 6am and 6.30 saw us leaning over the port side, B deck. We had our best entertainment by the local inhabitants, who dived and sang to us and kept us thoroughly amused. One comedian came dressed complete with top hat and collar and tie, doffed his hat before he dived for sixpences and returned as immaculate, except for a slightly soggy collar and a tie that hung damply over one shoulder. He gave a delightful impression of a Salvation Army preacher – in short he would have brought the house down in any theatre.

  So we watched the palm-girt shore slip slowly back into the distance and disappear, and now we are heading for Cape Town, around the ‘bump’ and rushing it, as we are to be in port in a week’s time, so it is said. In the meantime it is hot, so hot that one feels one cannot possibly go on day after day, wet and sticky and exhausted with it all. The cabins are the bête noir of the trip – we dread going down there to dress and iron. By dinner time Mona and I feel at enmity with all our fellow creatures. Daily we meet at 12.45pm for a passion fruit parade with John and Woody – an institution no less, and then again before dinner and for coffee afterwards. We have endeavoured to appropriate a table and chairs in the annex where it is cooler and less frequented. It rained last night, suddenly and stormily, and cleared again as quickly. And today it was lovely on the boat deck: very fresh and breezy except that I had washed my hair in the morning and it blew everywhere in the wildest confusion.

  August 31st 1940

  Cape Town is a memory – and we sail on – no-one knows where. Ten days of sea between Freetown and Cape Town. The usual routine – boat drill, sometimes an emergency one, when things are done more realistically, the boats lowered, the whole crew assembling on deck and we are turning round putting up shutters and then sitting on the floor until the four bells sound, sending us to our boat stations.

  For some time the sergeants were most social, inviting the sisters to dan
ces – Monday night at 8, whist drives and concerts but for some reason these entertainments have been cut out – we think the officers have intervened for reasons best known to them. The officers hold a dance each Saturday evening and one night last week there was a concert, various topical sketches and songs on A Deck. We sat in easy chairs and toyed with shandies when the occasion demanded. Afterwards, going out on deck we saw a hospital ship quite near us, brilliantly lit, in green and white and red lights – a strange and lovely sight – in these blackout nights. Then there was the usual last minute rush to write letters – about nine this time – and nothing to put in any of them, and then getting someone to censor them. Mona got John N. to do hers and John W. did mine – so it’s all an endless farce really. And so to Cape Town, ships in the bay and Table Mountain rising sheer and stark above the town, a cloudless sky, warm sunshine and the town lying before us.

  Mona and I were on duty in outpatients on Tuesday and Wednesday – the day we reached Cape Town – but we finished up early and after lunch walked into town. We meant to do a lot of shopping but leaving under pressure, arranged to meet the boys at 3.30pm and to have tea with them, we got little enough done in the end. The town itself isn’t very large and the shopping is distinctly expensive. Elizabeth Arden creams at 4/6 in England were 10/- and so on. But there are many fine buildings, tall and straight in the modern style, often with friezes in stone around the walls, or over doorways; heads of famous African chiefs or sometimes Dutch motifs. We had tea at the Waldorf, very noisy and modern and American, and afterwards, by taxi, went along the rim of the mountain and along the sea front to Camp Bay, which is a very lovely stretch of coast, quite rocky in parts with the waves thundering in spray on the headlands. We got out of the car and scrambled onto the rocks. It was lovely beyond words to stand there: the sea surging around us, the long stretches of very white fine sand, the red roofed houses among dark green pines on the hillside, the sun beginning to set over the rim of the sea, making a golden path across to our feet and the mountains standing firm behind us, touched with a rosy light – all so lovely. I think we could have wept easily enough – all four of us. These are things that remain; even wars seem fleeting and unimportant in comparison. A golden evening.

  We went then to the Del Monica, a new looking café, very large and somewhat bizarre, and where it seemed all the army and the navy and the QAs had decided to eat, or more particularly, to drink. It was in the Moorish style with midnight blue sky and artificial stars waxing and waning, comme il faut. We had some exotic cocktails, choosing them for the poetical worth of their names – Alhambra, Angel’s Kiss, Blue Moon, and Orange Blossom – and then went upstairs to eat. White-turbaned Indians waited on us and we dined, if not wisely, very well. We celebrated something – I don’t remember what – with champagne and wine, very happy to forget much that was better forgotten for the moment. We went somewhere else after that and eventually arrived back at the ship, by taxi, about 11pm. It was enchanting for us to see lights once again, by night, having lived through months of total darkness and walking around lightless decks every night on board. It seemed too wonderful to be true that the streets were brilliantly lit and that windows of houses and cafés poured forth a steady warm glow and that neon lights winked unrestrained against the sky. We went up on a deck for a few minutes to watch the hillside under the mountain, a veritable diamond necklace against the dark sky. Next morning, up betimes and after wasting some precious hours, we eventually got into town by bus. We started on a shopping campaign but got very little done in the end, although I did manage to get a cable to the family to say that all was well. It seems as though I shall never see their familiar handwriting on an envelope again. By this time the matron in Haifa must be almost snowed up with our steadily accumulating mail.

  We came back to the ship for lunch and as we were setting off for town again, with the boys, someone asked us if we were going into town and said, if so, that he would drive us. Before we knew what was happening it was arranged that his wife would drive all four of us up Table Mountain, or as far as one could go by car. After a considerable time at the cable station, awaiting our turn for the funicular, we eventually all packed in and in seven and a half minutes were transported to the very top of Table Mountain. Gradually, and miraculously, the panorama unfolded itself as we ascended and the smaller hills dwindled, and Lions Head looked like a perfect coconut pyramid – the tall pines below began to shrink and look like shrubs, the sea shimmered like silk, under the blue sky, and the boats, far away indeed, were no bigger than canoes.

  Once there, the top of Table Mountain presented an enormous rock garden on a grand scale, small rock flowers and shrubs sheltered under the great boulders. To stand on the edge gave one, alternately, a sense of power and weakness – to be monarch of all one surveyed and to be a mere dab on the horizon. Away, some forty miles, rose the Drachenburg range, mysteriously shrouded in mist, with their peaks outlined jaggedly against the sky. From the terrace below the café, more hills, sheer and grim, others bathed about their feet with cloud. We had tea in the lovely little café and then started downwards again, the sun pouring richly across the sea (I couldn’t see at all, without my very dark glasses). We wasted a good deal of time then, going in search of the lady’s husband, who insisted on our going to his club to take the local sherry, before taking us back to the ship.

  After a wash and brush up we set out again. Mona and John went to Del Monaco and John W. (who was detained to do a small job) and I went off to the Mount Nelson hotel some distance out of town. It had a superb entrance and a long palm lined drive. Inside it was like any good quiet hotel in England or Australia, except that the waiters, as seems to be normal in Cape Town, were Indians. We were really too late for dinner, it was almost 8, but John saw the head waiter and all was arranged. We started tropically with paw paw, the first since I had left Australia, and continued through turkey and trifle and fruit salad as the waiter insisted. Coffee in the lounge completed a pleasant quiet evening. It was nice to get away from the ship’s crowd for a while. A taxi back to the ship and then bed about 1am.

  We left Cape Town at 5pm next day. We were not allowed on shore during the day, which annoyed us considerably, as we wanted to do more shopping and there seemed no reason why we should have to stay on board. We had managed to get some fruit and flowers the previous day: lovely oranges and mandarins, guavas, passion fruit and apples. The flowers were a sheer joy: heather and proteas, anemones, ranunculus, freesias and Icelandic poppies in gorgeous profusion. We have some now on our table and I like not to think that they will shortly die. We are in the first convoy now heading east and then north. There are a goodly number of ships, more than before, and larger ships including the Empress of Britain, the Empress of Canada and the Shetland. The Ormande, we have left behind it seems, as she is too slow for us.

  It is getting hot and muggy again, and we like it not. This ‘organised waste of time’ as John calls it, continues, in spite of determined efforts to combat it. I do nothing all day and go to bed quite exhausted with the effort. We do open our port hole, having unofficial permission from the steward as we have no light showing through from the corridor and it is safe enough, and even so, the cabin is unbearably hot and airless. Tropical kit tomorrow – into our tricolenes and white drills once again. It is said that we shall arrive at our destination in 16 days and without any more ports of call. I shall be most thankful when we are really established at last, wherever that may be, so that I can unpack and really spread myself out once more. If it is a tent, I’m done for once again. It is Sunday morning, no boat drill and everyone is sitting around in odd groups, writing, playing chess or cards, or just sitting, as I propose to do, even now.

  September 6th 1940

  Calm seas, blue skies, warm breezes, and gorgeous sunsets – the Indian Ocean as I remember it in 1937. The sky was perfectly lovely the night before last. The sea at one stage was a heavenly blue and the sky a pastel pink, where it met the sea on the horizon
, with delicate opalescent clouds suspended just above the horizon. The sea was so still we could see the reflection of the Empress of Britain as she rode alongside us and the smoke from the funnels of the other ships hanging in the air in a black horizontal line halfway between sea and sky. From the port side later, the sea was a delicate turquoise, the ships standing out in a black relief against the setting sun, setting really like a great lantern and sending its last beams across the still waters to our ship’s side.

  At night, leaning over the rails on A Deck, the sky was peppered with stars, countless millions of them.

  ---- Look how the floor of heaven

  Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;

  There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest,

  But in his motion like an angel sings,

  Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;

  Such harmony is in immortal souls;

  But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

  Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.9

  There was a moon too, yellow as cheese, coming in on its back. And the cool breeze played about us while we leaned out into the darkness, and the phosphorus, where the foam curled away from the ship, was the only light, it seemed, in the entire dark world. There was an officers’ dance on Thursday night but the atmosphere became too awful after the first hour and we had to come up for air. Last night we were invited to the Sergeants’ Mess for a concert. Quite a lot of unsuspected talent transpired, much more than we can manufacture in our lounge, I fear.

  This morning, the news reported that over a thousand planes were over England and Wales last night. One can’t imagine this somehow. The whole city was lit by parachute flares, and once again, Londoners ‘dragged’ their weary limbs into air raid shelters. It all seems so impossible that such things are taking place, every day and every night, when we spent so many weeks in London and it was then quite quiet and peaceful. It’s rather maddening to think that we shan’t know, until the end of all this and we return there, if we are still extant at such time, just what damage has been done and who has suffered.