Without our being fully aware at the time, Joyce’s war experience was all around us: our playroom had a dark green canvas bed, bucket and washbasin; her double blue tin trunk had the names of every port scrawled or plastered on it and our dressing-up clothes were silk, crêpe de chine or brocade dresses and shoes that she had had made by the dursies on the side of the road in India. And when I found and came to read the journal some sixty years later I found some of the stories that she had told us and the vivid descriptions of places that she had never forgotten.
Despite the interesting and rich family life that she had created, the strains in the marriage and the incompatibility of personalities that were hinted at in the last few months of the journal resulted in divorce after twenty years. Later, Joyce married Dewi-Prys Thomas, Professor of Architecture at Cardiff University and a passionate Welsh Nationalist. They shared a deep love of history, literature and Welsh affairs and travelled together to Greece (which she had never reached in the war), Malta and further afield. She journeyed to Australia in her mid-70s where she was reunited with her brothers, their families and old friends. And in her early 80s, after Dewi’s death in 1985, she travelled on her own to Spain, Russia and Samarkand. She lived in the home of Siân and her husband Peter in her last years, from where she took great delight in the interests and successes of her children and her four grandchildren, Catrin, Owain, Lucy and Rhianwen. Joyce died in Birkenhead in 1992 aged 83 and in her last days she was back on the slow train up to Darjeeling, smelling the guavas piled on the stations. Those ‘four rich years’, as she called her war years, were with her to the end.
Rhiannon Evans
2015
About the Editor
Professor Emeritus Rhiannon Evans was Pro-Vice Chancellor at Edge Hill University until her retirement in 2009. She received an MBE in 2008 for services to higher education, particularly for her national work on widening access. She will finish walking around the 890 miles of the Wales coastal path in 2015 and also hopes to undertake some more of her mother’s Indian train journeys. She lives in Birkenhead.
NOTES
1. Anthony Beevor, The Second World War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012).
2. The history of the QAIMNS(R) started some twelve years before the outbreak of the First World War during a time of relative peace in the British Empire. The Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (Reserve), named in honour of Queen Alexandra, replaced the Army Nursing Service and the Indian Nursing Service in 1902 by Royal Warrant. It became known as the QAs.
3. Where she had been in lodgings while nursing in Llandudno.
4. The War Office requested suitably trained nurses to join the QAIMNS(R) in 1938 when war was anticipated. Nurses were interviewed and given sealed packages which bore the words ‘Open only in the event of war’.
5. Millbank, next to the Tate Gallery, was the headquarters of the QAIMNS. Now it is the location of Chelsea College of Art and Design.
6. In the margin is written ‘Frequent air raid signals in the last week in Le Mans. No one took any notice of them after the first half dozen.’
7. In May the British Expeditionary Force was withdrawn from France, leading up to Dunkirk.
8. Tricolene was a white dress worn by army nurses in the tropics.
9. The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1.
10. Rupert Brooke: ‘The Dead’.
11. The beginning of the Blitz and the intense bombing of London and other major cities.
12. Battle of Britain day with the largest attacks on London by 1,500 German aircraft.
13. A guide or interpreter.
14. Saqqara is a vast burial ground serving as the necropolis for the ancient capital of Memphis.
15. Mereruka’s tomb is the largest and most elaborate of the non-royal tombs.
16. A fortified place for heavy guns.
17. A felucca is the traditional wooden sailing ship used along the Nile since antiquity. It has two triangular sails and can accommodate up to ten people.
18. It is noted in Tyrer, Sisters in Arms (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008) that fraternising between QAs and sergeants was discouraged.
19. A novel by Sir Walter Scott, set in 1187 during the Third Crusade.
20. This refers to November 14th when 400 German bombers attacked the city: 568 people were killed and 100,000 fled the city where 60 per cent of the buildings had been damaged.
21. Used as a cleaning agent.
22. The British begin the Western Desert offensive against the Italians.
23. All sea ports in eastern Libya where the British and Commonwealth forces were in battle with the Italians.
24. A city on the coast of Eritrea.
25. An Arabic word which translates as ‘never mind’.
26. George Santayana: ‘Oh World Thou Choosest Not’.
27. HMHS Karapara was built in 1914 and became a hospital ship for the second time in 1940 with 338 beds and 123 medical staff, serving between the Red Sea and India. On her second voyage she was bombed and set fire to at Tobruk, towed back to port, repaired and successfully sailed to Alexandria from where Joyce joined her. The ship still required repairs during the next year.
28. The rest of this sentence is redacted with blue pencil.
29. In the margin is written ‘Mona’s Viennese Knight’.
30. By Phyllis Bentley.
31. Antony Beevor’s account differs, suggesting some wartime propaganda which was promulgated to the army: ‘On August 25th, Red Army troops and British forces from Iraq invaded neutral Iran, to secure its oil and ensure a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus and Kazakhstan.’ Antony Beevor, The Second World War (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012), p. 221.
32. James Ellroy Flecker travelled widely in the Middle East in the consular service and was a very popular poet, who died at the age of 30. His poem ‘The Old Ships’ begins: ‘I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep.’
33. P.B. Shelley: ‘Ozymandias’.
34. Omar Khayyam: ‘Ah, Moon of my Delight who know’st no wane,/The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again:/How oft hereafter rising shall she look/Through this same Garden after me – in vain!’
35. Now Pune, in southern India.
36. An ancient Iranian people who lived in northern Iran up to 670 BC.
37. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: ‘Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs/And as silently steal away’.
38. John O’London’s started in 1919 and ran until 1954. It was a popular literary journal with a circulation of 80,000 at its peak. Horizon: A Review of Literature and the Arts was founded by Cyril Connolly and ran until 1949 with a circulation of around 9,000.
39. A vehicle used to transport personnel and equipment or as a machine-gun platform.
40. John Lehmann started New Writing in 1936, and then it became Penguin New Writing which ran from 1940 to 1946. It was committed to publishing writing that was anti-fascist.
41. W.B. Yeats: ‘When you are Old’.
42. Robert Burns: ‘Man was made to Mourn’.
43. A small Arab coin.
44. Capital of Ceylon, now capital of Sri Lanka.
45. Now Jakarta, Indonesia.
46. A small unit of Indian currency.
47. Joyce sailed on February 8th 1937 on the Mongolia from Australia to the UK to visit friends and family in Wales, where she worked until the outbreak of war.
48. A small light armed warship.
49. The name of Indonesia before the Second World War.
50. Milton, Paradise Lost: ‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks/ In Vallombrosa where Etrurian shades/ High over-arch’d embower.’
51. Indians from the province of Madras.
52. A non-commissioned officer equivalent to a sergeant.
53. Sevastopol, Ukraine.
54. The Aleutians are volcanic islands in the northern Pacific Ocean.
55. 220 miles off Yemen.
56. In Libya.
57. By John Cowper Powys.
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58. Anne Ridler, A Little Book of Modern Verse, 1941.
59. John Masefield: ‘Sea Fever’.
60. A journey of 1,035 miles.
61. The Old Monastery, Calcutta.
62. A drug for treating malaria.
63. A journey of over 800 miles.
64. Khalil Gibran.
65. Actually the son was Aurangzeb.
66. A type of headdress.
67. The Welsh word for homesickness.
68. A play by Emlyn Williams.
69. ‘Dafydd’ is the Welsh form of ‘David’.
70. German and Italian troops surrendered in north Africa in May.
71. The Bengal Entertainment Services Association, founded in 1939 to provide entertainment for the British troops.
72. Thomas Gray: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’.
73. Now Dhaka, Bangladesh – a distance of 207 miles.
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