Mrs Miles’s Diary
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013
A CBS COMPANY
In association with Imperial War Museums
Text copyright © Mary Wetherell and Imperial War Museums 2013
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
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The right of Constance Miles and S. V. Partington to be identified as the author and editor of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1998.
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ISBN: 978-1-47112-558-4
ebook ISBN: 978-1-47112-559-1
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Editor’s Note
Constance Miles wrote her diary as a series of journals, eleven in all, each of which covered three or four months of the thirty-seven for which she kept a record. She had her own typewriter but, no doubt for the sake of speed, she wrote mostly in longhand, sending each journal out to be typed up in the village and later bound. Her handwriting was not easy to read, and the original typescript includes a number of mistranscriptions which she subsequently crossed through and amended in pen. Some she misssed: her friend Bey Hyde, for example, is spelled ‘Bay’ throughout at least one of the later journals, and Eudo Andrews appears several times as Endo. The niece of old Mr Stevens is sometimes called Miss Stevens and sometimes Miss Scott. These, together with a couple of geographical errors and some muddled dates, have been corrected for this edition rather than reproduced verbatim.
For much of the diary she referred to people by their initials. Thus her friends Bey and Barbara and her son Basil all appear at various times as ‘B’, and ‘Mrs R’ can be either Mrs Rapson or Mrs Rayne. As a general rule, where the person is known from the context I have named them in full to avoid confusion; or their identity, if less certain, has been suggested in footnotes. In some cases, however, it has not been possible to establish who the intial stands for.
Forty pages of the original diary are missing, and what happened to them is not known. The typed pages are numbered in pencil, and page 535, which concludes the entry for 18 May 1940, belongs to the journal labelled by Connie ‘3A: 3 March – 20 May 1940’, while page 536 continues with the entry for 1 July and is marked, in type, in the top right-hand corner ‘B41’. We know that at one point she sent the journals to her stepmother in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, for safekeeping: it may be that these particular pages were lost in transit.
The full diary runs to more than 1,800 pages of typescript and falls not far short of half a million words, which meant that far more material had to be cut than could possibly be included in this book. Much of what Connie recorded, however, consisted of newspaper articles or extracts from other accounts published during the course of the war. For copyright as well as editorial reasons it was a straightforward decision to exclude most of these and concentrate on her own words and impressions, allowing her wonderful and distinctive voice to shine through.
However much we know about the Second World War, there is no substitute for reading about it in the words of those who lived through it. I live not far from Connie’s home village and know the district she writes about well, yet I Iearned a great deal from her diaries that was new to me, not only about the war on her Surrey doorstep but in its wider context.
I am immensely grateful to Mary Wetherell, daughter of Connie’s younger son Basil, for access to her family photographs and to some of her family papers, including a memoir by Connie’s sister Mildred of her mother (Connie’s stepmother) and another about Mildred herself, along with some of Basil’s own wartime correspondence. Most helpful of all were the family memoirs that Connie wrote for her sons, which provided invaluable insight into her husband, Elystan (Robin) and into the Miles family, whose history is less in the public domain than that of Connie’s father William Robertson Nicoll, but is no less interesting.
Spending several months in Connie’s company through her diary, it is impossible not to feel that I have got to know her. I only wish I could have met her, in order to have got to know this amazing woman better.
Contents
Editor’s Note
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
Part One: August 1939 to April 1941
1939
1940
1941
Part Two: December 1941 to April 1943
1941
1942
1943
Postscript
Endnotes
Introduction
The small Surrey village of Shere nestles comfortably under the shoulder of the North Downs, midway between the towns of Guildford and Dorking. Nearby are the well-known beauty spots of Newlands Corner, where in 1926 Agatha Christie’s car was found abandoned, sparking a week-long police hunt for the missing writer, and the Silent Pool, where legend has it a woodcutter’s daughter once drew the attention of the future King John.
To the west is the neighbouring village of Albury with its red-brick barley-twist chimneys, where the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn laid out the grounds and gardens of Albury Park. Eastward lie Gomshall and Abinger Hammer, where in 1909 the landmark clock on which Jack the Blacksmith strikes the hours was erected to commemorate the ancient iron industry of the Weald. South of Shere is Peaslake, and beyond that the heather and pines of the Surrey Hills; a district which, until the railways brought the Victorians to colonise its secluded slopes and valleys, was once a wild and lawless place, the haunt of smugglers and thieves.
Shere itself sits prettily on the Tillingbourne river, its main street still lined with shops, its houses an eclectic mix of old half-timbered cottages and newer, more substantial stone-fronted villas. It seems an unlikely setting for a Second World War journal, let alone one which so vividly captures the daily struggles and hardships of living through the war years as does the diary of Constance Miles.
When we think today of the home front in wartime Britain, we tend to call to mind images of bombed-out buildings in our major cities – London, Coventry, Glasgow, Swansea – or of stoical crowds sheltering in tube stations. But what Constance Miles (known to her family and friends throughout her life as Connie) does so powerfully in the journal she kept between August 1939 and April 1943 is to show us that even in this relatively rural corner of the prosperous south-east, the impact of the war on ordinary people going about their daily lives could be both relentless and devastating.
In any event, Shere was not so remote from the war as one might suppose. Surrey had long been designated a reception area for evacuees from London, and by the end of 1940 the population of the parish had effectively doubled, stretching both the ability of the village and its surrounding farms to accommodate the influx and the ability of its inhabitants to cope. Not only children but entire offices and even government departments were relocated to the countryside; and later in the war, once the air raids had begun in earnest, many of those whose London homes had been destroyed or who were fleeing the bombardmen
t of the south coast ports sought refuge in Surrey’s towns and villages.
Not that Surrey was safe from air attack, either. It lay beneath the flight path of the Luftwaffe raids on London, and not infrequently, random bombs fell, jettisoned by aircraft seeking to lighten their load and make their escape. Between the end of August and the end of November 1940, Connie records a long succession of nights disturbed by the constant drone of hundreds of planes overhead, and by the sound of detonations too close for comfort.
On the night of Sunday 8 December, several incendiary bombs landed on the village, and Connie remarks on the many small fires that resulted. One fell on the family home of her daily help, whose account is both graphic and grimly comic: ‘Went through the roof, quite a small ’ole, slanted across to James’s bedroom, then made a bigger ’ole and . . . went through the scullery below.’
Not all the bombs dropped on Surrey were incidental, although Connie quotes a German airman whose plane was brought down over Dorking in September 1940 as saying, ‘we had no intention of bombing Dorking. We did not know where we were.’ From 10 July until 31 October the Battle of Britain was fought in the skies above the south-east, as the Luftwaffe sought to disable the RAF. Airfields at Kenley and Croydon in the east of the county were targets, the latter being bombed on 15 August by planes which had been aiming for the former, with sixty-two civilian deaths. The Hawker Hurricane, the most successful RAF fighter aircraft of the war, was manufactured in Kingston upon Thames, then still very much part of Surrey, and assembled in the Hawker sheds at Brooklands, Weybridge. Wellington bombers were also designed and built at the Vickers Armstrong works at Brooklands, and on 4 September, after the Luftwaffe turned their attentions from airfields to aircraft factories, eighty-three people were killed and 419 injured in a raid on the Brooklands complex – the worst single incident of the Battle of Britain up to that time.
Between June and October 1944, some 9,500 V-1 flying bombs – the infamous doodlebugs – fell on London and south-east England, before their launch sites in France and Belgium were destroyed. In total, wartime casualties in Surrey were second only to those in Kent among the southern counties, and more than double those of Sussex or Essex.1
Troops were stationed all over the county. The army town of Aldershot lay on the other side of Guildford, just inside the Hampshire border, and at different times both Canadian and British soldiers were billeted at Netley Park, across the A25 from Shere. In the build-up to D-Day, thousands more Canadian troops were stationed in camps on the North Downs and on the Surrey commons, including Albury Heath, where General Montgomery addressed them before the Normandy invasion. Also in preparation for D-Day, the Dennis vehicle works at Guildford, six miles from Shere, manufactured Churchill tanks.
Closer to home, the GHQ Stop Line, the main line of defence against a German land invasion, ran along the escarpment directly above the village, and the surrounding countryside positively bristled with defensive installations. Surrey stood squarely between the south coast and London, and in the summer of 1940, following the withdrawal of British forces from Dunkirk and the Fall of France, with Germany in full control of the continental Channel ports, an array of tank traps and machine-gun emplacements were built along rivers and railway embankments, at crossings and bridges and overlooking the junctions of lanes and tracks: wherever they might impede or prevent the passage of German forces. The Surrey Defences Survey, begun in 1989, estimates that there are still some 2,000 such fortifications, the most visible being pillboxes and dragons’ teeth, remaining in the county’s woods and fields today.
On 15 July, having been out to look at one concrete emplacement under construction, Connie writes, ‘We are trying to take in that we are in a village where a line of defence (is it for London?) nearly cuts into us’, commenting also that ‘We shall, I suppose, look back, if we are spared, on this time with amazement.’
Connie decided to keep her diary before the war had fully begun, recording her opening entry on 24 August 1939, eight days before Germany invaded Poland and ten days before Britain and France declared war on 3 September. She broke off writing it in April 1941, resuming it in December of that year and maintaining it until 15 April 1943, when she gave it up for the second and final time.
In the covering note she sent to the Imperial War Museum in 1947, she describes herself both as a housewife and a professional journalist. She was a published author, who had earned enough from her writing to put her two sons, Harry and Basil, through public school. She wrote children’s books under the pseudonym Marjory Royce, and, in her own name, articles and book reviews for a number of magazines. With her younger brother, Maurice, she wrote a novel, Lord Richard in the Pantry, which was later adapted as a stage play and was made into a film in 1930.
Writing was in her blood. She was born Isa Constance Nicoll in 1881 in Kelso, Scotland, although her family moved to Hampstead in London when she was three years old. Her father was William Robertson Nicoll, a Scottish churchman and noted founder of two successful periodicals: the nonconformist British Weekly and The Bookman, a literary magazine whose contributors under his editorship included such luminaries as W. B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Ransome and Hillaire Belloc. He was literary advisor to the publishers Hodder and Stoughton and knew many of their authors personally, amongst them Winston Churchill and J. M. Barrie. A staunch supporter of the Liberal party whose journalistic skills were particularly valued by Lloyd George, he was knighted in 1909 and made a Companion of Honour in 1921.
Her mother Isa (Isabel) Dunlop, whom her father adored, loved music, especially Beethoven, and was an excellent pianist. Connie was thirteen when Isa died and fifteen when her father remarried, after two years of what his friends described as somewhat chaotic domestic arrangements. His second wife was Catherine Pollard (known as Katie, even after she became Lady Catherine Nicoll), a talented artist and illustrator whose work was published in magazines and books. Connie’s half-sister Mildred was born in 1898. Despite the sixteen years between them, she and Mildred were always close, as indeed she was to her stepmother, writing to her throughout her life and always calling her ‘Mother’. It was in this heady atmosphere, in which literature and politics were always under discussion, that Connie grew up. While she attended schools in Hampstead from the age of seven, her father also encouraged his children to educate themselves by reading widely. This was a habit that never left her. Years later, her granddaughter, Mary Wetherell, recalls that her abiding memory is of Connie always having a book beside her, or in her hand. In her diary, apologising for quoting at length from a book which had nothing to do with the war, Connie writes: ‘It may seem strange that I should copy this into a war diary, but I want it to be clear . . . that I got through the war as I did simply because I had this secret life of reading.’
All three children inherited both their father’s love of the written word and his formidable work ethic. Maurice became a psychologist whose books included a multi-volume commentary on the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which was considered for many years the authority on the subject. Mildred was an accomplished poet who wrote a series of articles for Homes and Gardens on family life in wartime, which subsequently grew into a novel, Family Postbag.
In 1909 Connie married Elystan Miles, an officer in the Royal Artillery, and threw herself into the life of a soldier’s wife. Elystan served with distinction in the Great War, and was awarded the Military Cross for his actions at Ypres, where he commanded a Heavy Battery. Connie wrote in her family memoir that ‘that war period was the high spot of his life’. However, he was not entirely happy in his army career, being too keen to suggest improvements which were not always well received (a trait which remained in his later life, as Connie’s journal makes clear). In one report his superiors wrote: ‘this young officer is too fond of having new ideas’. And having attained the rank of major, he dreaded further promotion because, in Connie’s words, ‘a colonel had to be so much in his office, and Elystan hated paperwork.�
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He resigned his commission in 1920 and, with a timely legacy ‘from stormy Aunt Minnie’, he bought Plas Meon in Soberton, Hampshire, and set up a chicken farm. An outdoorsman by nature, he loved to be physically active and disliked spending time in towns, seldom accompanying Connie on her trips to London.
In 1928 they moved to Shere, a village which Connie had known from childhood visits with her parents. They settled at Springfield, an imposing house set high above a sunken lane on the south side of the village, where Elystan kept himself busy with gardening and building, and Connie supplemented his army pension with her writing. Although well connected, they were not wealthy: they divided the house into two, living in the upstairs apartment and letting the downstairs to tenants to boost their income.
Connie as a young woman
Photograph courtesy of Mary Wetherell
Elystan as a young man
Photograph courtesy of Mary Wetherell
Harry had been born in 1912 and Basil in 1914. Harry followed his father into the regular army, serving with the Loyal Regiment (North Lancashires) until he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a potentially disabling bone disease. Invalided out in 1940, he emigrated to what was then called Rhodesia, where Elystan’s younger brother Bevis had a tobacco farm, and took no further active part in the war. Basil had not long qualified as a doctor when war broke out, and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving first with the Royal Engineers and then with the Scots Greys in North Africa, where he was severely wounded on the first day of the Second Battle of El Alamein. The entries in which Connie writes about waiting for news of Basil, receiving conflicting messages and not knowing even if he was still alive are among the most immediate and moving in the diary. They grow increasingly brief and sporadic. At one point she says merely: ‘I cannot write much about this’, a reticence which, for someone who poured herself into her pages, itself speaks louder than words.
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