The officer in charge agreed to take her on as an ‘instructor under instruction’, as long as she kept on dressing as a boy; as he explained, headquarters certainly wouldn’t sanction employing a woman in such a dangerous sport.
Stories of my mother’s days at Heston echoed through our own childhood. Whenever she was encouraging us to leap off cliffs into freezing seas or to climb to the top of trees, her own bravery in the face or fear would encourage us to push on. She loved working with the young boys, teaching them how a glider catches the thermals and showing them the simple instruments that kept the craft stable. She was in her element chanting the mantras of strict safety drills and giving the cadets the confidence to climb into the tiny solo cockpit, lifting their spirits as she strapped them in.
‘Don’t worry Charlie,’ she would sing. ‘You know you can do it!’ She would then give the boy a hearty slap on his shoulder and a kiss on the forehead before the glider was winched three hundred feet into the air and cast adrift into the clouds. With the trace of her kiss on his skin and her encouraging words still ringing in his ears, he would happily swirl over the fields, coming down with a bumpy landing ten minutes later. And there Eve would be, whooping with joy as he struggled out of the bucket seat, his arms raised in triumph. He would give her a hug in gratitude, for Eve had shown him that he could turn fear, full-body-stress fear, into pure, adrenalin-pumping excitement.
Then it was her turn. All the cadets and officers had turned out to watch this ‘maiden voyage’. Amid good-natured banter and proud salutes from her fellow instructors, the young tomboy settled into the cockpit. She gave a cheery wave to the crowd and off she went, winched higher and higher, but at the critical point she forgot the vital instruction that she had drilled into her young cadets: never release the nose from the winch cable while the glider is pointing skyward. She released the glider and it promptly stalled and began spiralling towards the ground. She remembers feeling dizzy and sick, as complete terror caused her to momentarily freeze. At the last moment, self-preservation clicked in and she managed to pull the joystick back just in time to bring the glider to a haphazard landing. Her audience ran to her as she emerged from the cockpit, shaking. She began to take off her flying helmet, but her excitable students chanted, ‘Again! Again!’
The idea of going back up into the clouds made her palms sweat. ‘Come on, Evie, my girl,’ she muttered to herself as she forced a smile, ‘you can do it.’ With a victorious twirl of her helmet and to a roar from the crowd, she twanged her goggles back over her eyes, snapped on her seatbelt and was winched skyward again. Up and up she flew, counting to a hundred to settle her nerves. This time she calmly waited for the glider to straighten up before she pulled the release lever, its head down. She gave the cheering cadets a fly-past, blew them a kiss and followed through with a near-perfect landing. She never went up in a glider again.
In 1943, when Eve was nineteen, she applied to become a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Every girl dreamed of becoming a Wren, and she was no exception – the lure of the sea, the boats, the outdoors and the saucy uniform were too much to resist. With virtually no preparation for the interview, Eve puffed up her chest and walked into the recruitment office to ask for a job. Once again, her audacity paid off, and they offered this uneducated, dyslexic girl a job as a visual signaller on the spot.
Visual signallers, sometimes known as ‘bunting tossers’ or ‘flashers’, were instructed to communicate in Morse code, either with hand-held Aldis lamps or a larger, fixed ten-inch lamp. Semaphore flags were used for signalling in daylight. After four months of training, eight young Wrens were posted to the Black Isle, a peninsula on the bitterly cold east coast of Scotland. Much of the Allied fleet was based there and the girls felt responsible for the safety of every ship.
After the majority of the ships left Scotland for the south, their next posting was at Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight. The island was in virtual lockdown, with civilians unable to enter or leave without special permission. This created a true feeling of community and although rationing was strict, with no meat, eggs or fish available, the girls were well looked after. Not a day went by when the friendly publican or a neighbour didn’t take pity on them and slip them a freshly laid egg or other treat of some sort.
Mum gives a slightly guilty grin when she describes her year in Yarmouth as being ‘one of the best of her life,’ but I can easily imagine it to be true. She and her seven colleagues had by this time become real friends, and they were all billeted together above a chemist shop at the end of their signalling pier. Yarmouth is still a charming village, with its colourful cottages surrounding the harbour, and the young Wrens felt safe in this tight-knit community, yet proud to be playing their part in the war effort. Mum loved to walk to the end of the pier, dressed in her navy duffle coat, to her wooden signalling hut, with its wood-burning stove and where a steaming mug of cocoa awaited her. The fact that the island was swarming with fit young servicemen didn’t go unnoticed, either.
Eve’s dreadful spelling didn’t have much effect on the outcome of the war, but it led to some good laughs. On one occasion she was happily flashing an instruction to a Motor Torpedo Boat. ‘B-I-R-T-H-H-E-R-E’ she signalled, to which the captain’s response was, ‘W-H-A-T-A-R-E-Y-O-U-G-O-I-N-G-T-O-D-O-A-B-O-U-T-I-T?’
Another time, a sailor tied his dinghy to her jetty and walked into her hut. ‘Little Wren,’ he said. ‘It seems you’re having trouble with your Morse code. I’ll teach you a secret and I guarantee that you’ll never forget it.’ Thereupon this kind man proceeded to write the alphabet out in capitals, before demonstrating the dots and dashes and marking each letter accordingly. This way, she was able to visualise each letter according to its Morse code equivalent. In five minutes he had taught her what navy school had been attempting to do for months, and she has remembered Morse code to this day.
There was romance on the pier, too. Mum remembers looking through her telescope and spotting a good-looking lieutenant commander, dressed in a white naval sweater and standing on the deck of a motor torpedo boat. Without giving it too much thought, she flashed him an unintelligible message. His response was to question what on earth the message was about. She then sent another message back, slowly and clearly. ‘Would you come alongside?’
He immediately brought his boat alongside the pier and was surprised to be offered a mug of cocoa. The next day, Eve was thrilled to receive a parcel wrapped in brown paper, hand-delivered by a sailor who stood waiting for a reply. As she untied the string, her heart lifted; there was the woolly jumper that had caught her eye the night before. So began another moving wartime relationship, of private moments grabbed during shore leave, silent seaside walks, intense conversations and final urgent kisses, before she waved her loved one off as he steamed away into the unknown.
When Germany finally surrendered on 8 May 1945, the young Wren was homeless and broke. Her old friend Brenda, a dancer with the Ballet Rambert, was going on a tour of Germany to entertain the British troops there, and suggested that Eve join them. The idea was preposterous: after years away from the world of classical dance, the prospect of her doing a respectable plié was dubious, let alone dancing in a full ballet show. The tour was to be sponsored by the Entertainments National Services Association, and the charming naivety of the time is highlighted in the thought that sending a ballet company to keep up the troops’ morale with performances of Swan Lake was regarded as a good idea.
Eve made an appointment for an audition with Madame Rambert herself. Mim, as she was known to all who worked with her, must have had a sense of humour, for she roared with laughter as Eve appeared from the wings dressed in her uniform of bell-bottoms and a sailor’s hat and proceeded to dance and mime her way through a prepared piece about life in the navy. Mim hired her. ‘At least you’ll keep the troops amused,’ she said, ‘but please don’t expect to have a job with us on your return.’
‘Adventure out of adversity’ was Eve’s mantra during the n
ext two months. She had no sense of entitlement and never expected the weather to be perfect, her accommodation to be comfortable or the food to be wholesome. In truth, the harsher the conditions, the better the story. This attitude lifted the spirits of other dancers in the troupe, who laughed and joked their way through the devastation that was Germany in November 1945.
I can’t imagine what the wretched, starving, humiliated Germans made of this group of young dancers. The girls walked among the rubble as the vanquished population picked away at their pitiful cities. They were spat upon by children and hugged by the elderly, who looked them directly in the eye, a plea for understanding. It was bitterly cold. Compassion was the only emotion that rang true during those two months, alongside the pleasure of being adored by an audience of four hundred men every night.
Eve’s imagination could have been getting a little fanciful when she included the following story in her memoir, Mum’s the Word. ‘I have one lovely memory from those days,’ she writes. ‘Just outside Berlin, a young, handsome British general invited me to go riding with him and lent me a thoroughbred Army horse. We went galloping through the forest, playing hide-and-seek as we wove in and out through the trees. It was thrilling, but perhaps a bit risky for a working ballet dancer!’
I don’t believe for a minute that Mum has ever been on a horse in her life, but reading this story tells me so much about her all the same. Reading this extract, I wonder if it ever crossed her mind that she might have passed her future husband as she visited the army stables, for he too was posted in Berlin at this time.
Post-war Britain was a dreary place. Once the end-of-fighting euphoria was over, a depressing reality struck home. Emergency laws were passed, including the rationing of food, fuel and material. This was not a life that Eve had envisioned for herself after the adventures of being in the Wrens. She decided to become an air hostess, a ‘Star Girl’ on British South American Airways, flying from London to Santiago in Chile, a twenty-day return trip requiring six stopovers.
After some basic training in how to ditch the plane in an emergency and in serving food, Eve was fitted out with a uniform that had been designed by Norman Hartnell to emphasise the girls’ curves. They were issued with silk seamed stockings and told that they were allowed to wear flat black shoes while flying but should be elegantly shod at all other times.
Eve’s first flight took off on 26 March 1947. She was not allocated a seat and during her breaks she would lie down on the mailbags in the hold. The planes only flew at ten thousand feet and at 250 knots per hour, their engines emitting an ear-splitting drone as they were buffeted by every gust in their path.
Their first stopover was in Lisbon. The next, after an eight-hour flight, was in Dakar in Senegal, West Africa. Mum graphically describes the effects of the gruelling flight: the nausea, the swollen ankles and intermingling smells of Jeyes Fluid and vomit. A glorious two-day stopover in a dilapidated hotel called the Majestic followed, with eccentric fellow guests, sandy beaches and warm, clear seas. After Dakar came a terrifying nine-hour flight over the Atlantic to Natal in north-east Brazil, and from there another seven hours to Rio and a two-day stopover. Finally they flew to Montevideo and on to Buenos Aires, a world away from grey post-war Britain before landing in Chile.
In August 1947, an Avro Lancastrian airliner named Star Dust disappeared while flying over the Andes. Eve had been scheduled to be on the next flight of that very plane. The tragedy was followed by another in January 1948, when the Star Tiger disappeared between Santa Maria in the Azores and Bermuda. Then the Star Ariel disappeared between Bermuda and Cuba, giving rise to the legend of the ‘Bermuda Triangle.’ The reason for the planes’ sudden disappearances was a faulty pressurisation system that caused them to disintegrate in mid-air.
Even so, this Star Girl carried on flying – when weighing up the odds between personal safety and adventure, there was really no contest; adventure won out every time. Thankfully British South American Airways were to be taken over by the British Overseas Airways Corporation and they switched to the pressurised Avro Tudor airliner, but by this time Eve was embarking on another chapter altogether.
7
LOVE IS THE DEVIL
Love is both the devil and the angel; we crave it and we fear it. One thing is for sure: none of us can control it and very few of us escape its clutches entirely. Love can also refresh a family dynamic: just when everyone is settled in roles, along comes someone from outside and stirs up the pot. It’s no coincidence that some of the greatest stories start with either a wedding or a funeral. Drama lurks where the relationship order is disrupted; watching how the sand settles is where the fun lies.
Let us look back at our story so far. We’ve witnessed the lives of Joyce/Mona, secluded in the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, and then the Branson family, not of the landed aristocracy themselves but at ease in the world of shooting parties, stately homes and servants. We’ve followed Ted through six enriching and shattering years of war; having been undoubtedly respected as a soldier then finding himself, at twenty-nine, unqualified and unemployable.
We’ve also had an insight into the lives of the Jenkins family, with their emphasis on education rather than material possessions: Granny Dock with her athletic prowess and competitive, restless spirit, and well-to-do Rupert, his confidence crushed by the First World War. And then, of course, young Eve, a product of the two of them, neither shackled by her class nor defined by her education, and utterly unafraid of what lay ahead.
As children, we loved hearing the story of how our parents first met. It was nothing particularly extraordinary, just a day when the gods were smiling down, with both of them in the right place at the right time and open to making connections.
Eve was helping a friend at a drinks party while resting between trips to South America. She was standing behind the bar at the far end of the room when she saw Ted enter. She was immediately attracted to him, with his cheerful demeanour, thick blond hair and graceful posture. One of the many letters of condolence we received after Dad’s death, sixty-five years later, stated rather touchingly that ‘When you talked to Ted at a drinks party, you could be sure of three things: that he would make you laugh, that he’d tell you something that you didn’t already know and that you would leave feeling better about yourself.’ I’m sure that was as true back then as it would be for the rest of his life.
Eve grabbed a tray of nibbles, wove her way through the throng and, walking up to him, popped a cocktail sausage in his mouth, saying, ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’
And she was right – Ted was instantly smitten. He invited her to the theatre, making the error of choosing the hit musical of the time, Bless the Bride. Sitting in the front row of the stalls, he couldn’t work out why the cast kept glancing down at them, at one point even checking to see if his flies were undone. During the interval, Eve had to admit that she knew the show quite well, having been in its chorus during the war.
It’s hard to imagine how ingrained the class system was in post-war Britain. Such thinking wasn’t necessarily motivated by snobbery; it was simply regarded as the natural order of things. Unless you were living on the fringes of society, conventional thinking emphasised the importance of maintaining the status quo by ensuring everyone knew where they stood. A month or two after their first meeting, Ted invited Eve to Bradfield Hall for the weekend to meet his family. Blinded by love, he was oblivious to how his parents would perceive his new treasure, but the reality was that everything he was attracted to about Eve – her spontaneity, her classlessness – was designed to horrify them.
The weekend was a disaster. Eve had never been to such a grand house and looked to Ted for reassurance as they wound their way along the long drive and were welcomed by the butler. She didn’t meet Sir George and Lady Branson until she entered the drawing room for drinks before dinner that evening, and their polite coldness was apparent from the beginning. It seemed that all their questions were traps, intende
d to expose her lack of education and humble origins. Poor Ted did his best to keep everyone’s spirits buoyant, but his sister Joyce, forever under her mother’s thumb, barely said a word all through dinner. The only saving grace was dear Uncle Bill, who gave Eve encouraging winks across the table when the going got particularly tough.
Wendy and Joe arrived the following morning along with their two young children, Michael and Jill, who offered plenty of distraction. Wendy and Eve instantly bonded, both feeling the weight of Sir George and Lady B’s disapproval, Wendy helped Eve see the funny side of everything. She was thrilled to discover that Eve was even more hopeless at the English language than she was, and on Sunday took great pleasure in her in-laws’ reaction when she told them what had happened in church that morning.
‘After the service was over,’ explained Wendy, ‘Ted wanted to show Eve around the church so we all stayed behind for a little tour. Reverend Appleyard was full of information, telling us the history of the windows and various brasses. He invited Eve to follow him up the steep pulpit steps so he could show her his pride and joy, the medieval oak-carved lectern. When they got down from the pulpit, Eve shook the vicar by the hand and said, “Thank you for showing us around your church, Reverend – I particularly enjoyed seeing your beautiful rectum!”’ The Branson seniors were not amused.
One Hundred Summers Page 7