The Pictures
There had been little bombing in the South-West for some months now, and we had stopped sleeping in the shelter altogether. It was kept ready, however, for as Dad said, ‘You never know.’ We had air-raid practice in school, but where we went for shelter, I do not remember. We carried our gas masks, were reminded by notices in the trains that ‘careless talk costs lives’ and wore our uniform clothes until they were ridiculously short and tight—new ones took so many coupons. Prayers were said in the daily assembly for the military personnel and all others suffering the consequences of war, but it all sounded very formal and unreal. Here, there were no boys to give their enthusiastic and improbable interpretation of events.
I think we were desensitised by now. There were so many deaths in the fields of conflict, so much suffering in the occupied countries and so many ships sunk that our minds ceased to take it all in. We were discouraged from talking about the war at school because the fathers of many of the girls were in the forces. From time to time, a girl would be called out of class to be told that her father had been killed, captured or wounded. The child concerned would be away from school for a week or so, and we would all be told to be especially nice to her when she returned. We were sorry—we were not monsters—but there was so much of it all that we soon concentrated once more on our own affairs.
We were aware, however, of the arrival of the American GIs. It was long after the war that I was told that ‘GI’ meant ‘Government Issue’. I wonder if the handsome, swaggering Americans themselves knew this. I can’t imagine that they would have been impressed!
Many Americans were billeted in and around Bath. America had joined the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, but on the whole I was not aware of their presence in England until they appeared in their dozens in Bath. They were a source of great worry to mothers of the women who fell for these glamorous young men in their smart uniforms, who were known to have plenty of money, cigarettes and silk stockings and an eye for the girls. The saying sprang up that they were ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’!
Bath was still in a poor state, with damaged buildings, big open spaces where houses had stood and piles of rubble where buddleia bushes and foxgloves flourished. Buddleia, although beautiful, still reminds me of devastation.
I was in my second year when the country started to become more hopeful that the war could be brought to an end fairly soon. An air of excitement was felt, and people spoke of the invasion of Germany as a real possibility. It was rumoured that various main roads were closed some nights to ordinary traffic (there wasn’t much anyway) for troop movements towards the south coast, ready to cross the Channel, but everything was hush-hush.
At about this time, Mum and Dad decided we would start going to the pictures on Friday evenings. So for the first time, aged about twelve, I went to the pictures with them. I don’t remember the main film at all, but I remember the Pathé News. Suddenly, I was seeing soldiers, aircraft, ships, Mr. Churchill and much more. A voice told us of the terrible cruelty of the Germans. Then we were seeing Japanese soldiers with guns standing over thin men who were digging and building a road. I watched as the police, here at home, arrested someone for selling things on the black market, and I saw a group of men rebuilding a bomb-damaged house. It was all so amazing!
I realised that, in time, I might be able to join in some of the chatter among the girls at school: they had been going to the pictures regularly and knew all about film stars with wonderful hair and clothes and a place called Hollywood, where the films were made and everyone was rich and lived in enormous houses and walked around all day in their bathing costumes. At least that is the way it seemed to me. Just as television opened up the post-war world to ordinary people, so the cinema was doing the same for the quiet corners of wartime Britain. The light and glamour of the American films, with their unlikely stories, the glimpses into a world without black-out, shortages, gas masks and bombs, were just what everyone needed to raise their spirits, Dad told me.
Although I was far too young to appreciate them, the dance halls, with their noisy bands and lively tunes, were another diversion. Everyone needed some light-hearted entertainment to banish the gloom of war-torn Britain.
I loved the pictures except for two things. The cinema was always blue with smoke from the hundreds of cigarettes that were being smoked, and my eyes streamed. The other thing was the plush seats! The bristly surface of the seat hurt and irritated the eczema on the back of my knees so that I kept trying to ease the pain by sitting forward so that my knees were beyond the edge of the seat. Mum kept telling me to stop fidgeting and sit back. Even Dad realised that it was painful for me, but when he pointed this out to Mum she just said, ‘If she sits still, it will be all right.’ Of course, it wasn’t, so Dad gave me his soft hankie to put behind my knees.
Soon I would be taken to the doctor and given some proper ointment, and while it did not cure the eczema, it soothed the pain and itching a bit.
The patches behind my ears were a problem at school, being on show all the time because of my short hair. I was intensely miserable about this, as, apart from the embarrassment of the eczema, I was the only girl in the entire school with hair so short and straight. Hair was being worn at shoulder length or long in plaits at that time.
For the first, but not the last, time, I became devious. I told Mum that the teachers thought that the cut ends of my hair were irritating my skin and making it raw (it was actually what I wondered) and that I ought to grow my hair so that the ends were below the back of my ears. I got myself in knots with this lie, but it worked. A very grudging Mum eventually agreed. It did help, and what a difference this apparently minor change made to my life.
Another lie followed because of Mum’s insistence that I should wear the thick grey winter uniform stockings all through the summer, as well. This was awful. Everyone wore white ankle socks in the summer. The gym mistress asked me if I was going to wear these stockings all the summer. I said that I was. Why did I not tell her that I hated the idea and that Mum made me? Like everything else, I seemed to protect Mum from ridicule. Was I self-conscious maybe and didn’t want people to know about my situation at home? I don’t know, even now. I told Mum that the teacher had said that I must not wear the stockings in the summer because it was very bad for me. She had said that it was bad for me, but I added the rest.
Another lie that I told concerned the showers. I loved the showers (no one had showers at home; only baths), but occasionally I was afraid that I might have bruises on the tops of my legs, so I didn’t want to undress. We were only excused a shower if it was ‘that time of the month’, so I sometimes pretended to the gym mistress that it was, when it wasn’t. No one ever questioned this, as it was considered a very private and delicate matter.
All these personal things mattered hugely, even though the world around me was tearing itself apart in the war. How selfish we were at that age.
I was just entering my teens, but the term ‘teenager’ had not been coined. We were children until we were adults. There was no in-between.
Legally you were an adult at twenty-one, when you ‘came of age’ and got ‘the key of the door’, although many youngsters had jobs from about fifteen or went to college at eighteen. In spite of this, most were still under the care and control of their parents until they were about twenty.
How very different things are now.
‘Peace in Our Time’
It seems extraordinary to me that I should be writing about the end of the war in Europe today, the 11th of November at roughly eleven a.m. I had not planned the progress of my tale to coincide with this iconic day at all, I just happened to arrive at that momentous event on this year’s Armistice Day.
Of the actual end of the war I remember absolutely nothing. No announcement in school—though there must have been one—no jubilation at home, no street party or service of thanksgiving; nothing! I was only seven when the war had started, but I remember exactly w
here I was and what was said by my father and how he looked that day. I was thirteen now, and yet I remember nothing at all about such a joyous occasion as the end of this long, grim war.
Gradually the lights went on, signposts were reinstated, air-raid shelters were demolished or turned into garden sheds, men came home and many were demobbed. The Americans started to go home too, some taking with them an English wife: a ‘GI Bride’. Large numbers of people were still homeless as a result of earlier bombing, so cheap houses were quickly built. They were called prefabs and were only meant to last for ten years, but some would still be occupied more than fifty years later. Work started on the restoration of Bath Abbey and some of the other historic buildings in the city. Excavation began again on the Roman Baths, while the trains and buses no longer carried the warnings about careless talk or exhortations to dig for victory.
But all this took a long time: materials were still in short supply, factories had to be restructured towards their original function after making munitions and many skilled workers had been lost. Rationing was expected to ease, but it actually got much tighter as ‘we’ were helping to feed the starving in Europe; and, with so much of our merchant shipping lost, overseas goods were still virtually unavailable. As children, we could not really understand all this and rather thought that this wonderful victory would mean a return to normality immediately. Mind you, many of us were too young to remember what ‘normality’ had been like anyway.
At the pictures, I saw the London celebrations, with all their pomp and flag waving, but I also realised that whatever Bath and Bristol had suffered in the bombing, it was nothing like the devastation that Londoners had experienced and which I now saw, stretching away behind the bands and parades and all the jubilation. At last, I was beginning to think outside our own corner of England.
A few days later, what I saw on the cinema screen was to have a profound effect on me for a very, very long time.
Friday came. Once more, I do not remember the main film, but, even now, all these decades later, I can see the horrendous images on the screen on the Pathé News.
Images of the victory celebrations were shown, and then the music went silent and the cinema manager came on to the stage in front of the screen. He said that they had been told to warn people that they were about to see upsetting pictures from a concentration camp that the British troops had liberated during the invasion of Germany. The authorities had advised that these were not suitable for children, so there were staff available to take children out to the foyer and look after them there. He disappeared, and streams of children started to pass on their way out.
Mum said to Dad, ‘Should Julia go out, then?’
After a moment, Dad said, ‘No, I want her to see this and remember … ’
So I stayed.
Pictures were shown of the conditions in an infamous concentration camp, the name of which I cannot bring myself to write even now. A group of British officials were being taken round this terrible place, accompanied by the Pathé cameras.
There were piles of bodies everywhere, some mutilated, some burnt, all nearly naked and so thin that they were like skeletons. Among them were small children’s bodies. The officials were shown the instruments of torture, hammers and knives, that had been used on the people, then the ovens in which they were burnt, whether alive or dead, I have never known. A commentator said, ‘The living walked about among the dead.’
Then there was some hazy footage taken by the first soldiers to enter, and it showed some living people sitting, slumped against a wall, so thin that they could scarcely sit and again almost naked. Then we saw the fat, brutal-looking German commandant, being arrested. We saw the shocked and horrified faces of the liberating troops. There was more, but I closed my eyes at that stage and held my breath to prevent myself from being sick.
From that evening onwards, for about twelve months, I could scarcely sleep for the horror of the pictures in my mind. When I did fall asleep, I dreamed that the bodies rose from the ground and walked towards me. In the day, I kept seeing images of flames in those ovens and the dead bodies of the children, just thrown into a heap. I seemed to scream in my mind.
I could not bear to be alone because I thought of that place all the time, and I could not bear to be with people in case they spoke about it. Many did, as the shock waves of the discovery of such appalling atrocities spread through the country. I walked away from groups of girls at school if there was the slightest chance that they might speak of it; I skipped biology one day because we were going to study the effects of starvation on the human body, and I guessed that the atrocities would be discussed.
I could not eat, my marks slipped at school and my friends took me to task for being ‘peculiar’. I shrugged it off with a sort of bravado, pretending that there was nothing wrong. I could not turn to anyone for help, as that would have meant talking about it. In any case, it would not have occurred to me that I could be helped. Some teachers asked if I was all right and, of course, I said yes, but all the time the terrible images of what I had seen went on and on in my head, in my chest, it seemed, and in my tummy.
Tummy ache and ‘bilious attacks’ were the norm, but on two occasions they were so bad that I had to stay home from school. With this and my poorer marks, Mum said that I should keep to school more. Dad stuck up for me, saying that it was not my fault. I did not think at the time that this was ironic, as it was really his fault for making me watch that newsreel. That realisation came years later.
I no longer wanted to go to the pictures in case there was something else like that in the news, but Mum and Dad insisted that I go with them. I couldn’t tell them why I didn’t want to go. They noticed nothing specific, except that Mum said I was slower than usual at doing the bedrooms and Aunt Lizzy thought I was paler than ever. She was wise enough not to say this to Mum this time.
Dad was very distressed by the cruelty at the time, but it did not occur to him that I might be, too. If it had, he would have wanted to talk me out of it; and I couldn’t have that, so I tried not to be with him very much. It was as well that he did not notice this, either. So my anxiety went on for months and months.
I tried to think how to tell Mum and Dad that I no longer wanted to be a nurse, without telling them why. I might have to see and cope with the results of cruelty or tend sick little children. I knew that I couldn’t do that. I worried and worried about this, but then another emotion took over. Guilt! Guilt that I was alive and they were dead. Guilt that I was often miserable at home, but at least I had a home. Guilt that I was afraid to be a nurse. I was only twelve or thirteen so I don’t think I itemised these feelings quite like this, but that was generally how I felt.
But gradually I decided that I would feel less guilty if I did become a nurse. I could help children—not those poor children, they had gone forever, but sick children in hospitals. So I wanted to be a nurse again, this time with a more altruistic motive than just wanting to leave home!
One of the officials who had inspected the concentration camp was the MP for our area and sometime in the following few months she committed suicide. I do not remember if the reason was discovered or reported, but in my young mind I knew, without a doubt, that she was suffering because of all the terrible sights she had seen and that she couldn’t live with those memories. I was totally convinced of this, reasoning that I had only seen it on the screen: how much worse it must have been for her to have actually been there.
Until that time, I had been sure that God had been on our side—we had been told often enough—but now I wondered. How could He have let these awful things happen before He helped us to win the war? The only way I could deal with that thought was to believe that the Devil had been at work.
I do not talk of that time, but it slowly passed as everything does.
The following year I was thankful that I had a lot of good things to think about.
Growing Up
Great News
I was in the ‘other room�
�� one day when Mum called from the dining room. I knocked the door, but there was no answer. So I knocked again. Dad’s voice sounded impatient when he said, ‘Oh, do come in!’ I entered just as Mum came in from the kitchen.
‘For goodness sake, Mildred,’ he said, ‘why on earth the child has to knock on doors all the time, I don’t know. We will have no more of it!’
Mum pursed her lips. ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Sit down. We want to tell you something.’
I sat at the table opposite Dad. Mum was to my left.
Dad said, ‘Who do you think is coming to live with us?’
I immediately answered, ‘Auntie Jinny?’ (Wishful thinking!)
They looked taken aback, and then Dad said, ‘No, not Auntie Jinny or anyone like that. It will be a brother or sister for you.’
I went hot and cold. I knew exactly what this meant and I could feel the excitement welling up inside me, but I did not dare to say what I thought in case it was wrong. It would have been so embarrassing! So I just looked at Dad and then at Mum and said nothing.
‘Well, can’t you think?’ said Mum.
‘Um … is it … are you going to have a baby?’ I was so afraid that somehow I was wrong and they would hoot with laughter, but they both smiled.
‘That’s right.’
I took a big breath: ‘Oh, I’m so glad. When?’
‘Oh, a while yet. May. We told you first. Now we shall tell Grandma and Granddad S. and Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Lizzy.
‘Can I come too, when you tell them?’ I wanted to be part of the excitement. I thought everyone would be as thrilled as I was. But they were all a bit worried at first because Mum was now thirty-seven and this was considered a bit old to have a first baby, although many women had subsequent babies into their late forties.
Dad was a bit quiet about it sometimes, and Mum said it was because my mother had died when she’d had a baby, and for the first time Mum talked a little about my mother. I was astonished and slightly apprehensive, and I wondered what she was going to say.
The Country Nurse Remembers Page 18