Songs of Innocence

by Abrams, Fran

  Yet with an estimated 60,000 agricultural workers now away at the war, and hundreds of thousands of jobs in other trades now vacant, Hardie and his supporters were left shouting into the wind. Children were legally allowed to leave school at thirteen with permission, and many did so much sooner, especially during the war. The President of the Board of Education, Joseph Pease, declared himself unable to do much about it. After all, he pointed out, many thousands of children were out of lessons because their schools had been comandeered by the forces.

  Dora Dewar, a young teacher who worked near London’s docks at Custom House during the war, recalled later that her pupils began to disappear as soon as spring was in the air: ‘After Whitsun the great exodus began across the Woolwich ferry into Kent, first for pea-picking, then for the cherry picking and other soft fruit, then for the apples and pears and last of all the hops. They camped in tents and huts and had a glorious holiday and came back in early October like a horde of brown, shiny, smelly gipsies.’46

  For other teenagers, there was no such happy ending to a spell of war work. Sylvia Pankhurst’s young friend Rose Pengelly, by now aged sixteen, found a job in one of the factories which were crying out for women and girls to fill the places of the absent men. One Thursday just before Christmas 1915, she came to Sylvia’s welfare centre to dance for the younger children. ‘On Saturday she should have danced again – but the knife of the machine she was working descended on her pretty right hand, rending and mangling the thumb and a couple of fingers. Her new employer making no offer to pay a cab fare, she walked to the station, took the train to the London Hospital and there sat in the out-patients department till late in the evening, when her crushed thumb and two fingers were amputated.’47

  Boy combatants and civilian casualties

  Legally, the minimum age for enlistment in the army was eighteen, and soldiers were meant to be nineteen before they could serve overseas. Naval cadets could join at fifteen, but most did not see active service until they were older. But in truth many teenage boys were swept up in the jingoistic atmosphere of the time and managed to persuade the recruitment officers to turn a blind eye to their real age. The youngest fatality is reputed to have been John Condon, who was killed in May 1915 and who was said to be just fourteen years old – though there has been some dispute about this.48

  Most boys joined for the glory and the excitement, yet the food was also an incentive. When Albert Farley, aged fifteen, sent his first letter to his family in London from a shore base near Chatham in Kent, much of his letter was taken up by a full description of the clothing and the meals he had been given: ‘I am getting on all right with the bananas, salmon, sardines, bully beef, peas, pickle onions, shrimps for tea, cocoa for supper,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps fried fish and salmon 2nd course dinner, bananas, apple, custard and plums on Sunday.’ Albert reported, with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a pupil writing home from boarding school, that he also had four new ‘duck suits’, three hats, a toothbrush and two sets of singlets and drawers: ‘Everything A1.’ Albert died four months later along with about 400 other sailors when HMS Natal, the ship on which he had become a stoker, caught fire while at anchor in the Cromarty Firth and was ripped apart by a series of explosions.49

  But the most celebrated of these boy combatants was Jack Cornwell, who, like Albert Farley, was fifteen when he joined up and sixteen when he died. Unlike Albert, Jack became a national hero and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. He died standing alone at his exposed post on the deck of HMS Chester, awaiting orders while under fire during the Battle of Jutland in May 1916. In different times the reaction might well have been that Jack Cornwell was too young to fight and that he should never even have been there. Yet the navy did not even attempt to play down the significance of Jack’s extreme youth. Far from it: the boy’s tender age was used to highlight his act of heroism. The Daily Sketch splashed his photograph across its front page. The London Gazette, recording the awarding of the Victoria Cross in September 1916, reported: ‘Mortally wounded early in the action, Boy, First Class, John Travers Cornwell, remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders, until the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded around him. His age was under sixteen and a half years.’

  Jack Cornwell had been a Boy Scout, and the movement, too, was eager to honour his life and death. The Headquarters Gazette reproduced a letter written to the boy’s mother by the captain of his ship: ‘I cannot express to you my admiration of the son you have lost from this world. No other comfort would I attempt to give to the mother of so brave a lad, but to assure her of what he was, and what he did, and what an example he gave. I hope to place in the boys’ mess a plate with his name on and the date and the words, “Faithful unto Death”.’ Money was raised for an impressive memorial in Manor Park Cemetery in east London. A few months later Jack’s father, Eli, who had joined the army, was buried in the same grave. Jack Cornwell is also remembered in a memorial in Chester Cathedral.

  None of those young recruits could have known what they were going into. C. J. Arthur, who was fifteen when the war broke out, had joined his school’s cadet battalion in 1914. A few months on, he recorded later, he told his commanding officer he was going to join up: ‘Good,’ he said. ‘What age do you want to be?’ Armed with a letter, he presented himself to the colonel of an infantry battalion, who told him to get his hair cut and made him a lancecorporal. Ten weeks later, he was promoted to sergeant, and in 1916, still aged just seventeen, was sent to the trenches in France. When volunteers were sought for a raid, he pushed himself forward: ‘The major had seen service in Gallipoli, and was not nearly so bloodthirsty as we new soldiers, and he promptly asked me if I wanted to end my young life. Being facetious, I answered that I thought there was a war on. I had my wish . . . one of the casualties was the company sergeant-major, whose place I had to take before I was eighteen.’50 Arthur recorded that he had ‘lost at least half my bravado’ by the time he had survived the Somme, but unlike so many others he did outlive the war.

  At home, too, the casualties were mounting. Although the death toll from bombings was not so high as it would be in World War Two, it was still significant. An official report published after the war recorded the total numbers of children killed at home, in aeroplane and Zeppelin raids, and in bombardments of the east coast from the sea, to have been almost 300. A total of 770 children were known to have been injured.51

  The worst atrocity occurred on 13 June 1917, a hot, hazy day. Residents of London’s East End reported looking up to see a couple of dozen silver planes ‘like big dragonflies’ in the sky. The shrapnel bombs they were carrying would kill a total of 104 people that day. Among them would be a class of five-and six-year-old pupils who were in lessons at Upper North Street School, Poplar, when one of the bombs hit and devastated their classroom. Sixteen of them would die. Rose Moorhouse was among the survivors: ‘We didn’t hear anything, no noise, no bomb falling,’ she recalled later. ‘Next thing I remember was that I felt heavy, I could scarcely breathe. I kept falling into unconsciousness, then waking up, to hear the sound of myself moaning.’52 Rose was buried for three days while her older brother Jimmy kept returning to the site to dig for her, convinced she was buried alive there. On the third night, he heard her moaning and, along with a policeman, managed to dig her out.

  The event caused widespread horror and dismay, and a fund was set up to erect a memorial – still standing today – and to send the victims’ surviving siblings out of London for a holiday. Yet some fatal raids were met with a much more prosaic response. C. Ward, a Scoutmaster from Hartlepool, reported in 1915, for instance, on the German bombardment of the town in February that year. As firing began from the sea, the town’s scouts were dispatched on bicycles to call up ‘special constables’ from outlying areas. ‘I felt quite proud of the scouts, they seemed to think only of duty, heedless of the bursting shells all around them they really behaved like seasoned veterans under fire – quite cool,
calm, and collected,’ Mr Ward reported in the Headquarters Gazette. A scoutmaster and threescouts were killed while doing ‘good turns’ running messages, he said. Yet there was a silver lining – recruitment had received a boost as a result: ‘The visit of the Germans has certainly given a fillip to the scout movement locally.’

  Not everyone was so brave under fire. The Times reported in December 1915 that London’s Chief Inspector of Schools had read out a series of children’s essays about their experiences of Zeppelin raids: ‘My father was frightened during the raid and he ran into a beer shop and got under the counter and stayed there until it was all over,’ one such essay reported. Another added: ‘A man came into the public house and said: “Give me half a pint. If I am going to die, I will die drunk.”’ Most of the children recorded how exciting they had found the raids, though, and many of the boys spent time afterwards hunting for souvenirs.

  As the war went on, even those not directly affected could no longer ignore the horror of what was happening overseas. Elsie Oman, now working in a sugar factory in Salford, remembered seeing wounded soldiers who were being billeted in a local school because the hospital was full: ‘There were quite a lot of wounded young soldiers on crutches with legs missing, some with arms off and some blind. In fact some of them looked too young to be in the army. It made a shiver go down your spine to watch the poor things hobbling about in their hospital blue.’53 And the arrival of a Post Office messenger was greeted with dread: ‘Sometimes when we were going to school or on an errand we would see the messenger boy from the GPO and that meant a telegram for somebody. We would stand and wait to see which house he would go to. They were coming very frequently and nine times out of ten they would bear the familiar words: “Deepest Sympathy”.’

  In north London, Sidney Day’s father would come home on leave with the smell of the front hanging around him. ‘When he had leave from the army he would come home, straight out of the trenches, mud everywhere, filthy. The poor old bugger had puttees wrapped round his legs up to his knees and the mud was all caked in where they hadn’t been taken off for weeks and weeks. His legs looked like ladders from the marks round them made by the ties.’54 Sidney’s father survived the war and came home, his lungs permanently scarred by gas but, as Sidney noted, better off than an uncle across the street, who had lost most of his jaw.

  Sonia Keppel’s wealthy and well-connected father was in France, too. His early letters, she said, were ‘full of almost boyish adventures which I, at least, could share. Unlike me, Mamma and Violet were not taken in.’ Now these letters began to change and ‘although they nearly always contained something to laugh at, through them now seemed to ooze a trickle of mud from France’. On his fiftieth birthday, the family sent a hamper from Fortnum’s, and he reported that he and his men had enjoyed it but so, too, had the rats. When he came home on leave Sonia was shocked to see his changed appearance. ‘I grew up a lot . . . suddenly the positions were reversed. Now here was Papa, dependent on me. “Is it awful at the front, Papa?” once I asked him. And he nodded back at me, gravely smiling. “Not too good, Doey,” he admitted, pressing my hand. “Not too good.”’ Fortunately for Sonia, her father was transferred to Ireland just before most of his battalion was wiped out at the Somme. Sonia’s sister, Violet, was not so lucky. Three of the friends with whom she had enjoyed high jinks before the war – including a particularly close friend called Billy – were killed in the space of three months. ‘Much has been written of the lost generation and of the irreparable gap it left,’ Sonia wrote. ‘And almost the most tragic part of it was that it was lost so quickly, largely within three years . . . I can remember Billy, on a day of spring sunshine, playing beautiful tennis and then, flinging down his racquet, making quick, skilful sketches.’

  The armistice was greeted with relief and an official stiff upper lip. In Hulme, Harry Watkin’s headmaster brought the news to his pupils: ‘Mr Holmes came into our classroom and told us that the war was over, but if we wished to applaud it must be done quietly. Then came his instructions. The few boys who were wearing stiff Eton collars should tap on them with their finger tips [instead of clapping]. He then solemnly made his announcement and we responded. We had the afternoon off.’

  And Hermione Llewellyn’s dashing father, who had gone off with his horse to Egypt at the start of the war, was coming home too: ‘When the telegram arrived we were with our mother picking lavender in the garden. Nannie brought it out from the house: she held the envelope out by one corner as if it was a firework which might explode. Our mother opened it carefully and slowly: we all watched and saw that her hands were shaking. She seemed to take ages to read such a little bit of paper. And then she stooped down and scooped all three of us into a bundle and cried: “Your father is coming back. He’s coming home soon. He’ll be here soon, soon, soon . . .” We ran all the way to the Hall to tell Gran and she and our mother hugged each other and cried.’

  4 Between the Wars

  ‘The war ended and me Dad come home,’ Sidney Day would write later.1 ‘After he got gassed in France he never could breathe through his nose properly again. Sometimes he was in so much pain with his nose he would come home from work at dinner time and put his head over a bowl of hot salt water and sniff it up. That was the only way he could shift it. Me mum’s brother, Rob, who lived right opposite us, was much worse off. He lived with his wife Ginny and their kids . . . he had half his jaw blown off in the war. For a pension he got the big amount of two and sixpence a week. The poor old bugger only had half a jaw and looked a sight, but he got used to it at the death. He still knew how to drink a pint of beer.’

  For the Day family of Archway, north London, life would go on – indeed, the six-year-old Sidney seems to have taken it in his stride. ‘Me dad was never sober when we was kids, but he was a proper father. He showed us where to go scrumping, where to go bird catching, where to go fishing. We collected walnuts in the season and pickled them. We made horseradish sauce by digging down deep for the root, grating it and mixing it with vinegar. We always had a pocket of beech nuts or cob nuts in the autumn. We made elderflower wine in spring,’ he wrote.2 Yet somehow the mud that squaddies like Sidney’s father had brought home from the trenches had besmirched this idealized Edwardian notion of childhood, and nothing could ever really be the same again.

  Among the adults of that generation – the parents of the children who would be born between the wars – there would always be an abiding sense of dread. This was the generation that had survived one war and lived with the fear that before long – perhaps just as its children grew old enough to be called up – there would be another.

  Some, once the war was over, threw themselves into the frantic partying which would come, in the eyes of posterity, to characterize the world of privilege in the 1920s – the world of the flapper and the age of jazz. One history of the period is entitled We Danced All Night;3 another, The Morbid Age.4 The two titles, taken together, seem to sum up the spirit of the times.

  Emma Smith, born in Newquay in 1923, would grow up in an atmosphere of troubled respectability:5 ‘My mother stretches her hand across the table towards my father. It’s her way of saying she’s sorry to him for something. I don’t know what. I sit in my high chair and watch. Her hand lies on the tablecloth, palm upwards, open. She wants him to take it, but he lets it lie there . . . Then at last he does put out his and allows her to take it, but I see the look in his eyes and because it’s a terrible look, I remember it. Later, much later, I learn the word that describes the look. It is hate.’

  Emma Smith – born Elspeth Hallsmith – was the daughter of a bank clerk who dreamed of being a famous painter. Her parents had married – unhappily – in 1919, soon after her father had been released from a German prisoner-of-war camp. And although the war was ancient history to children such as herself and her sister Pam, it seemed to hang around: of the groundsman at the local tennis club, she wrote: ‘Our father and Wilton are different in every particular except for being, both
of them, very silent men. Wilton doesn’t call all the members of the tennis club “Sir”: he chooses whom he will respect. There are those who say that the groundsman is bolshie. He looks at them with contempt, in the same way as our father regards his bank manager, Mr Oxley, with contempt. Our father and Wilton were both in the Great War. They have this in common. Is it the Great War that Wilton is thinking about as he silently, broodingly mows the grass of the tennis club courts? Is it because our father was awarded a medal, the DSO, that Pam and I are allowed the out-of-season privilege of playing on the creosote-smelling step of the tennis club pavilion?’6

  The 1920s were a period in which, it seems now, shadows hung heavy over family life. For Hermione Llewellyn, born into a wealthy mining and brewing family, there would be a dizzying downward spiral into excess, followed by debt, followed by disaster. Hermione’s dashing father, back from the war, was determined to live the life of the landed aristocracy. He had bought a country manor called Combend, several fast cars, plentiful quantities of livestock and numerous horses and dogs. No one had ever counted the cost, until one day it all came to a sudden, painful end. Hermione’s mother was forced to break the news one teatime.

  ‘We’d raced up the secret stairs to the story-time room and found her looking so pretty in a tea gown, with a leather-bound copy of Huckleberry Finn on her lap.7 She began to read but suddenly tears streamed down her cheeks and then, with difficulty, she said: “Combend has been sold – our house and land . . .” “Why, why, why?” we asked, but she wept so much she could not answer. Nor did she ever answer that question – to any of us.’ There followed a painful process of negotiation, in which the children were forced to give away most of their toys and pets before moving to a much smaller house: ‘On 17 March, when all was settled, we drove slowly, like a funeral cortege, along our drive; I felt sick and sad and also uncomfortable. I had hidden two of my mice and four Roman snails in small cardboard boxes in my knickers; for once it helped that I was rather plump.’