The second-in-command, a smallish wilted man, with a sparse sprinkling of golden hairs and a sunken chin, asked why we weren’t in the shelter – We said we preferred to sleep in our beds & then he went All Intimate and told us that he did too.
Then the Third Man spoke. He was youngish and timid and teetotal (The others had whiskey-and-soda but he had lemonade) and asked us if we knew what to do in the event of Gas being used? We said no, because he was obviously dying to tell us – whereat he inflated his chest, breathed out hissingly and began.
‘New-mown hay, Geranium, Garlic and Onions,’ he said, ‘If you smell those you’ll know it’s Gas.’ (I didn’t ask what would happen if it turned out to be just New-mown hay, Geranium, Garlic or Onions – It would have Hurt Him – although I should like to know – but I admit that it isn’t likely, darling, that one would smell Onions, just willy nilly in these days.)
My mother looked mildly surprised & said she supposed we’d know anyway when we heard the Rattles. ‘Oh! no,’ said PC 3 kindly if Disillusioningly – ‘not at all. You see, nobody knows the Gas is there until Someone happens to smell it and tell someone else. But you’ll be alright,’ he added consolingly ‘if you have your Gas mask on.’ My mother’s mouth opened – obviously with the intention of asking why she should have her gas mask on, when there hadn’t been a gas warning – but she Thought Better of It.
Then they went on to describe their experiences in the First Great fire at the Docks. ‘We kept having to lie flat on our stummicks in the Road,’ PC 1 said, ‘And not a soul to offer us a drink of something to Hot us Up.’ He rolled his Diminishing whiskey appreciatively round his palate.
At about five minutes to eleven he sighed and said: ‘Well, boys, these ladies ought to be tucked up in their beds. We’d better be going’ – and they shook hands Solemnly all round. Then he turned to my mother, ‘I don’t like to think of you ladies alone in this big house with only that sick old man in the shelter to look after you,’ he said. ‘You go along and have a Cosy Talk with the Chief Warden about Fire-Watchers, mum, but anyway, we’ll keep an eye on you, so you don’t fret – won’t we boys?’
‘Yes,’ said PCs 2 and 3 Obediently – and they crunched out into the night.
I needn’t tell you, need I, darling, how Very Beautiful it all was.
Friday 21 February Darling, I caught my train by the scruff of its neck and leapt into the arms of a brace of Good solid British Workmen just as the wheels were starting to creak into action.
When I got home, I found my mother Anxious (because I was late) but Civil – and there was a message from the Air Ministry asking me to be there at 10.15 instead of 10.30. I had a Theory, darling, that this was because the Gas Attack was Due to begin at 10.30 and Mr Proper thought we’d probably be Matier out of our Respirators than in them – but actually it wasn’t as Elementary as that, my dear Watson – It was because he had a Committee meeting at 10.30.
I sat for some moments with his typist in an Outer Office, and she (a Motherly, Woolly Soul in a Shawl, darling) said I needn’t be nervous – as, after all, the Worst was Over.
Mr Proper (concave middle and bushy moustache) didn’t keep me very long. He asked a few apparently driftless questions – but no doubt they had some Hidden Significance which I was too Mollock-dazed to see, darling – and then another man (also bushy-moustached and hollow-middled, I have a theory that The Head of the Civil Service Sends for a Vogue Pattern every five years or so and Cuts Out hundreds and hundreds of Higher Grade Civil Servants all exactly alike. These were about 1890 Vintage) asked me about Memoranda – and said he thought that abstracting a memorandum from a confused mass of documents would be rather like Research. Then Mr Proper said: ‘Well, I suppose the Board said something non-committal like “you’ll hear from us in due course” – so I’ll say the same,’ and he gave me a pleasant smile, darling, and came to the door with me. That was really all, and I’ve no idea whether he liked me or not – so we’ll just have to Wait and See.
Miss Page has been Giving a Lecture on the Mating of Animals, darling, all through this letter – It’s simply been shattering my Concentration – I only heard odd snatches – ‘Horses have to have a Gate between them so that the mare doesn’t get damaged by his Hoofs …’ ‘Then the jenny-robin hops on to a branch and he hops up beside her and he sidles after her – and then hops on to her back and nine times out of ten he falls off and has to start all over again …’ ‘I get so dreadfully embarrassed when I find myself in the monkey-house, with someone I don’t know very well … It isn’t only the baboons – It’s some of the other monkeys – and their fronts …’ Here I looked up, darling, and remarked mildly that the trouble with her was that she was Inhibited – She started to get Irritated – and then Thought Better of it – and Miss Carlyon gave a wicked little smile and said when I got to her age, I’d learn the difference between Inhibitions and Maidenly Modesty. Then Miss Page went on to talk of Ducks who Mate in the Eternal Triangle – two Drakes and a Girl – and the Men fight it Out. Darling, no-one can say that I don’t learn things in Welfare – Eastern Command & London District. Later she went on to Lovers I have Known – in the Animal World – Some of her stories were rather Beautiful – I’ll keep the best ones till we meet.
Thursday 27 February Oh! my dear love, on Monday week, I shall be a rill Civil Servant. A man called D. A. Parry with a small cramped signature, has been Directed to Offer me an Appointment as a Temporary Administrative Assistant in the Air Ministry, subject to evidence of my medical fitness.
The appointment will be of a Temporary Character (and shan’t I hare back to Cambridge and my dear love after the war?) The salary will be at the rate of £260 per annum. (Infinite Riches for a little girl.)
No additional salary will be paid in the event of my being required to go into the air in connection with my duties (at least, darling, I Know Where I stand – (or fly)).
Can you love a Temporary Administrative Assistant, my darling? Because, if not, I shall tell them that I’m afraid they’ll have to find Another – because God Forbid that you should.
Friday 28 February Lady Nathan turned rather Nasty on me this morning. I was discussing the Future with Miss Carlyon & Miss Page – and I asked them if they’d like to take over my lists after I’d gone – as they knew a good deal about them – (more than anyone else in Welfare at any rate) They both liked the idea as they feel they haven’t nearly enough to do, as things are, and so I went into Lady Nathan and suggested that she should ask them about it. She looked annoyed and told me not to concern myself with what was going to happen after I’d gone – and said that a lot of trouble had been caused in Welfare by people delegating their work unofficially to other people. I said I was very sorry and that I wouldn’t say any more about it – and left it at that – but I think she was being a bit Uncivil, darling – not to say Querulous.
Saturday 1 March [Petworth Cottage, Old Bosham] Joan & I have talked & talked and talked – she’s older, darling, and she’s wrapped herself round protectively with cellophane, so as not to allow her melancholy to sit on brood while Ian’s away. She’s happy in a way, and intensely social on a very High Plane with a lot of Canadian Officers – but she can still be willy nilly – and she still gambols absurdly in the sunlight.
These are the guests:
a.) Benjie I – A major with No Chin. He was a Contemporary of Pa’s at Cambridge – and he used to dine at the Savoy every night & return to Cambridge next morning. He told my father he didn’t do any work at Cambridge – ‘He was too busy.’ He is Fat and rather mimsy – and he tends to waggle a finger at the gairls with a touch of rogueishness. Apart from this he can hardly be said to be there at all. (He got a double first, but it made No Difference.)
b.) Mrs Benjie I (and child). A dull, Vacuous woman – with wide-set empty blue eyes – (daughter aged 9 to match). Joan has a Theory that Mr Gestetner’s a bit of a Solace to Mrs B. I – and I shouldn’t won
der, considering what it must be like to be married to B.
c.) Benjie II. Dr Weizman’s son – (Not the Wild Oat Expert – the other one). He has rather a Rugged look – He is not as Elaborately Unconscious of my Existence as his father – which is something of a comfort.
d.) Mrs Benjie II. A very charming girl, darling – She’s just qualified as a Doctor – and she has a brilliant smile (not as brilliant as yours, my love, but ‘twill serve for the nonce) and lovely teeth.
Then there are the Alexanders, of which you know something – and Joan – and our host – who Has his Moments. He was talking of the quality of Lady Nathan’s Intellect yesterday. I said I thought she was a clever woman in Her Way. He looked thoughtful and said that he had a great respect for the Elephant but he wouldn’t keep one as a pet – and this was what he’d said To Lord N when he was engaged and asked Mr Gestetner’s opinion of Nelly – (and Eleanor, Baroness Nathan, was no Larger than Joyce in those days, darling).
The truth is that I ought to be in Solace because the air is clear and crisp and this is an enchanting place – and Joan is here – but I’m not – I’d rather be battling against a snow-storm in Reading with you – or waiting for hours in the rain outside the station because, at least then, I’d know I was going to see you soon.
I went to my parents’ room this morning – bade them a Civil good-morning, and was greeted by a Prim harangue from my mother on the Impropriety of my Conversation at dinner. (All because Mr Gestetner asked me what sort of cases we got in Welfare, darling, and I told him!) She then went on, backed up by Pa’s silent approval, to the Perennial Subject of my pursuit of you – It is Blatant, she says – So obvious is your lack of interest in me, that you prefer to read the paper than to talk to me – If I had any dignity or pride, I’d let you alone. Oh! God, darling – I can’t stand any more of it. Why the hell can’t they let me alone. The trouble is that the whole thing is so Well-Intentioned – you know – we-tell-you-these-things-for-your-own-good-my-dear.
Darling, Mr Gestetner has a listening-in apparatus, and he threatened to use it on Joan & me last night. He bought it to fix on his eldest son’s cot – so that he and Mrs G. could hear what he Burbled About in his resting hours – but they have used it for less Ingenuous purposes since. They had two guests once, whom they Suspected of Living in Sin, and they thought it would be amusing to Learn All & confront them with it in the morning – so they hid the microphone in her bedroom – and Listened-In. Having Learnt All, they repeated what they’d heard to the people next morning. Everybody was quite unabashed – but I think it’s rather a Heartless pastime, don’t you, darling? Mr Gestetner is a queer man – an odd mixture of subtlety and incisiveness of mind – and an extraordinary blunt crudity – but I like him, darling, and I think you would, too.
I’ve just read through this letter – (It’s a newly acquired habit of mine, darling – I think I’ll lose it – because it’s so discouraging). It seems to me to have all the amorphousness of a ground-rice pudding – without any of its smoothness. A letter should be like a Lobster-salad, darling – crisp – well-seasoned and resilient – with a touch of the Unexpected here and there.
Wednesday 5 March There’s been an interruption in the form of Miss Carlyon muttering a line from Coriolanus. I looked up & remarked that I had not written Coriolanus, at which she Tore her Hair in a Worried Way, and said: ‘Well, who did?’ I said perhaps Bacon did – or Mrs Bacon (well – I mean) and then, darling, she made a Revolutionary Pronouncement – she said that for all she knew, Shakespeare might have written it! Well, darling, if she’d said Bombay Duck was a kind of Mallard found on the Ganges, it wouldn’t have taken a heavier sandbag to knock me down.
Darling, you don’t have to apologize to me for reading the papers when you’re with me. My mother is talking nonsense – because she wouldn’t be pleased at all if you were to show your affection for me by Mollocking in her presence. However, let’s forget the whole thing and have our Solace in our own way – please.
I’m sorry I’m so often silent, darling – Sometimes it’s because I’m completely at rest in your arms, and there’s no need for idle chatter – and sometimes it’s because a Roman thought hath struck me – but it’s always because I love you – so please bear with it – after all, I’m often garrulous (particularly in letters) and you’re often very silent – which evens thing out somewhat, doesn’t it?
Thursday 6 March Joan rang me up a few minutes ago to tell me that she was leaving St Michael’s in April, and was putting herself on the Central Register hopefully. She’d just had a letter from Sheila, announcing that Hamish had come back to England via Iceland and was now Commissioned and flying all over the place. Terrific Solace All Round.
Pa left today for Liverpool and Douglas. Oh! I wish you could be in London with me on Sunday – my mother is going to Oxford – and I shall be alone and Solaceless.
We’re going to spend the day at King’s Langley on Saturday with Ismay & her parents but if you were here for the weekend, you could come too – and make my duty-visit a pleasure.
1 He married Cynthia Elliot in 1944.
2 On 23 December, Churchill had addressed the people of Italy, stressing the old friendships between the countries and telling them that Mussolini’s war was against everything the Italian Crown, the Vatican and the Italian people wanted.
3 Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
4 It is an irony that the ablest Secretary of State for War Britain had had since Haldane should be best remembered for the Belisha Beacons, the amber globe added in 1934 to pedestrian crossings when he was Minister for Transport.
5 In Wiltshire.
6 Macbeth, Act V, scene iii.
7 High Explosive.
March–September 1941
After the cosy world of Buckingham Gate, and Lord Nathan’s Anxious Soldiers Department, the Air Ministry building on the Strand came as something of a shock. It would only be a matter of time before Eileen’s new colleagues took their places alongside Miss Carlyon and Miss Sloane in her letters, but with the best will in the world she was simply not built to be an obscure cog in a ministerial machine the size of a largish town, a civil service drone somewhere at the bottom of an administrative hierarchy that stretched above her in a bewildering range of grades and initials from her own lowly position as TAA in S2b to the ultimate heights of the PUS to the S of S for Air.
While Eileen knuckled bravely down to her new work, in the world beyond Ariel House and S2b the war in North Africa was taking a turn for the worse. The early successes against the Italians had come back to bite Wavell, and the arrival of Rommel in North Africa was a prelude to a series of military disasters, first in the Libyan desert and then in Greece and Crete, where a wretchedly conceived campaign ended with a humiliating evacuation, serious naval losses and more than five and a half thousand British and Empire dead or wounded.
There was the odd success to lay against these reverses – the Bismarck was sunk in May – but the most comforting news was not from the battlefield but from America. At the end of 1940 President Roosevelt had proposed a system of ‘Lend-Lease’ that would enable Britain to buy American goods without payment, and in March 1941 this became US law, guaranteeing Britain could at least afford to fight the war.
If the deal was not as generous as it might first seem – in effect Britain was paying for survival with her future – it showed the same grim resolution that was at last evident on the home front. At the beginning of the year, Herbert Morrison had introduced a compulsory adult register for fire-watchers, and from 1941 ‘compulsion’ would become the watchword of the war, with food rations tightened and rationing extended to clothing, essential industries prioritised, income tax raised, prices controlled, ‘reserved occupations’ pared back, land put to plough, conscription for women introduced and the movement of labour – on the back of Ernest Bevin’s Essential Work Order passed in March – controlled and directed to where it was most
urgently needed.
It was the personal rather than the public that Eileen preferred to share with Gershon and in the summer that Germany invaded Russia and changed the course of the war it is their old Cambridge world that fills her letters. In April, Joan Aubertin, the most vividly attractive of all Eileen’s friends, came to live with her in Harley Road, and over the next months, as the two of them were joined in London by most of their old college friends and enemies – her old tutor Muriel Bradbrook at the Board of Trade, Mrs Crews at Postal Censorship, Elizabeth Clark with the Friends’ Ambulance, Rosemary Allot at the BBC, Joan Friedman doing something noisily ‘hush-hush’ at Bletchley – Eileen’s war began to look as much like an extended Girton reunion as anything else.
Gershon, too, was now at West Drayton, and though that made it easier for them to meet, the small, almost imperceptible cloud that had hung over their relationship since at least Blackpool, was taking on a more definite shape.
6
A Rill Civil Servant
Monday 10 March 1941 I arrived at Ariel House to find the entire staff in its Gas Masks. It’s not so much having to put them on that we mind, a Home Guard spokesman said to me, (taking his off to make himself heard) it’s putting them back in their satchels that is such a nuisance. I went (Escorted by the Home Guard) into Room 101 – The Establishment Secretary tried conversation à travers le respirateur and found it Wanting. He Took it Off – bade me a Civil Good-morning and gave me several hundred forms to fill in and sign – (Including the Official Secrets Act, which I read through carefully – He said that only one person in a thousand ever read it. I thought to myself, darling, that only one person in a thousand has such Urgent need to read it – but I forbore to say so). Then he gave me a Yellow Pass – and the Home Guard took me into a Large Bare Room where hundreds of Pilot Officers (mostly Old and Fat, darling) were sitting in a Row with numbers pinned on to them. A cosmetic-smeared Wild Oat of a Girl pinned a number on to me and I sat down next to the last Pilot Officer – then a photographer came in with a huge lamp & a very small camera and Moved down the line, snapping us all with the Wonderful impartiality of Complete Indifference – Then the Wild Oat took the number off me – and the Home Guard took me up six flights of stairs to see Mr Proper. Mr Proper handed me over to Another (same Vogue Pattern) and that was how I became a Temporary Administrative Assistant in the Meteorological and Educational department of the Air Ministry, darling. (This department sees (a) that the Barrage Balloons go up when the weather is nice for Mollocking, and (b) that your Technical Instructors get Paid According to their deserts – What could be more fitting, darling? I wonder who told them All about me and Barrage Balloons.)
Love in the Blitz Page 20