by Ursula Bloom
Youth at the Gate
A young woman’s memoir of life during the First World War
Ursula Bloom
Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2016
This edition first published 2016 by Corazon Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1959
Publisher’s note: As this book was written, and takes place, many decades ago, occasionally terms of the times are used that would not be used today.
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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
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Foreword
I wish to thank for the courteous help given to me so willingly by Mr. Charles Eade; Mr. W. Law of the East Essex Gazette; The Imperial War Museum; Mr. McLarney of the Frinton-on-Sea Urban District Council; Mr. Cadness Page, Librarian at Harrods; Mr. P. E. Westley, who was a special constable in Walton-on-the-Naze all through those four years.
I should also like to mention the debt I owe to the late Mr. MacDonagh for his book, Living in London during the Great War.
Ursula Bloom
Author’s Note
At the time of the Second World War people said to me, ‘This will be the most ghastly thing that has ever happened.’ I felt that I remembered an even worse time when we were so entirely unprepared for it, and so appalled by what came and by our incapacity to find swift victory. It was youth which fought that war, believing that in so doing it would finally crush any chance of future hostilities.
The memory of those four years has quietly slipped away, and much is forgotten. Today 1914-18 has become something of a period piece. Little more. That is perhaps why I wished to write autobiographically about it. I was one of the young people brought up in a sheltered life, suddenly jockeyed into chaos, and this is just the story of personal experiences during that time.
Ursula Bloom
Chapter 1
But Death replied, ‘I choose him.’ So he went.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
It is difficult today to picture the 1910-14 period, for then it was a bigoted world, the era of the autocratic individual, when today it has become the age of the masses. Society was carefully sectioned, all part of the imperial honeycomb. We were sons and daughters of an empire which we believed to be impregnable, and perhaps it was going to be the greatest shock of all to discover that ‒ like other empires ‒ it could fall.
We were jauntily young, enjoying perhaps one of the most exciting periods of our history. Jazz had arrived. The ‘Bunny Hug’ was here. Mother thought it rather rude, my father thought it rather funny. We were all aware that the sublime era of the waltz was fading. Those wonder shows, The Merry Widow, The Count of Luxemburg, The Waltz Dream, and The Dollar Princess, were getting a trifle timeworn, and the two-step was wearing thin. ‘Alexander’s Rag-time Band’ was the thrill of the hour and what a stimulation! If silly old Lord Roberts was going about the country launching the idea that Germany was laying in stock to go to war with us, we thought it was just because he was getting senile and amiably forgave the old fool!
None of us dreamt that the peacefulness of spring-sowing and autumn-reaping would fade for ever in the August of 1914, and from the ashes of our love for country there would rise no phoenix. We fondly believed peace at home to be our abiding happiness. Wars to date had in the memory of man been so conveniently far away that they had not distressed many of us overmuch. If Grandmamma complained that since the Boer War eggs had never come down properly in price (they should be twenty for a shilling, as any fool knew!), and it was preposterous to ask more than eightpence a pound for the best butter, that was just Grandmamma, and who cared?
It was still the era of the horse bus, and lean tired horses with all their ribs showing plodded the streets of London. The early motor-cars, still unreliable and dangerous (of course), had been replaced by better cars. The aeroplane had come, quite crazy, our parents insisted, and I had met Grahame-White and Gustav Hamel, who had offered to take me up in his plane. ‘Only over my dead body,’ said my mother, I think with wisdom.
We had had an inspiring coronation, and the Prince of Wales had been formally installed at Caernarvon Castle; now we all believed that he would settle down and marry the Kaiser’s only daughter, so ensuring our future peace. Not that peace mattered so much, for, when we came to think about it, nobody could beat Britain.
In 1910 I had left the comfortable pastoral rectory near Stratford-on-Avon where I had been brought up, for my parents’ marriage had broken. I had lived a sheltered life, properly chaperoned, was too young to be ‘out’, a highly important moment in every girl’s life, and had been educated privately at home. In fact I had not been educated at all. Any money there was, and there was very little, for my father’s stipend was £300 a year, had to be expended on the son, not the daughter. All the right kind of daughters married young, and this had been instilled in me as a duty. I wished to comply. Nothing would have enchanted me more than a pretty wedding, and a romantic young husband, preferably a duke. I wished to do the very best for my family, which I loved dearly, with the faithful rather pathetic loyalty of any nice young girl of that period.
My mother, myself, and my brother moved to St. Albans. We received a meagre allowance from my father of £120 a year, and although that was a period when living was cheap, and being parson’s folk we were unaccustomed to luxury, the allowance was insufficient for our needs.
My mother had to undergo an operation for a malignant growth which we prayed would never return. We did not talk about it, because somehow we felt that silence would strengthen our defences. It was quite wrong to leave your husband in those days, so we were under a social stigma, for my father being a parson could do no wrong. Social laws were cast-iron. It was the era of church on Sundays, of lower and upper middle class, county and aristocracy, all in their correct niches. No tradesman could even by mistake come to the front door, but must go round to the back. He could never open a conversation (as myself today with royalty), and had he taken off his hat instead of pulling his forelock to my mother he would have been asked to send in his books and the profitable association between the families would have ceased.
In St. Albans need drove
us hard. My frantic efforts to write for magazines had met with no editorial encouragement, and I began to lose heart in that direction. I had contrived to get my brother into a bank by appealing to an influential friend who had done his best. After three months’ probation my brother came home one evening looking dim, and with a present for Mother with which to bias her in his favour when he admitted that he had got the sack. He then went off on his own and apprenticed himself to an engineering firm (a tremendous loss of caste to professional people, and, what was considerably worse, he was to receive no salary for the first three years).
We had economized in every possible way, and there had now arrived the hour when automatically one said ‘No, thank you’ to second helpings (always offered, for that was the correct social rule), and carelessly overlooked putting butter on the bread.
To the outward world we pretended that we had means, for that was ‘the thing’. Only the vulgar were hard, up, though even they seldom admitted to it. Gradually the strain on our petty resources was too much and as something had to be done, I was the one who did it.
I had already committed a sin, for I had become engaged to a good-looking sympathetically minded young man of twenty-three entirely against my mother’s wishes. It had happened when both of us had gone to stay with my great-uncle at Heath Farm, after Mother had had her first big operation and I had been shattered by the dreadful truth of it. I was painfully aware that we lived under a cloud, for she had left my father, and I had few young friends, consorting only with old people. On this visit my cousin Harry insisted on taking me to a dance at St. Albans Town Hall. Mother said I was far too young to go, but my cousin persuaded her, and off we went together in a hired cab.
At the dance I had met Montie, who was good-looking, danced well, and flirted, something quite new to me and most inspiring, I thought. Naturally I had been lonely. I was sick for youth and privately believed that one had to marry any man who kissed one. Fascinated by his chat and his love-making, and by having someone in whom I could confide, I got engaged. By the time Mother came to I believed my future lay in Montie’s hands.
He was quite a nice young man and worked in an architect’s office in St. Peter’s Street. His salary was a hundred and twenty a year, and as three of us at home were living on that, I thought I should find it quite simple to manage on it with only two.
Montie was connected with a cinema being built at the time to his design in Harpenden, and owned by a certain Mr. Clements. The cinema required a pianist at thirty shillings a week, and threepence off for the insurance stamp. I applied for the post, and with some regrets on the part of Mr. Clements, who however did not wish to fall out with the architect, I was accepted.
When I brought the news home to Mother I admit that it was with some trepidation, and I bought her a bottle of port ‒ the ruby-red type at two and sixpence ‒ with which to soften the blow.
I offered the port, then broke the news, and my mother was far more upset than I had anticipated, saying that it could only have been Montie who had thought of this, for I would never have done it. She was wrong there. I pointed out that when one’s entire income is just over two pounds a week, and someone else can earn an additional thirty shillings, it is something. She wept.
‘To think that we have come to this!’ she wailed.
Of course she was right, and it hurt her, which was a tragedy. I was the young girl of the new age only wishing to defend my family and support them to the best of my untrained ability. I privately was delighted.
The hours were fatiguing. In pre-war days nobody had any compunction in overworking an employee. The continuous programme began at half past five, ending at ten-thirty. On matinee days it started at two-thirty. My hands felt like flat-irons at times, and the only possible refreshment had to be snatched from the piano top whilst still playing with the other hand.
I worked in that sour-smelling but lovable little cinema where the cottage piano was concealed from the stalls by ill-fitting plush curtains and stood so close to the screen that frequently I went dizzy from the proximity of the exaggerated picture. There was no possibility of escape, for only the National Anthem at half past ten could set me free.
Then when the chocolate tray had been checked (the booking-office takings had been sorted out earlier), Montie and I walked to Harpenden station where we had to wait an hour to catch the midnight train back to St. Albans. At eleven the bright lights were lowered, and in winter it was icily cold, for although lighting and firing were incredibly cheap, those were the days of rigorous thrift.
I developed acute anaemia. I lost the rosy peach colouring which had been mine, and turned pale. I also lost two stone in weight, though I had been plump as a partridge, but it was some consolation that I had the Directoire figure ‒ much in fashion ‒ and that a corselette skirt was no longer a trial to the midriff. Mother never saw it this way. Mothers don’t.
Occasionally my father visited us, always with distress to me for I loved him and fretted when after he had gone. Mother wept her heart out and had to be consoled. To be torn between love for both parents and a deep desire to do one’s best for either of them was agony. To help a delicate brother and to remain faithful to an engagement about which there was constant bickering were in themselves defeating. There were moments when I actually walked out of the house vowing that I would never return, but of course I did. It would have worried Mother too much if I hadn’t, and in those days no girl purposefully worried her mother.
On occasional Sundays Montie and I went up to London in the afternoon to choose films for future programmes. Sixty Years a Queen, Les Miserables, Quo Vadis?, and anything with Ford Sterling in it. We would have tea at the Coventry Street Lyons’, which opened at four o’clock, and we lined up for this, returning home at nine at night. Mother thought it quite wrong, yet wanted me to enjoy myself, and so was torn two ways.
The bands at Lyons’ were thrilling. The metropolis was gay, the lights bright. If the hansom cab was dying out, the taxi was rapidly coming in, and one could kiss in a taxicab where the hansom had offered its own problems. There was a jovial thrill about Sunday night in London, the Cockneys being hilarious, the flower girls doing a brisk business, for it was still the right thing to buy your girl a corsage to wear. It was the provocative era of Gertie Millar, Lily Elsie, and the Dare Sisters. There was a vulgar little man called George Robey creeping to the fore, and considered by the young to be jolly amusing, though the old thought him quite shocking! All the girls were privately in love with Bertram Wallis, who had ousted poor Lewis Waller, who in his turn had succeeded Hayden Coffin.
Those were lovely years, and if my home life had been happier I should have adored them, but we were under our cloud, and even a small cloud was a disgrace in that era. Our big house had gone. It was a social crime not to have two servants (£8 a year), but we could not afford even a ‘general’, which in itself was a sign of defeat but not so awful as having a ‘woman in’. People cut me because my mother had left my father and I felt dismally alone, yet there was of course nothing that I could do about it.
That was where I was when the war broke out.
The first sign of the coming war was recorded in the Daily Mail of June the 29th, 1914, when it gave details of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife at Serajevo in the Balkans.
We had always been interested in the Archduke for it had been a debatable problem as to what he would do when the hour of his succession to the throne of Austria should arrive. The old Emperor could not be expected to last long. Franz Ferdinand had so far loyally abided by his marriage but he could hardly hope to put a morganatic wife on the throne, or make his son the heir. All this would be exciting, we thought, quite unaware that it would be long before Franz Ferdinand’s accession that the excitement would begin.
The shot was fired on Sunday the 28th of June. To celebrate the anniversary of his marriage the Archduke and his wife drove from a nearby watering-place where they were staying a
nd made a formal entry into Serajevo.
Although a bomb was thrown as they went, it was after the mayor’s reception and on the return journey that the tragedy occurred. The driver of the royal car made a mistake, either inadvertently or on purpose, and took a turning which by misfortune led him into a blind alleyway. There Princip the assassin was waiting. He fired his revolver at short range at the Archduke, hit him, and turning sharply aimed again at the Military Governor, but missed. The actual shot had however been received by the noble Archduchess who, realizing what was happening, had flung herself in front of her husband to protect him with her own body.
The wretched pair were rushed to the Konak for medical aid, but when they arrived there the Archduchess was already dead and the Archduke died but a few moments later.
We received the news fairly calmly. Fathers said, ‘Dear me, dear me!’ over the English breakfast table, and mothers pouring out tea at the other end said, ‘Isn’t it awful?’ but that was about all the thought we gave it. European royal families were always filling the headlines this way. It had been only by extreme good fortune that the King and Queen of Spain had survived the bomb thrown at the coach on their wedding day in 1909; the King and the Crown Prince of Portugal had been assassinated when they sat in the same carriage driving through the streets of Lisbon; and the unhappy Empress of Austria had been shot when out walking. The idea that the reaction to this murder would lead Europe into anything more than a passing shock was overcome by the comforting, reassuring, ‘Thank God that sort of thing couldn’t happen here.’
There was a miserable funeral conducted during a terrible thunderstorm, a grim prediction of worse to follow, though nobody thought of it as that. We had always been so comfortably sure of our smug little island (naturally we did not think of it as that, for it would have been lèse-majesté or treachery), and nobody could lay a finger on us.
We read about it for we enjoyed sensationalism and the papers sold on it. It was very shocking, of course, but nothing to do with us, and at this moment England was in the holiday mood.