Youth at the Gate: A young woman’s memoir of life during the First World War

by Ursula Bloom

  Where should we all go this year? Worthing was select, Margate was vulgar. The elite went to Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, but that was expensive. My family usually went to Great Yarmouth in spite of the commonness this entailed, but Norfolk was our home land, and other members of the family met there. It was also cheap, which was very important to us. There was a boarding establishment where men could stay for twelve-and-six a week (no lunch). Somebody had picked up fleas there (it was the cubicle system), but what were a few fleas when one saved so much money? Mother was the one who made the fuss, and as she didn’t get the fleas, my brother and myself were amazed that she should be so upset.

  We’d go to Yarmouth again.

  On the twenty-third of July the Daily Mail published a headline which shocked some of the older people considerably, for Austria had presented an ultimatum to Servia. I read the Servian reply handed to the Austro-Hungarian Minister in Belgrade, treating it as good casual reading, and not bothering too much: ‘We have accepted part of your demand. For the rest we rely on your loyalty and chivalry. We have always been satisfied with you.’

  I thought it sounded dignified, not realizing that loyalty and chivalry were out of date, for the first threadiness had crept into the old school tie, though we did not know it.

  There was a certain pleasurable excitement about the apprehension of our elders, who took it seriously. If something happened, then it happened, and it would be fun to get us all out of our rut. Perhaps the young always think that way.

  It was reported that the Czar had sent word to the Kaiser as a friend begging him to ‘stop the Allies from going too far’. The Kaiser insisted that he was being driven into a war which he had no wish to fight, and although Wilhelm II never alluded in so many words to his patience being exhausted, that was what it was.

  On Sunday the 26th of July I was beginning to think about details of the holiday. It was the usual English Sunday, I had been to church at St. Paul’s in Fleetville, and now was starting to fill a trunk which would go off as luggage in advance. Mother was not too strong when it came to this sort of thing.

  That very day the Fleet was assembled at Portland after the review at Spithead, and the man who eleven years later was destined to become my second husband, was a snottie serving in the Hindustan there. Young Gower Robinson wrote in his diary:

  Portland. July 26th, 1914

  Lie-in till 7. Divisions 9.30. Very busy so I couldn’t go to church. We were going up North at 9.30 a.m. tomorrow, but owing to the Austro-Servian show we are staying at Portland till further orders.

  All that week I was playing ‘Oh, you Beautiful Doll’ and ‘The Wedding Glide’ at the cinema, with very little idea of what might be going on and anyway thinking that a change could only be to the good. In the Gunroom of the Hindustan the snotties were throbbing with excitement because something was up. Whatever it was they wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Was it war? Would they go into action? and if so, what fun!

  Portland ‒ Sea. July 29th, 1914

  Got under way at 7 a.m. It was a very misty morning and we started off heading S.W. However when we got a bit out to sea, we turned right round and headed up the Channel. Nobody, not even the Captain, knows where we are going. All the forenoon and afternoon we have been preparing for action. Ammunition has been stacked up all round the guns, extra stanchions fitted up in places under the turrets, mess tables taken down to the bag flats. We have had orders to fuse all lyddite, but not to throw overboard any unnecessary stores. Found time in the dog watches to have a game of deck hockey. It is now midnight, and I have just spent three and a half hours in the main top at night defence. We made a dash through the Straits of Dover at full speed, with no lights burning. We had orders not to fire at any German ship unless fired on first.

  The morning papers gave the news of the Fleet leaving Portland for a secret destination, and now the older folks were appalled. I and my brother thought it interesting.

  ‘It’s that awful Mr. Winston Churchill,’ said Mother. ‘Somebody ought to stop that silly young man, he does ridiculous things, and now anything may happen.’

  The Kaiser had signed a decree to mobilize the German Army; our elders were apprehensive, but we found something which we thought much worse. Wilhelm had actually signed his decree on a table which was made from the wood of the Victory, Nelson’s flagship! What an insult!

  August dawned. In the Daily Mail good hotels at Brighton were advertising vacancies at thirty-one and six a week, or for the week-end twelve and six. The leading article mentioned: ‘Yesterday for the first time in its history the London Stock Exchange did not open.’

  By the next morning German troops were in Luxemburg. I remember that I was far more interested in the enormous front page advertisement taking the whole page which urged me, ‘Throw your powder-puff away, and use Papier Poudré, a triumph of toilet science.’ No nice girl used make-up, though all girls wanted to do so. The advantage of Papier Poudré was that being in book form, with cunning little leaves of peach colour, your father was not suspicious, and your mother never gave it another look. To discreet maidenhood this was the last word!

  It now seemed as if something was about to happen, which my brother and I thought was a good thing. It would be too bad if in the end the thrill of going to war was denied us.

  The August Bank Holiday was approaching. Extra music had to be hired from the music shop on Hollywell Hill where every week I went and chose my pieces. We would on the Monday itself open at eleven in the morning, with the programme continuing until ten-thirty at night. On such days my mother came over and took an occasional picture for me to give me a rest, but it was hard work.

  Mr. Clements the owner got fidgety and would come and talk through the fusty curtains while I was playing, which made things difficult. Some nasty old man had asked for ‘1812’. (I had to play any piece on request but one had hardly expected ‘1812’ in the entire!) The usherettes, two of them, were worried over their holidays; could they get a long week-end, or not? That depended on Mr. Clements, for holidays were not smiled upon. When Mother came I went and sat with them just inside the door, and we discussed the holiday question, whilst Who Will Marry Mary? was being serialized on the screen. Mother had been instructed to start off with ‘When we are Married’, and instead, she had begun with the gavotte from Mignon, which Mr. Clements hated, and it gave me the jitters.

  The audience were not helpful; it was the duty of the pianist to keep the audience under control, stop too much whistling by changing the tune, correct laughter in the wrong place, and level them up when one could. That night the moment that I played any patriotic tune they joined in with fervour, applauding overmuch, and whistling frantically. On the lamp-blacked slides latest news was scratched with one of my hairpins, and it was increasingly exciting. The night before a snottie whose name I did not know, and who did not interest me in the least, wrote this:

  August the Third. Scapa Flow.

  Turned up for physics at 6.30, but the P.T.I. didn’t appear, so we all trooped down again. Nothing doing all day, so we found time in the dog watches for a game of deck hockey. Apparently Germany has declared war on France and Russia, so I should think it can’t be very long before we declare war on Germany. However, we are all looking forward to a war, to give us the chance of wiping Germany off the map.

  That was youth’s angle. What fun this is going to be! My word, if I catch you bending!

  Chapter 2

  On Tuesday, August the fourth, when we were already halfway through the evening programme at the White Palace, Mr. Clements returned and started to talk again. He said that he wanted the national anthems of all countries who would be our allies to be played in a kind of pot-pourri at the end of the evening, ours as the final one.

  I did not think it was a good idea. Already innumerable countries were involved, some with very long national anthems, and it would take a time to compose and to play, when all the audience asked was to be allowed to go home.


  He looked at me with gaunt dark eyes on either side of a big nose which was like an eagle’s beak. He was horribly worried, we knew that because his finger-nails were bitten to the quick (one of his nastier habits) and last week one of the girls had noticed that they were actually bleeding.

  Mr. Clements was on the Stock Exchange (the cinema being merely a hobby), and with war coming he saw disaster ahead. It is pathetic that at the time I did not realize that his wife had a daughter by a previous marriage to a German, a girl born deaf and dumb, and both of them were in agony lest Olga would be taken from them and put into a detention camp. I had never heard of such a place.

  Earlier this evening Brooker the commissionaire had gone. A policeman had come for him, which alone caused some perturbation, but he was an old soldier on the Reserve.

  We wished him well, and those who could gave him something ‘for luck’, there seemed little time for goodbyes. This had brought the war considerably closer. Brooker, a very ordinary little man, who had never even been particularly brave with the drunks, suddenly glittered into something of a hero.

  ‘God only knows what’ll happen,’ said Mr. Clements in anxiety. ‘It’ll be the end of the world as we know it. One thing is certain, England’ll never be quite the same again.’

  I was contemptuous. I thought he was cowardly, something to be despised in this moment of thrill. If we went to war (and oh, how I hoped we should!), England would rise with a glory never before achieved.

  ‘Maybe it’ll be nicer than you think?’ I suggested as I wrestled with ‘Poet and Peasant’ on the cottage piano.

  ‘You’re just a silly little girl! You don’t know a thing about it, and you’d better hold your tongue,’ he snapped, then swept out through the curtains, which at the start had been second-hand, leaving me with a haze of their dust and facing the nastier bits of ‘Poet and Peasant’.

  The ‘Pathé Gazette’ flickered across the screen with pictures of the Reserves being called up, to be greeted with violent applause from the twopennies. A destroyer put out from Harwich harbour. A slide told the audience that so far ‒ my tin clock told me it was nine o’clock, just before the ‘big picture’ ‒ Germany had not replied to our ultimatum, and the twopennies booed.

  The cinema darkened again, just above me lights played on to the screen, and the tin clock (one-and-sixpence) on the piano top began to tick away the last vital minutes of the old regime. At the dramatic moments of one’s life one does not recognize the tensity of emotional crisis. Sitting there playing for Mary Pickford was just another night in my life. No more.

  When the end came I played the national anthems, but the audience did not stay, for they were eager to rush out and hear if we were really at war or not. Not yet. I closed the piano lid, and pushed the borrowed music into a box, for at all costs we had to keep that clean or the shop on Hollywell Hill wouldn’t take it back next Monday. I went through the deserted foyer, up shoddy stairs to where Teddy was waiting with his chocolate tray to get it checked. As nobody else came to do it, he and I achieved this together.

  The two girl attendants pulled on coats which hung on a wall hook, the only attempt at a ladies’ room that we had. There was no lavatory of any kind and in emergencies one had to go up to the station which was a considerable way off. Any natural need of this kind was vulgar and could not be mentioned. Mother always said it was better than in the eighties when one was prepared to die rather than admit that nature could no longer contain itself, and some people had died, she vowed.

  I went downstairs again into the foyer which advertised next week’s programme in big colourful posters to catch the eye. We should be running Les Miserables, a picture I had selected. Montie was waiting, in the green suit of the era, and with a stick.

  ‘Have we gone to war?’ I asked.

  He didn’t know.

  It was a bright night as we locked the cinema doors, and walked to the station. Little prickles of stars were out, and the elm trees on Harpenden Common were like immense cardboard fountains for some stage setting. The gorse smelt of honey. We were exhausted, and I was hungry, but had bought a penny chocolate bar from Teddy and intended to make my supper off it.

  It was eleven, and the day was over. The station lights were always lowered to save expense, and the place seemed to be half asleep. In the period of cheap living people encouraged far greater retrenchment than today, when nobody cares.

  The unaired waiting-room was nothing short of a prison cell and we sank tired out on to the varnished form against the wall. The incandescent gas turned very low made a singing noise which became monotonous, but every night there was this tedious wait in a dimness like that of a vault.

  My body ached, and although we talked as lovers do, of what we would do one day when we became rich, it never seemed realistic in this squalor, when what we most needed was sleep.

  The old bent porter who walked like a crab, half dragging a leg behind him (souvenir of the Boer War), pulled a forelock at us. ‘The line’s busy tonight, ever so busy. Your train’ll be late,’ and he grinned. ‘Blame Kaiser Bill, and that! They’re moving the troops round all the time. I don’t know where they’re going, nobody does. But they’re going all right.’

  Montie thought that Mr. Clements must be in considerable difficulty, for, according to the newspapers, stocks and shares were making flying leaps downhill. The bank rate was bobbing about. (That conveyed nothing to me, I’d never even heard of the thing. Europe had panicked, said Montie.) Mr. Clements had never been over-popular with the cinema; a ready fault-finder he would lie in wait round corners to catch you out doing something you shouldn’t, which had not made him liked. Montie had seen him go off on an early train which was unusual, for he usually stayed in the hope of catching somebody diddling him, but he had gone looking cadaverous as ever. ‘He looked like an old man,’ said Montie.

  ‘But he is old, very old,’ said I. ‘Why, he must be forty.’

  Train after train came through at speed, but all the blinds were drawn, so we could see nothing. For months we had sat there at this hour listening to the whining gas and waiting for our own slow train to arrive. Tonight that had changed. One after another, so close that it seemed likely they would collide, trains went through in sequence. It was very late when ours came.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the Midland Station at St. Albans, generally almost deserted, though there they did not lower the lights as they did in Harpenden. Tonight the Midland Station hummed like a beehive.

  We walked into the yard, up the wooden steps to the bridge top and on to the Granville Road, leaving the sinister outline of the prison behind us. Montie always saw me home, then we said good night outside the house which was at the corner of the Hatfield road, and he went on to his own home on Hollywell Hill. As we crossed the bridge, another train with drawn blinds shuddered through, shaking the earth on which we walked. The noise was accentuated by the lateness of the hour and my own fatigue, but it looked strange, for I was accustomed to trains which were a quivering ribbon of yellow windows, and the gloom of these seemed ominous.

  By this time the Government must have arrived at some final decision, for it was well past midnight. Perhaps we were at war! Had the first shot been fired? The fact that it might have killed somebody did not strike me at all. The lights of the city shimmered behind us, and glancing back we could see the square outline of the Abbey tower, resolute against the night sky. My wrists throbbed (they never stopped aching until next day), and I felt sick and ill, for I was working too hard, and eating too little.

  We went round the high wooden fence of our corner garden into the Hatfield road. Even the little rowan tree in the front garden lost its scarlet fruit at night and turned drab, and I glanced up at the front bedroom where Mother slept, and where she always kept the light on for me until I returned. Tonight the room was unlit. There was no glimmer of gas in the hall bracket and instantly I knew that something must be wrong, for Mother and Joscelyn were not there.

 
‘They’re out,’ I said.

  ‘They couldn’t be!’

  They should have been in bed for some hours, and a flask of Ovaltine should have been waiting for me. Joscelyn started for the works at six, so could never stay up late, yet they were absent now. It was extraordinary that the face of the house should be dark at an hour when usually it welcomed me in the friendliest fashion. This was the moment when it seemed everything in my life changed.

  I fitted my key into the door.

  Opening it, the house conveyed the loneliness of one deserted. I sensed it as I crossed the threshold. Mother had always said that the dweller on the threshold whispered a warning (she was very ‘fey’), certainly it happened that night.

  I turned to Montie, always kind, always helpful, though frequently ineffectual. ‘Don’t leave me alone in the dark?’ I begged.

  ‘I’ll stay till they come back from wherever it is they have gone. My word, I wonder what’s happened to them?’

  Horror came to me. It was a flicker of Victorian upbringing. My mother disliked and distrusted Montie and always had done; she resented our ever being together without a chaperone, yet here we were, in a completely empty house and in the dark. Such an idea was monstrous!

  ‘We must light the gas,’ I begged him. ‘Have you a match?’

  ‘Of course, dear.’ He put down his stick (no man could be seen abroad without a stick in those days) and lit the match which quivered unpleasantly as he reached up to the hoop of peeling brass in which the burner hung. It did not light.

  ‘The meter’s run out,’ he said.

  The match died. I groped in my bag feeling the rim of every likely coin with my nail, and no shilling was there. I had the treasured half-sovereign wrapped in tissue paper for extra safety, waiting for the end of the week when I should be really hard-up. A florin, two sixpences, some coppers, and half a halfpenny which Richard Aldington and I had once split, each keeping a half. I expect his had been abandoned, but I was a most loyal girl, and nothing would have made me discard mine.