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

by Ursula Bloom

  I walked on, but a desperate urge to look back forced me and I saw the beach at low tide, with dead men lying there, crumpled men, unreal yet starkly real. It was the first time I had seen death, and the storm-seared, wreck-spattered beach was humped with men who were not men any more.

  It was useless to stand retching by a tamarisk hedge, I had to find the strange doctor and beg him to be kind to Mother. Not to let her know if it was, and already I was sure that it was. The doctor was not too kind. He said thousands of people died of cancer, and it did come back. I must pull up my socks.

  In the next few days I did not have much time to worry about the war, or the young men who had been drowned, for I was so much more worried about my mother. She was to have an immediate operation in the house. The district nurse would come in for it, and Mr. Percy Coleman a surgeon from Clacton would do it. I sent for my father, for I thought he should be with us in this, and the night before the operation I went up to the station to meet him. It was another of those wild and noisy nights with a storm. In the last few days I had formed quite a different opinion of the cruelty of the sea.

  The train was late and I stood in a corner of the little station on the cliff edge, with the wind shrieking and the noise of the waves like continuous thunder. With the blind faith of the young I prayed for Mother’s life. If only she could live longer, just a little time more! I loved her so much and at the back of my mind was the feeling that, if I had not gone against her in becoming engaged to Montie and insisting on it, this would not have happened. I blamed myself.

  My father had not wanted to come down, but we walked back to the house together. I got him some supper and then we had a talk. It couldn’t be a happy one, try as we would. Next morning he and I prepared Mother’s room and brought up the kitchen table which looked ominous. The district nurse arrived and took charge and he and I went downstairs.

  Waiting for the operation to begin could not be a very happy time, we talked banalities, but when the surgeon came he was quick. We sat in the room listening to every sound they made above us, hating it, scared, not knowing how to help, trying to talk about the war or the weather, or something quite unimportant. When they came down to tea which I had got ready for them, the surgeon spoke to me about it.

  ‘She ought to live two years,’ he told me.

  I suppose he did not know that I had expected much more. I tried not to show what I felt. ‘Two years?’ I repeated dimly.

  ‘I’m sure you want the truth.’ Then perhaps he noticed that I had gone pale and he said: ‘You’ll marry, you know. You are a very pretty girl, but you don’t need me to tell you that. You’ll be all right.’

  ‘It’s Mother who matters,’ I murmured.

  They got talking to my father, and feeling sick I went out and down to the beach. Mother would not be conscious again for an hour, they told me, and this had given me the chance to think. I sat on the dry sand, the only person who would come here on an early December afternoon, but I had wanted to be alone. Then I knew that I was not alone, for the horror had happened again. A man in a blue suit lay at the water’s edge almost as if asleep. The waves came to and fro, playing with him like a cat’s paw curling round the mouse she had destroyed, amusedly. Against his stillness the perpetual movement of the water was somehow horrifying.

  I got up quickly, stumbling through the loose sand, and by the parapet a Sea Scout stood whittling a stick with a jack-knife. I called to him.

  ‘There’s something down there.’

  He would have been about sixteen years old, I suppose; he glanced, then said: ‘Oh, that’s another from the Harwich wreck, I expect. You’d better go home, miss. No good hanging about here.’

  I went home. I had suddenly been jolted into the ugly side of the war, something which I had never thought could happen, leastways to me.

  I sat up with Mother that night, she was not properly conscious until about three, and the next night she had a relapse and I had to go out to find the district nurse for her. She rallied within the week, and from that time there we were playing a cat-and-mouse game with each other, and the shocking part was that we both knew it.

  Within that same week we heard the terrible noise of gunfire, and thought there had been a battle at sea, but it was the German ships shelling the coast. It was a calamity to have arrived here only to find it far more dangerous than we had thought possible. Now my one terror was that the ships might come again and shell us before Mother was fit to get up and about again.

  It was at this very time that the young snottie whom I should marry in 1925, got busy about the shelling.

  Rosyth ‒ Sea. December the 16th

  Got a message from the Admiralty at 9 a.m. saying that some German battle cruisers and light cruisers had been bombarding Scarborough and had smashed the wireless station. So we got under way immediately, and were outside the Firth doing 17 knots at 10. Went to action stations as it was rather misty. Later on the Admiralty sent a message to say that the whole German High Sea Fleet was at sea, and we have been expecting an action all day but nothing has happened yet.

  December the 17th. Sea

  Had the first dog in the main top last night, and from 8 to 9.15 on the bridge. Went to action stations at daybreak and remained there until 10. At noon the chase was definitely given up and we had one or two P.Z.s and then turned back to Rosyth. Altogether a very tame and disappointing ending to a situation that promised so much.

  He was bursting with patriotic fervour for the fight, which was already sickening me.

  The other gentleman who was to come first into my life was having little troubles from his last sojourn at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. A waitress in a restaurant in K.P. was threatening him with a breach of promise, which ‒ if ever she found out ‒ would kill his mamma, he was sure. Another young lady had made him a handsome present of a sword, and as he was not mad about the one he had got he was waiting for it. When it arrived it was a cavalry sword and he was in an infantry regiment. Going back surreptitiously to the sword-maker where he understood it had been bought, and who was a first-class man, he discovered it had not been bought there at all, but happened to be one her brother did not want and she had passed it on.

  His Christmas looked like being complicated, for not only this, but as all his family went in for composition (his aunt Lady Arthur Hill had written ‘In the Gloaming, Oh my darling’, his uncle Lord Lurgan composed beautifully, and his son Brownie (the present Lord Lurgan) was musically most gifted), so Arthur Denham-Cookes had written a waltz. The war had held up publication, and it appeared in the December, he having completely forgotten about it, only to recall in horror that being a waltz and the Austrians and Germans being closely associated with such, he had published it under a German pseudonym, Rudolph Ausberg.

  He and the butler burnt the lot before anybody saw.

  ‘This isn’t my war,’ said Arthur.

  At Walton, Mother was slowly getting about again. The anxiety was not lifting. She was to go to London for radium treatment in January, and the surgeon held out great hope. I wonder if we really had any hope left, I doubt it, but we had to go on.

  Joscelyn was lucky in that he got Christmas leave. The first stage of passionate enthusiasm was dead, and we knew that the Herts. R.F.A. were posted for overseas duties in February, also it would be to France. France was icebound at the moment, but with the spring the war would flare up anew, anything might happen. Christmas, the time when it was all going to be over, had been a snare and a delusion.

  I went to meet my brother at the station, and it happened to be one of those Christmases when we were particularly short of money. It would be his final leave, and we knew he felt dreadful about it, as indeed did we both.

  On Christmas Day we ate cold ham round the fire, and played Double Dummy patience all the afternoon. Mother in a fit of wild generosity, which I am sure she could not afford, was giving half-a-crown to the first person who won it four times running.

  It was bad weather, and the leave
petered out, accomplishing little, and not making any of us very happy really, seeing that it might be the last time we should ever see Joscelyn. Mercifully Mother was too weak to go to the station with him, so I went alone.

  The novelty was tarnishing. Once the fact of having a brother in Fred Karno’s Army and going abroad to fight was a triumph, now it was not quite so great. We felt miserable.

  It was one of those grey days which in winter frequent the east coast and are inescapable. We discussed the weather, the Radium Institute where Mother was going next week, anything rather than the fact that he was going away. I remember that he looked considerably older, and wore corporal’s stripes. When the train came I pressed the only half-crown that I possessed into his hand and waved him away, then turned to walk home, the mist gathering on the sea.

  There was some comfort in the realization that we were fighting this war so that no other people would ever have to fight again, but when you are actually doing it even the strong sense of a duty done is insufficient to give you heart. Mother sat by the fire, she looked very drawn and grey. We sat on playing patience until supper-time ‒ supper was broken biscuits.

  We went up at once to the Radium Institute in Riding House Street, to stay in a ladies’ hostel in Gower Street where they took us in for nineteen-and-nine a week (cubicled room for three, and the third was a French lady who made an awful noise when she cleaned her teeth). Mother spent so many hours a day at the Radium Institute under Mr. Pinch, and it was an exhausting treatment, she feeling ill all the time. Because she was a clergyman’s wife they treated her more than kindly and we paid so little that it was hardly a fee at all. But the bother lay in the taxis to and fro (she could not travel by bus) and the railway fare, which, even if these cost the least possible, were still too much for us on an income of £120 a year.

  The new year was greeted excitedly, and the leader writer in the Daily Mail on January the first wrote:

  A year opens today that will decide, or go a long way to deciding, the destination of Europe for many decades to come.

  The sales had started, and I read the advertisements with an avid eye, for dress appealed to me. Whiteley’s had Russian real pony-skin coats reduced from nine and a half guineas to six. The tea frock had come into vogue, very chiffony and attractive and awfully mature-looking, which made me eager for it.

  The new struggle for Ypres had begun. The papers seemed gloomy, and even the fascinations of the advertisements for the winter sales could not entirely dim the fact that the new year was not starting well.

  At Walton when the world was quite still in the very early mornings we could, if the wind was the right way, frequently hear the heavy booming of the guns in France. The earth vibrated with it, and we knew that an offensive had started. Then one day it seemed to be considerably nearer, quite alarmingly so.

  ‘Possibly a mine at sea?’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mother, ‘that’s quite another sound, it isn’t guns across the Channel, I think that it is something here.’

  Next day we knew what had happened, for the paper told us that the Zepps had been over, bombing Great Yarmouth, Cromer, and King’s Lynn. All along we had felt sure that an attack from the air must come, and in one way there was the sense of satisfaction, ‘Thank goodness, now it is here at last!’ Mother went down and got the paper early from the mat, and when I went in to see her she was sitting up in bed reading it.

  ‘This is only the start,’ she insisted. ‘I always knew that flying was a ghastly mistake, and we’ll all be in the front line now.’

  The Zeppelin raid on Norfolk was treated almost as if it had been an invasion. Public feeling became agitated, and security regulations were tightened, making the restrictions increasingly severe, and we were having further trouble with skimpy curtains which would not fit in spite of the ubiquitous safety-pin. At night the ‘Specials’ were busy as bees in a hive, and where once a little chink had not mattered, now the merest suggestion of it brought them hammering on the door, and making rude remarks.

  If raiders came the Scouts would give the warning on their bicycles, and their bugles later would give the All Clear. This was undoubtedly the Scouts’ war. Not only had they been called up for war duties on August the fourth last year, but they were still at them. Mother was concerned that the Sea Scouts had to rescue bodies from the beach or sea and take them to the mortuary behind the cemetery; she felt that this was shocking for boys who were so young, but then the whole of the war was shocking, and most of all for youth.

  The onus of the casualty lists seemed to be borne mainly by the second lieutenants who were being mown down all the time. More and more women in mourning filled the streets, for it was the era of mourning which had to be worn for the regulation time at all costs. Deep mourning for a year for close relatives, half-mourning (grey, white or purple) for the subsequent year, and widows’ weeds were necessary for a year and a day. Heaven alone knows why!

  The thought of Zeppelin raids made everyone think what to do for the best when it came to shelter. The main wall of the house was one suggestion. The cellar was certainly an idea, and for rich families excellent, for then Dad could get a drink when he most needed it!

  The spring was coming. It might be that the glory of fighting the war to end all wars was getting a bit tarnished, and we had secret apprehensions of what this spring might bring; at the same time, perhaps we had got through the worst.

  What next?

  Chapter 6

  Spring always comes late on the east coast and this one followed the pattern of its predecessors. The arrangement was that every six weeks Mother went to the hostel in Gower Street and had treatment at the Radium Institute. Anyway something was being done for her and that gave us confidence, though probably deep down within both of us the anxiety continued. How could it be otherwise?

  Three times a week I played the piano at the soldiers’ recreation rooms. They were dreary in some ways, for being schoolrooms by day the children’s work was lying about, and the piano was always tinny. ‘Little Grey Home in the West’ was in great demand, ‘There’s a long, long trail a’winding’, and ‘Tipperary’. The cinema had taught me how to build up an entertaining pot-pourri, though often the men turned from the gay songs, and sought something utterly miserable, like ‘Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling’ (since my experience on Walton beach that first day I felt strongly about that one), ‘Home, Sweet Home’, and ‘Poor old Joe’. My work there was what was known as ‘doing my bit’. The men were amazingly happy, laughing at the discomforts of billets, and always believing that the war must end fairly soon. They never seemed to be aware of the wretched fact that with the better weather, men overseas were dying right and left; that deserters were made to dig their own graves, then shot, so we were told. Life was sheer hell out there.

  The men told me the difference between an officer’s uniform and a private’s, something I found hard to get into my head. My first instructions were that an officer always wore a Sam Browne, which led me into a regrettable error of judgement one day with a sergeant-major! The regiment stationed with us was the Essex Cyclists, an innovation for that particular war.

  We waited for the spring and the big advance, with everything growing more difficult; threepenny-halfpenny tins of tinned milk were now sevenpence-halfpenny, even broken biscuits had gone up, and of course if the war did not end soon all would go up still more.

  On April the twenty-second I rose early and slipped down to get the paper. The headlines were shocking. The Germans had made their first gas attack before Ypres and the thought of it sent me completely cold. Joscelyn was somewhere in the neighbourhood. I did not know what to do to keep this from Mother, she would be bound to hear of it sooner or later, but for the moment I parried that one.

  I went to her and told her that Mark James (the newspaper shop) had forgotten to send the paper along this morning.

  ‘Isn’t that annoying?’ said she. ‘Never mind, I’ll go out and get it myself when I
get up.’

  I said I’d go, because I could then say that they had sold out. She was annoyed about it. I read what the paper said about the first gas attack. It had come when the battle front was apparently completely peaceful, and the first sign had been a light mist along the front of the German trenches, which drove across No-Man’s-Land into the Allied lines. Two French divisions had been wiped out, and the Canucks had come up to take over from them. They had no respirators or masks, and could only tie their handkerchiefs over their mouths. Later we were to know that our secret agents had reported that this gas attack was coming, and news had been sent that the gas was already stored in iron cylinders in the shell-proof shelters at the back of the German trenches, yet nobody had done anything about it.

  I thought that I had been clever in keeping Mother in the dark, but when we went on to the front with our needlework an old man we knew came along.

  ‘It’s awful about this gas,’ he said. ‘Them Germans, and this gas attack on our poor boys!’

  Mother looked at him, her face ashy, but she spoke almost without fear. ‘They haven’t used gas, surely?’

  ‘Oh, they have, ma’am, and they’ll do it again, you may be sure.’ He stumped off along the front. She said nothing for a moment, then she turned to me.

  ‘It was nice of you keeping the paper from me, dear, but you can’t keep the truth from people. The time comes when you have to admit it. What a shocking thing it all is!’ Neither of us had mentioned Joscelyn, I suppose we dare not, and now I was terrified lest a War Office telegram would come. In a few days we heard, and we gathered that in his particular neighbourhood nothing had happened; he and Harold had stitched away in the saddlers’ shop noticing nothing amiss.