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

by Ursula Bloom

  On the third morning I heard from Montie. He was passing through London expecting to be sent immediately out to India. He enclosed the money and a telegraph form, and asked if we could lunch. Would I meet him at Charing Cross, by the bookstall? On the spur of the moment I wired that I would, and caught the next train.

  The whole of the journey I swung between the thrill of romantic adventure and the anguish that I was deceiving Mother. I ought not to be doing this, but I was doing it, and that in itself was exciting. I went to Charing Cross, walking into the station prepared to wait by the bookstall as he had said. Montie was there first. He was still good-looking, kindly and gentle, and looking much better in a second lieutenant’s uniform than in that bulky fustian outfit which the privates wore. He had on a ‘Gorblimey’ cap which was the last word in smartness.

  Both of us were on edge. We met like strangers, unsure of each other. We took a taxi to Brice’s where we had lunched on ‘treat’ days at the time when I was living in St. Albans, and I was still excited though experiencing some mild emotional disappointment that the day was not as thrilling as I had expected.

  We talked of London, of everybody being in uniform, and all the time there was a certain strained atmosphere that made itself felt. We lunched on shoddier food than previously, though we paid more for it, and we talked about the old times, avoiding the personal side. We knew that when he got to India, Montie would be fairly safe just as Joscelyn would be when he arrived in Egypt. He had brought me several of the cigarette cards I was collecting, flags of all nations series, and some very smart silk ones. I dared not confess that recently I had given up the idea and had handed mine on to a child who was interested. We discussed the Brides-in-the-Bath case; George Joseph Smith was due for execution next week.

  We talked of ‘The Glad Eye’ and we paid one-and-six for the lunch, complaining about the expense. I was embarrassed that I was not more distressed to find how far apart we had gone. Montie must have realized this, for he said:

  ‘You and I would never have made a go of it.’

  ‘No, I suppose we shouldn’t have done.’

  I explained I wanted to get home before dark, so I should have to catch the afternoon train back.

  ‘You always hated the dark,’ he said. ‘My word, remember that night the war broke out!’ But he did not try to persuade me to stay.

  I saw him off at Victoria, not on the verge of tears and quite surprised to recall that once I had sobbed my heart out for this man in that awful little waiting-room at Harpenden station. It was dreadful that now I did not even love him.

  He brought me some white roses from the stall, there were no lilies-of-the-valley, and the roses reminded me of the frail white ones which grew just outside the schoolroom window when I was a child. It was for that memory that I wanted to cry, something far stronger than the thought of the man I once believed I loved and now had to admit that I hadn’t.

  I waved as the train chugged out, and I did hope that he would be safe, but all the time I knew that the prayer I prayed was only the one I would have prayed for a stranger, not for the man I wanted to marry. I’m all wrong, I thought, I’ve no heart, I’m not even sympathetic, but I hoped he would go to India and stay there out of harm’s way. It didn’t matter if we never met again.

  Turning to walk down the platform to the barrier, I saw that, without my being aware of it, a train loaded with wounded from the front had come in on the other side. Stretchers were being borne past me. Men groaned. One of them was strapped to his stretcher and he screamed as if he had gone mad. It was a haunting sound which went all the way home with me. A stretcher was sprawled on the floor of the guard’s van, two doctors beside it, apparently they were so intent on what they were doing that they did not realize I could see them. The man who lay there was very still, blood rose from his temple like a fountain rising straight up in a spiral. I had never imagined it could rise so high, and I tried not to look ‒ yet still looked ‒ and turned sick.

  A dismal line of men marched past me clinging wounded to one another. They were young men who seemed to have shrunken into sudden age, their eyes still glazed with the horror of an endurance which I never saw in the Second World War.

  ‘Now then, miss, now then,’ said a couple of orderlies, carrying a stretcher past me. The man on the stretcher did not writhe or scream, and the sheet over him was taut. He had been young, but it was the young who died.

  I drew aside, afraid, for it seemed horrible to be pushed away with a dead man so close, with the madman screaming, and that rising fountain of blood on the floor of the guard’s van. I wanted to be sick.

  Travelling back, I felt angry with the grown-up people, the diplomats, the M.P.s, and the men who should have seen this coming. Surely they could have protected the young? And they had let this happen. They were the ones who should have died, not these poor boys with the glazed eyes and that awfully old look about them. I cried in the train.

  I got to Walton with the dusk, and the white roses fell to pieces in the road; somehow I did not fret for them. I got into the house and upstairs to my room before it was quite dark. Once it had become dark I should have been too afraid, something which I had always been ashamed to admit. I did not wait to get any supper, and was sorry about that later when I got hungry, but I had some water and half a bar of Fry’s chocolate cream, which would do.

  I began to think about the future. About Mr. Coleman and what he had said the afternoon of Mother’s operation. About myself.

  If Mother died my father would re-marry, I knew, and that would bar my return home. I was ashamed not to be able to tolerate my father’s affections for other women, because I loved him in my own way, had once loved him deeply, but I did find it impossible to understand how he could behave like this. Nobody wanted to buy the stories I kept on writing, I did not know why I went on with them but somehow they were part of me and therefore undestroyable. They gave me happiness in their own way though I knew they would not sell. I felt so ill, so tired, and probably afraid of the future.

  I knew that Mother hoped that I should marry before she died. Before she died! How horrifying that sounded! I realized that the knowledge of my security would at least bring her some light in the darkness of the final road, but I could see no future for either of us. Mother was waiting for a visitor on whom we could not close the door; not all the love or riches (had we had them) could thrust him away, for he was someone who would have to be met. I saw myself lost.

  In the extravagant emotion of youth I was drenched in helplessness from which it seemed to be impossible to extricate myself, try as I would. I began to sob.

  A maroon shot up into the night and I heard the ‘Specials’ rushing down the street, which always meant danger. I sat up in bed gripping my knees with my arms and staring at the locked door which I dared not open. I was half hysterical. At that moment I think I wanted to die more than I had ever done before. I wanted it to be now …

  Joscelyn wrote from Gaza and we knew that he had reached a safe destination and if dysentery did not kill, him he would survive quite a long war in moderately comfortable surroundings. That was something, it meant he was secure. I never heard from Montie.

  The trouble with this war was that there never seemed to be any sign of an end to it. In the beginning we had thought a mere handful of weeks would bring victory, then that phase passed, and now approaching the second winter we dared not ask questions. I thought we should never reach peace again. From the north the man who was ultimately to be my second husband wrote this:

  Rosyth. October 1st, Thursday

  Went ashore at three and played 15 holes at Dumfermline with Williams. Awful panic when I got back. Eight cyphers had come whilst I was ashore telling us to raise steam, and then cancelling it, and the Commander and I both being ashore the cypher couldn’t be got at, so they had to go over to another ship to borrow one.

  The Navy seemed to have its own experiences, and how in wartime the two gentlemen most concerned could slip
ashore, I cannot imagine.

  News of the death of Edith Cavell horrified us, I remember Mother was speechless. The Huns were loathsome, they did awful things and were indeed the beasts. I made the ghastly mistake of commenting that if Nurse Cavell was helping soldiers and sailors to escape, wasn’t that espionage? I had to hold my tongue for the rest of the day. Of course I was shocked, with everybody else, but surely there was another side to it?

  ‘If you say things like that everyone will think that we really are spies,’ Mother told me with conviction. ‘England will never forgive the Germans for this, and quite right, too! This is the sort of thing men do not forget.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I agreed.

  We droned along in our rather dim life, keeping quiet because of the stigma we knew we had aroused, and doing nothing in particular. That autumn seemed to be a series of wretched events, but there was no sign of victory coming one inch nearer. There was the accident to King George the Fifth at the front, when his horse reared and he fell. An awful suspicion flowed everywhere that he had been killed by the enemy (one of those beastly spies, of course) and that the Press were just breaking it to us gently. In any emergency we all jumped to the conclusion that it must be a spy. A week later we knew that the King was still alive though badly injured.

  On November the first Lewis Waller died, the ‘flappers’ delight’ as he was known, and the hero of every young girl’s passions. I wept privately, but dare not let Mother know in case she thought it ridiculous, but at Stratford-on-Avon I had hung round the idol of most of my girl friends. Now he was dead. I remember sitting in the window-seat of the sitting-room looking across the road to the grey sea and thinking ‘this war will go on for ever’. Longing for young friends. For fun. For something gay, more than I was getting. And seeing no way out.

  That was when my life changed.

  Chapter 9

  The Essex Cyclists manned their bicycles and pedalled away, some said to Burnham-on-Crouch but nobody knew for certain, and we had fond farewells. The officers were mostly married, and their young wives had provided something in the way of more youthful friends for me; one of their captains had for a time come round with chocolates, which were to provide my lunch and tea though he did not know that. He was nice, I remember his brown eyes were almost gold, and Mother let him take me out on the back of his motor-bike (my first effort in this direction), which in itself was an adventure.

  The 24th Londons (the Queen’s) immediately succeeded the Essex Cyclists. After the unfortunate affair of the rice pudding which the General had disliked, Arthur Denham-Cookes had settled down with the Queen’s. He was a fair young man with grey-green eyes, not very tall but with that Blarney Stone charm that his Irish mother had given him.

  We first met at the adjutant’s dinner-party, somewhat disastrous for the fish pie was bad and the adjutant’s wife burst into tears and said that she simply couldn’t bear it. Afterwards we went into the drawing-room and had the entertainment fashionable at that period and known as an evening with music. Nito del Riego recited. He was extremely good-looking, and on all occasions was pushed to the front when entertainment was indicated. His sister Theresa had already published her beautiful song ‘Oh, dry those tears’. I met her later, and she had great charm.

  Arthur was Captain of the Day, so could not come to dine but arrived later armed to the teeth; he had just had to march to the end of Walton pier and back in the teeth of a gale. As the pier is second in length only to Southend that was indeed something.

  He was to sing and asked for an accompanist, so I volunteered. He seemed doubtful of my ability, and later when I had done it, apologized for showing the doubt, asking if in return Mother and I would dine with him that week at the Albion Hotel where he was billeted. I said ‘no’, she said ‘yes’, so we went.

  Everything in me warned me against that dinner. Yet really I should have loved it. Arthur was twenty-four, he spoke with a slightly Irish accent (mostly put on), and I sympathized with his deformed left hand which frequently made him shy, for he was secretly bitterly ashamed of it. He was young and I was sick for youth. He was rich, something to which I was unused, and he was gay.

  ‘I’m a nice little fellow when you get to know me,’ he confessed, ‘but shy, so be kind to me.’

  I met him next day in Walton High Street, when I was staring into a shop window, wondering if I could afford a My Queen, the speciality of the moment, but it had gone up to twopence.

  ‘Buying the shop?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh no, nothing at the moment,’ I said.

  ‘Och, so the pin money’s run out! Be damned to that,’ and in he went.

  I had never seen anybody buy chocolates like it. Even the local loony girl who ran the shop was cock-eyed with admiration. He bought three large boxes of this, four of that, said they were not large enough, then got the chauffeur to help me into the enormous open Sunbeam car he possessed and drive me home to Hertford House with him sitting beside me.

  Within the week he took me to the regimental dance. Apparently he couldn’t dance; the only time he had done, he had unhappily put his partner through some French windows, and as it was a first-floor room it was a trifle awkward. He did not seem too happy when I danced with Nito del Riego, so we sat out. He told me about his mother, who was something of a pest. His father had married again when seventy, an old gentleman with a fortune, and a daughter who was the first Lady Arthur Hill. His death had shattered his mother’s nerves; privately he thought she was just a trifle dotty, but as it takes all sorts to make a world, who was he to complain?

  ‘She’s stone deaf amongst other things,’ he said. ‘Half my family are that way. She’d love to meet you. You must come up to London and meet her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ I confessed, paling visibly.

  ‘Och but she’ll love you,’ said he. ‘Don’t let Ma worry you! She doesn’t know how many blue peas make seven, never did. It’s a mystery to me how I and my sister got born, but there you are.’

  The last thing I wanted to do was to go up to London to meet a deaf lady who didn’t know how many blue peas made seven, lived in glory in Prince’s Gate, and might get the idea that her son was ‘running after me’. However, the General came down to stay, now a Brigadier (that rice pudding scene must have been a very forceful one!), and he was the one who planned a jaunt.

  The Brigadier gloried in a visit, much more so if somebody else was doing the paying. He thought we would all four go up and see the panto, and we could stay at Berners Hotel as Arthur’s guests. We had no suitable clothes. There was one desperate winter’s afternoon when I got out the sewing-machine which had made my sister’s layette, and converted two frocks into something suitably ‘evening’, and did what was known in the family as one of my ‘bodges’.

  A week later we all started for London in the Sunbeam. I have to admit that any drive with Arthur at the wheel was a dramatic experience. Although the chauffeur drove part of the way, there came the moment when he didn’t, after which we skidded through Stratford, and had one or two contretemps which I found most alarming (though I don’t think they worried Arthur at all, for his principle always was that it took all sorts to make a world, so why worry?).

  Berners Hotel was comfortable. Mother and I changed into the newly bodged clothes, felt pleased with ourselves, and went out to dine at the R.A.C. It was my first grown-up dinner, with any degree of smartness. Until this hour I had always been a little girl, it seemed. Mother called it ‘backfisch’, my father called it ‘flapper’. Again, it takes all sorts to make a world.

  We started with caviare, which bewildered me. I thought it was blackberries, and how you got blackberries in January was surely one of the seven wonders of the world. I was given champagne, which sent me dizzy for hours. Arthur was trying to arrange for us to lunch with his mother the next day, the last thing that I wanted, for Mother’s coat looked shoddy and my cotton gloves were awful!

  We went to a box at the theatre, again for the first
time in my life; there were chocolates in packing the size of a baby’s coffin, orchids to wear (another first time), and a ‘Fums-up’ doll which was the rage of that year.

  ‘Look, he’s got her a baby,’ said the Brigadier, sparkling with champagne and thinking it an enormous joke, which mercifully I was too green to see.

  During the evening something went wrong. Arthur telephoned home to make final arrangements with his mother and apparently she was in a rage. Lunch was off. He went quiet, had a stiff one, then got to the stage of explaining that he could not take us back to Walton in the car as he would not be returning for a couple of days. Mother said that was all right, we could go by train, and neither of us conveyed by a flicker of an eyelid that this horror would mean poverty for the rest of the month.

  Much later in the year I knew that Arthur had told his mother he wanted to marry me and was ‘bringing me round’, and she had gone through the ceiling. It was an expensive ceiling too, at No. 6 Prince’s Gate, painted like a springtime sky, but his mamma went through it with a bang. Who was I? How dare I? I must be an adventuress, and I must be low. The Denham-Cookes had the sort of set-up which had never entered my calm rectory, for although I believed that I knew something about bad tempers (my great-aunt Augusta was a lively lady who, if annoyed, would walk up to her knees in the local pond and scream that she would drown herself), I had yet to learn the free-fight-for-all moods into which this family could launch itself.

  The evening ended deplorably, the Brigadier trying to carry things off well and entirely on my side, but we returned depressed. Mother had seen in Arthur the security for the future of an adored daughter (one cannot blame her); she had recognized his attraction; and now something had happened to upset everything.

  We jogged home in the slow train next day.

  ‘We shall never see him round here again,’ said Mother.

  She was wrong.

  Four evenings later the familiar ring came on the doorbell, and there he was with six dozen of the most expensive roses, and that provocative smile of his which one had to share.