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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Och, the silly old what-not!’ He poured out another drink. ‘If this goes wrong I might lose a pip.’

  ‘But you couldn’t lose a pip?’

  ‘Damn it, I could! I’ve got to get the ’fluence in on it. I’m going to London on Monday.’

  ‘Look here, Mummy is ill; she has had to go into a nursing home.’

  ‘I can’t help that, I shall want you with me. You’ll have to come.’

  ‘But Mummy …’

  For the first time I saw him look changed. Different, and rather frightening. ‘I’ll make you come,’ he said.

  I went to see the doctor about Mother, but he did not seem unduly perturbed. I sat with her most of the day, she seemed vague, rather frail, and she slept a lot. I was deeply worried about her. On the Sunday her voice had become far away, and although I begged Arthur to let me stay with her, he refused. I suppose he was afraid for himself. I did not know the circumstances which were surrounding him, and when I rang up the doctor he let me down lightly. I did not realize that he did it because I had the baby coming, meaning it well, but he should never have done it.

  I kissed her good night and left her at nine with the night nurse. They woke me before it was daylight. She was dead.

  Chapter 12

  We went to London that day just the same, I in a daze. We had to change at Colchester, and I sat on a seat in a biting east wind, not knowing what was going on around me. In London I prayed for an air-raid. Arthur left me at the hotel whilst he went to see his ma, and he was gone three hours. I never knew when he returned for I had passed out. When I came to, the hotel porter was still arguing with him and he was making a scene. Unhappily there was no air-raid.

  Twenty-four hours later we returned to Frinton, he feeling better because Ma had promised to help him, and she had the ’fluence. He was almost gay about it. The night after my mother’s funeral, he walked into the dining-room and held out his tunic to me.

  ‘Unpick the third pip,’ he said, ‘it’s no good going about looking silly. This is the unfairest thing that has ever happened in the British Army, but there you are.’

  ‘How could they do it?’

  ‘God only knows!’ He walked to the sideboard and gulped down a tumbler of something whilst I started on the pips. I was desperately sorry for him, and this would make it so much more difficult to help him. He oughtn’t to be in the Army; if I could only get him out of it, then maybe he could go into a home, get treatment, get something, but our hands were so tied.

  ‘You’ll help me?’ he asked. ‘You know I’ve always got the feeling you’ll run away. Ma said you would. Don’t do it. I’d be scared of what I’d do if you did, my sweet.’ And then: ‘I’ll confess something. That’s why I sleep with the Colt beside me. Don’t run away whatever you do.’

  The curious thing was that I wasn’t frightened, I took his hands. ‘You don’t realize that I could not run away. This is sickness and I promised to stay. I shall stay, you know.’

  He stuck to that Colt all the same.

  He was so deeply unhappy, so torn two ways by his mother, by life, and in a way by his deep affection for me. At this particular time I was not fitted to help because the shock of Mother’s death had gone deep, and there was the baby coming, too. Besides, I did not know what the answer was.

  Next morning Arthur was posted to Holland Gat.

  Holland Gat was an encampment on the most dangerous part of the coast. The men who lived in the huts there were known as the ‘Hold-on-or-die boys’, and that about assessed what it was. With the March of 1917, the general fear of invasion along this stretch of coast was starting all over again.

  Arthur went off to the camp, which meant I was left with just the servants in Thalassa, but thank goodness without the genteel one. I was suffering from shock, I felt very ill, and I shrank from other people. First of all they would soon guess that I was going to have a baby, and secondly they must know about the lost pip. That stung me badly. I did consult a doctor about Arthur, vaguely groping for help, and he told me that he thought Arthur was in a bad way. Ultimately, he believed, his brain would go.

  You would have thought that doctors could be more discreet, mercifully I did not believe a word he said, and came home in a rage. That was when Ma had got herself busy and had done something about the emergency, and the Denham-Cookes’ solicitor arrived. He was the tall aristocratic creature with the yellow drooping moustache and the astrakhan coat collar who had added little to my wedding. He came down on a day when the meat was a shocker, and there were no potatoes. It was the worst lunch I have ever served anyone, and not my fault, though I dare say it looked like it.

  We drove out to the camp in a seedy old landau. The best horses were at the front, and we should never have got this dilapidated article save that she had the megrims. However, Mr. Levett did not know that she was liable to fall down at any moment. We were set down at a gate with Holland House across the road, and had to walk the cliff path to the Gat. Sleet was falling. Mr. Levett was Edwardian and although he had the manner of an earl, he could not entirely hide a certain apprehension.

  Nearing the camp the inevitable bother began. Something must have been sighted, for the Navy came from Harwich way, as ever travelling so much faster than a landlubber thinks to be possible. Soldiers dashed out of huts, some yelling to us ‘Get out’, others ‘Go home’, or ‘Come on quick’. It was tricky to know what to do. He went on and into the hut airily alluded to as ‘the Mess’ (quite the most apt description of it!). I knew that the solicitor hated being there with a pregnant woman, but what could we do?

  When Arthur came he told us this had been a false alarm and he and Mr. Levett went off to the far corner and talked in whispers so that I shouldn’t hear. In the end they came to a conclusion but I wasn’t told what it was. Then we walked back to the waiting cab, with the old horse still standing in the Army attitude. The path seemed to have become stickier, and Mr. Levett was wearing patent shoes which did not take kindly to it. I kept wondering what he was thinking, but he said nothing. In the cab I asked, ‘Is this going to be all right?’

  He looked at me with pained reserve. ‘It is not possible to form any opinion until I am told the argument of the other side,’ he informed me.

  Left alone at Thalassa I felt desperately unhappy. The death of my mother had been a severe shock, for although I had realized that it was near, I had never thought it could be so soon. My father re-married within the month, Joscelyn was far away, and I was now painfully aware of Arthur’s trouble, and wanting to save him. I consulted the local doctor, who was not very friendly. I got in touch with the Army one, who was a charming young man, but unfortunately he spoke the truth. This was the worst type of case. The fact that Arthur was in the Service made it difficult to do much for him; there were treatments, he launched himself into a list of such, which were double Dutch to me.

  I said: ‘I oughtn’t to be having this baby really. It seems so dreadfully unfair.’

  He agreed but avoided my eyes.

  In the end he went back to his wife with a large bunch of daffodils, and I was left to have that good cry which did not appear to be a help any more. It almost seemed that if the Huns landed (and at this moment there was every fear) and we were all annihilated, that could be the answer. At Holland Gat the orders were No Retreat. Evacuation papers were flittering about again. My own private troubles seemed very small against the troubles of England at this particular hour.

  I read magazines over the fire, they had always fascinated me, and I wrote to the help page in Home Notes. Here is the answer which I received.

  HOME NOTES

  18, Henrietta Street,

  London, W.C.2

  A. Pearson.

  My dear Reader,

  Thank you for your letter. I am so very sorry for you in your anxiety about your husband, and sympathize deeply with you in what you must suffer. The cure I referred to in my article was …

  I do hope very much that you may be able to induce y
our husband to undergo the treatment, and if so will you be kind enough to let me know the result? It is so much more satisfactory to me to know if my help has really helped. Please write again if I can do anything more for you, and I very gladly will.

  Always your friend,

  ISOBEL

  If, as I read the letter for the first time, anybody had told me that ten years later I should myself be in Isobel’s post ‒ and hold it for seven years ‒ I should never have believed them.

  The war itself was going badly. I got scared to open the newspapers, and all the time we kept hearing of young men from the regiment who had landed only a few hours in France, to die. The enemy seemed to be strong as ever, and I think all of us were forced for the first time to admit the wretched truth, that we could lose the war.

  In the kitchen we were trying to make maize bread, the most revolting cakes with potatoes and grated beans, and because chocolate had now become desperately short, some home-made stuff with cocoa-butter. Mrs. Fanthorpe made me a lot of this, for she knew I loved chocolate and could not get it, and thought that as I had a baby coming, I had better be a bit spoilt. I never dared admit that I could not eat it. I tried giving it to strange children on the greensward, but they had an unpleasant habit of tasting it, then throwing it down and looking evil at me. I threw it down the cliffs, I jammed it into gorse bushes, and still she went on making it!

  Cocoa-butter chocolate was one of the nastiest things this wretched war had ever invented for us!

  However, Mr. Levett had managed to get into action. It took him his time, he wasn’t the sort whom one could bustle, but one afternoon in May Arthur’s batman came over on a bicycle to tell me that Arthur was transferred to the Durham Light Infantry.

  ‘The Captain’s going to Falmouth, madam,’ he said with the loyal adherence of his men who adored him and still would call him ‘the Captain’. ‘Posted for next week, he is. A bit of all right, I’ll say, madam!’

  A bit of all right it was!

  In a seventh heaven we prepared to flit. Arthur was to go down four days ahead and get a furnished house for us. I’d follow with a couple of maids. He gave me a cheque for fifty pounds to clear up everything, and his mother sent Jim, his old nurse, to ‘keep an eye on me’. Jim was a typical upper servant, grand, dignified, and prepared to go back to Prince’s Gate to Mrs. Denham-Cookes with I-have-a-tale-to-tell-oh! She didn’t like my servants, she didn’t like me, and the row we all had over her early morning tea in bed was a short story in itself.

  The day before I was to start for Falmouth, a sour-looking man appeared from the local wine shop and asked to see me. I went to speak to him and he presented me with a bill for over eighty pounds, and a nasty note saying that if I did not pay it immediately a writ would be issued.

  It seemed to me to be a fantastic sum. Never could I believe that we had spent so much. I offered the man the sapphire and diamond bracelet and my engagement ring, but he took great exception to my honesty of purpose and started to bluster. Never had anything like this happened to me before. I telephoned to Stanley Nicholson to come over from Walton, and asked the man to wait. He said he wouldn’t wait very long, money was what he wanted, and money was what he was going to get. I explained that I did not see how, but apparently he did, and he was right. Mr. Nicholson came over on his motor-bike, and said that the bill must be paid and he would cope. He had a word with the sour-looking young man and got rid of him. I pointed out that when I had paid everybody’s railway tickets, the milk and baker’s bills, and the little extras that seemed to be popping up at every point, I should have about thirty shillings left. He was reassuring. He would pay the bill and Arthur could pay him back.

  ‘He won’t be pleased,’ I said.

  Very kindly he said: ‘You leave me to deal with him and don’t worry. It’ll be all right.’

  The maids left at seven next morning. At nine I and Jim, and Juliet the pug dog Mother had left me, started off on an unbelievable journey. Jim saw me off at Paddington at one, and I could get no lunch. The train was due in at Falmouth at eleven-ten at night! I don’t think Jim was sorry to part with me, I certainly had no regrets about getting rid of her, for she had done nothing but complain and I could not think why she had ever been thrust upon me. The journey was monotonous and dull. When we got to Plymouth I saw the Navy in great display and found that fascinating. (The next time I was to come there was to meet the Sub-Lieutenant who at that moment was serving in Hong Kong, and who was then unknown to me.)

  I thought Devonshire was lovely, and admired the red earth and the pastureland, but we seemed to be going on for ever. Darkness came. Here there seemed to be no blackout for to my amazement blinds were not drawn and lights twinkled gaily like stars. When I got to Falmouth station I was very, very tired.

  Arthur met me and we drove to the little old-fashioned terrace above the park in which he had taken a house. En route I confessed about this awful bill that Stanley Nicholson had paid.

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Arthur.

  ‘Has it ‒ has it ruined us?’ I stammered greatly concerned.

  He was furious that anyone had had the impertinence to pay it. Of course we didn’t owe it! How could we have drunk that much? ‘How indeed?’ I murmured tactlessly. He flew into one of those ungovernable rages which were so agonizing, and then collapsed in the front garden of the house, so that I had to drag him inside and only pray that the servants had gone to bed and would never know.

  He wept when we went to bed, and I lay there after he fell asleep, with the blinds drawn and the lovely flower-scented air coming in through the window, and lights still burning on the other side of the park. It seemed a quite unreal world. All the time there was the loaded Colt by Arthur’s side.

  Falmouth was fascinating.

  It was an immense relief to be away from the gruelling pressure of the constant war on the east coast, and also from men and women who knew that my husband had lost a pip. Falmouth was a city of flowers, of calm, an oasis where nobody bothered about blackouts and treated them as being so much nonsense. The war news had improved from the moment we got down to Cornwall; food was more liberal there, and barring the immense trouble Mrs. Fanthorpe the cook had with the Cornish oven, life was considerably easier.

  I sat and sewed in the park, where a band played in the afternoons. I went down to the beach in the bay, and admired a far more turquoise sea than the one at Frinton. Nobody was washed up. The wreck of a torpedoed ship in the bay, its masts rusting out of the water, was the only indication that there was a war on at all. The unreal atmosphere did not endure for long for the absence of the blackout was changed abruptly on the night of a dance in the mess. The lights were streaming out into flowery gardens, the windows wide open and the regimental band playing ‘Let the great big world keep turning’, when the great big world started turning in a different way! A second lieutenant, white as a sheet, shot into the room and said something to the Colonel, who immediately clung on to his chair for support. A submarine had been sighted in the bay, they thought it was an enemy one! Women fainted. People rushed to the blinds which refused to be drawn, being quite unused to the effort now made on them. No shot was fired, but a glorious panic began; I have never seen people so frightened. At the end of an hour the dance broke up, one of the senior officers being left on the mess sofa in a dead faint. This amused Arthur considerably; he thought it the funniest thing he had seen in years.

  Falmouth resigned itself to the blackout. They talked of the submarine for days, and reckoned they had been in dire danger. Suddenly we started to be more careful about food, for wheat was now the worry, and the King’s proclamation exhorting his subjects to food economy had been read from the steps of the Royal Exchange by the Common Crier of the City. This impressed Falmouth.

  The little hand-carts with gleaming fresh mackerel straight from the sea did a terrific business. We dined out most nights at the Green Bank Hotel, most romantically situated at the harbour head, hanging over the water so that you c
ould imagine you were at sea, with no danger of being sick.

  The news came that the D.L.I. would soon be drafted overseas; Arthur was rapidly worsening. He was collapsing in comas and was constantly being brought back from duty in a state of semi-consciousness. The civilian doctor did not like him, and was annoyed with me because I did not intend to have the baby in Falmouth. He told me that unless I could do something about getting Arthur into what was then known as a ‘cushy job’, he would be sent overseas to some outpost of empire to relieve an AI man, and would die there.

  This did not cheer me. We got leave and went up to London to get the ’fluence to work. It was at that time a ten-hour trip, as the trains being considerably reduced stopped at every station. The previous day, July the seventh, there had been a dreadful daylight air-raid, killing 57 and injuring 197, which fraught the visit to London with doubt. This very week hot-weather kit was being issued to the troops, and already I had seen too many columns march away, with weeping wives and those courageously dry-eyed mothers waving them goodbye. This was a race with time.

  We went to Prince’s Gate. I could not be admitted. The difficulty was that I was pregnant and my mother-in-law said that it would be improper for the butler to see me. I had to sit outside in the taxi where an ancient maidservant brought me milk and cake, whilst Arthur and Mrs. Denham-Cookes had one of their more tempestuous rows within. They were the most extraordinary family, having quarrels the like of which I hope never to see again (once I saw Arthur rush up the stairs flourishing a loaded Colt ready to shoot his mother), but they came out of them on a fairly even keel in the long run.

  Arthur was to get a job in the Ministry of Pensions. It was, he said airily, merely the job of sitting by a wastepaper basket, as far as he could make out, and if he went into a coma, he would just flop into the wastepaper basket, so that would worry no one. We drove to Berners Hotel, where a contretemps immediately ensued. It was difficult to get spirits these days and if Arthur did not get sufficient, the comas and the shaking began. I went out into Oxford Street, only hoping that no one would notice how very pregnant I was (in those days it was considered to be rude), and I stood in a queue outside a bar where I managed to get some brandy. The price was appalling, three pounds if I remember rightly, but I brought it back in triumph.