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

by Ursula Bloom

  We were two young people in a blind alley. He had no right to take more yet could not live without it. Maybe the baby would put it all right. I wonder how many girls have thought that?

  There was another unpleasant scene at Prince’s Gate before we returned to Falmouth,when he and Rowland got wrong whilst I was sitting outside in the taxi. The ever-ready Colt was whisked out, and had it not been for the intervention of that much-harassed butler, I think somebody would have been shot that time. How the butler survived life there I have never been able to understand, for although I only sat on the fringe of it, in the car innocently drinking milk and eating buns, I saw enough to put me off.

  We started back again on the ten-hour journey to Falmouth and the anxiety was only lest the new posting would not come in time. Four days before the D.L.I.’s departure for an unknown destination, Arthur came rushing back from camp on a borrowed bicycle. He was radiant. He was a new man and the ‘nice little fellow when you got to know him’. The ‘cushy job’ had come through!

  We had a final glorious dinner at the Green Bank Hotel, when he gave five pounds each to three waiters and the head maître d’hôtel and left them almost dumb with amazement. We then went to an upstairs room for a little music, had an exciting party which grew more exciting as the night progressed, and finally a very red-faced admiral, who was doing a pas seul sword dance with a naval and an infantry sword crossed, had a wastepaper basket popped on to his head and banged down so that he got stuck in it! I had been sitting in a far window-seat which looked out to sea, trying to hide the fact that I was in the so-called interesting condition, and crying quietly to myself.

  I felt alone. I never have been much good at drunken parties, and in the end we had to flee the place, five officers and myself, and Arthur gave the night porter a ten-pound note as a parting gift.

  I imagine that the Green Bank were very sorry to say goodbye to us!

  There was another ten-hour journey back to Berners Hotel. The first thing to do was to arrange with a specialist for the baby, and I went to that most charming man, Jock Hedley. We went down to some friends of Arthur’s in Dulwich who helped us take a furnished house there, 82, South Croxted Road, where the baby would be born in October. It looked quite pleasantly secure. The maids came up from Falmouth at once and we settled in.

  My great difficulty was the fact that I had no money, for even now Arthur would never allow me to have any in case I ran away from him on it. It was an obsession with him. He would pay for anything I wished, but I could not have the money to pay myself. I wanted things for the baby, I wanted sets of new undies which would cope with my changing figure, and how that figure was changing!

  ‘If you want more underclothing, let me come with you and buy what you want, I’ll pay,’ he said.

  We went to a famous shop and I bought some lingerie, he sitting by on the small chair set for such a purpose, and going scarlet. I could not think what was the matter. When we came out he was torn between laughing and fury, for the girl who had served me had been the one he had known as a waitress at Cambridge and who had tried a breach of promise on him!

  ‘Be ye sure your sins will find you out,’ said he brightly.

  ‘Why not let me buy my own undies in future?’

  But, oh no! Nothing of the sort. In the end I had to deceive him. He was extraordinarily stupid about cashing cheques, and was always getting stuck for ready money, and I had managed to get five pounds put by. I would cash him a cheque for five pounds if he gave me ten shillings for doing it. Fair enough, said he, and did. On these miserable ten shillings, I bought the baby’s clothes, and a cot I trimmed myself (it cost seventeen-and-six at the grocer’s of all places!), and so became equipped for the great moment. He went home to see Ma every few days, usually the most unfortunate visits ending in one of their crashing rows, but I was mercifully off the map for the moment. I was now wholly in purdah.

  When we had taken this house neither of us had realized that the Royal Navy were stationed in the Crystal Palace at the top of the hill. When I heard they were there I thought it very silly of them. The Crystal Palace seemed to my simple mind to be no place for those who go down to the sea in ships. Three nights after we had moved in, delighting in the safety of this most excellent position, I discovered what the Royal Navy were actually doing, for an air-raid started.

  ‘Specials’ appeared from everywhere on their feet or on their bicycles, and there were the long piercing blasts on police whistles. From just over our heads the most shattering noise began. It was like an extremely bad thunderstorm, and although they might be camping there under the pseudonym of the Silent Service, most certainly they were far from silent that night when they went into action.

  ‘This is awful,’ said I.

  ‘Exciting,’ said Arthur. ‘Jolly good fun. Och! Let’s go out and see what it’s all about.’

  We took a couple of kitchen chairs into the garden where we thought we should get a better view. A plane was hit. We saw it come down, and cheered valiantly, not realizing that it was one of our own. Whilst all this was going on little pieces of metal began to rattle through the air, dropping like hail about us. It was shrapnel, my first introduction to it. We should have gone on sitting there but fortunately Arthur got a stinger on the hand, and at the same moment there was a devastating crash just across the road where a greenhouse had been hit. We went indoors.

  I believed that we had rounded a difficult corner, in that the Ministry job would last till the war ended, and Arthur would be safe there. He visited his mother, I always being left outside; each time they had shocking rows, and when it was not Ma it was his sister, and the Colt always came out. One day, I was convinced, there would be some frightful accident.

  The war was drifting along with no sign of peace in sight. Arthur was having constant comas, I still believing that they were some strange kind of faint, and terrified to let him out of my sight for a moment. It would be worse when the monthly nurse joined up with the family and things had to be explained, or covered in some way or other. But better when the baby came. Surely the baby would put everything right?

  Chapter 13

  The nurse arrived on the first of October from Brighton where she lived. There she had not had to face war conditions and I sensed the fact that she was very nervous. The first night, during dinner, trouble began at Herne Hill and the Crystal Palace guns opened fire. Because of her distress we did not go to bed until two in the morning, until the Boy Scouts’ bugles came by. It had not been a fortunate evening, and I made it worse by having during the morning laid my hands on what I had thought was a regular triumph, a hare for jugging. During the meal someone discovered that the hare was a cat (they were selling chopped up cats like this) and I, fostering rectorial faith in the man who said it was a hare, had been deceived.

  I tried to explain to the nurse that Arthur was ill, but she did not believe me. We felt her criticism, we shrank from her, a little lost, holding hands under the rug in the car with her sitting on the seat facing us. Oh well, anyway it isn’t for ever, I kept telling myself, but the baby did not appear.

  The Jerries seemed to be taking an evil delight in the nurse being with us, for there were bombs on the Serpentine and all manner of dead fish floating about, bombs on Victoria station (and she had arrived there, a discrepancy we tried to smooth over for her), and the Royal Academy was damaged.

  The accepted date for the arrival of the baby came and went. October was moving over to its end, and I had to admit that Arthur’s condition was getting quite frightful. Four days a week he was sent back in a coma. One afternoon he came home saying he had been given a week’s leave and then must go into King’s College Hospital for treatment. The week was obviously with the idea of my being obliging and having the baby and at least getting that over.

  ‘What can I do?’ I asked the cook.

  She suggested skipping, and oh, how I skipped! I am now convinced that no one in this world can skip an unwilling baby into this world. The
tweeny suggested jumping off the chest of drawers; she had a friend who wasn’t able to get her baby into being, and it had worked wonders for her. I did not fancy the idea.

  Arthur was worried to death, and had taken against the nurse. He thought it might be the end of all our worries if he shot her!

  The week passed and there was no baby. On the Monday I drove with Arthur to King’s College Hospital, he shivering with apprehension, hating leaving me as things were, I hating his going. I drove home with the nurse, calm, unmoved, and quite oblivious of what was going on, for anyway tonight she would not be shot, which might be something!

  At eight that evening the hospital rang me up, impersonal and indifferent, and enquiring if I was the next-of-kin. That struck cold horror to my heart, and I clung to the sideboard, only praying that he had not died. Arthur had had an attack, said they, would I come in the morning? I wanted to go right away, but they said no, he was sleeping now, tomorrow would be good enough.

  There was no air-raid that night, which was a relief, for the nurse got so bothered about them, and next morning she and I drove to hospital. Arthur seemed to be very ill, shaking terribly and hardly knowing us. But the young doctor was kindness itself; he asked me questions and told me not to be too worried, for they could get him right. Later he would be sent to convalesce at Craiglockhart, a hospital for officers with nervous diseases, in Scotland.

  It was something of a shock to see that Arthur had changed so much in those few hours, but I had confidence in the doctor, who was most kind. There had to be a daylight raid as we drove home, for it seemed that there was no end to this wretched war; it went on worrying everyone, with not a sign of peace coming even yet.

  It was November. The gutters were full of wet dank leaves, and men were mending the road outside the house, which meant that I could not go out until after dark, because in 1917 it would be too humiliating if anyone discovered where babies came from. One afternoon the old butler came down with some clothes from Prince’s Gate for Arthur, and one of the maids put him in the drawing-room. I talked to him through the door, explaining that I daren’t come in. Very gently he told me that he had three children of his own, it didn’t worry him, after which we sat down together and talked. I could not imagine what my mother-in-law would have thought if she ever knew of it, but on that particularly dank November afternoon it seemed one of the nicest things that had ever happened.

  Within a few days Arthur was better, and permitted to be fetched out to tea, on condition that tea was all it meant. Joscelyn wrote from Egypt that as far as he could see the war would go on for ever. Still the baby did not come.

  The gynaecologist finally decided to operate in the house, and when Arthur drove over to tea I had to break this to him. We rang the hospital together and said that the gynaecologist meant to get things going, and could Arthur spend tomorrow with me, when the baby actually would be born (we hoped!)? It took quite a lot of work reconciling Arthur to tomorrow; we had now been six weeks expecting a baby who appeared to be only interested in a stay-in strike.

  When I had dispatched Arthur back to the hospital, depressed at what might happen before we met again, the nurse suggested that I should come with her to the cobbler’s to fetch some shoes she had had soled. It was a wretchedly dreary evening. Nurse went into the cobbler’s, and I stood in the shadows outside, terrified that anyone would see me. There was a public-house there and some of the sailors were singing cheerfully inside. One of them reeled out, was sick in the gutter, then saw me, tottered for a moment, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and lurched back into the pub. I had the most dreadful butterflies in the tummy, almost a pain, and at that moment I would have given quite a lot of money to be back at home in the rectory, and away from the unhappy condition which I had once thought was marrying into high life.

  Nurse and I went home and at ten that night there was the inevitable warning and the Crystal Palace guns started with their familiar gusto. Nurse wanted to stay downstairs; she had a dauntless faith in putting her back against the main wall of the house, which she vowed was completely safe, so I left her at it.

  I went to bed and that night I knew that I longed more desperately for my mother than I had done for weeks, for there were times when this passionate desire for her completely distraught me. The sound of bombing came closer, the guns were most vigorous, and half an hour later I realized that something was really wrong with me. I went to tap on Nurse’s door, very meekly. There was no reply. Below in the hall a light burnt, and peering over the banister I saw her standing there, still with her back to the wall. It seemed a shame to disturb her but my need was becoming great.

  I called: ‘I’m so sorry to be a bother, but I think something must be happening. It can’t all be my supper.’

  It was the baby.

  Jock Hedley came immediately. Poor Nurse was in agony, for this was a really nasty raid and it was all taking place on our side of London. In the bedroom the three of us stared at one another. The baby had apparently been coming most of the day, and I had mistaken it for butterflies-in-the-tummy over the operation. I was only worried now lest we could not get the baby born before Arthur arrived at ten next morning, Nurse’s worry that we should be hit, and Jock Hedley’s agitation a very different anxiety. He had tried to sit down on the chair where the Colt lay. ‘Of course it isn’t loaded,’ he said.

  That was when I let out a shriek. ‘Don’t touch it. It is loaded. For goodness’ sake don’t touch it.’

  The raid ended about two o’clock, and the silence seemed strange after all that fuss! They had given me something which made me dizzy and queer; suddenly there seemed to be three doctors in the room instead of one, and the sterilizers made a predominant sound. Jock Hedley was speaking to me.

  ‘If there was no baby would you be dreadfully disappointed? It’s being just a little bit naughty! Will you let me do what I want, for I have nobody else to ask, so I’ve got to ask you? I’ll promise to do my best.’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ I told him, then slipped back into a deep sleep. At five minutes to ten that morning, just as Arthur arrived, Jock Hedley kept his word and brought the eleven and a half pound baby into the world, a boy.

  He wept real tears; he had red hair; he was exactly like my own father, something that I had never expected; and all his finger-nails were very long and had to be cut.

  Jock Hedley went downstairs where he found Arthur waiting in the dining-room, and he said: ‘Have you seen your son? He’s enormous.’

  Arthur said nothing. He passed out in quite the worst fainting fit of his life, and later when Jock Hedley came up to see me, he admitted that he would much rather have me than my husband as a patient.

  Coming to, Arthur gave five pounds to each of the servants, then went off to the West End, buying gold charms for the nurse who collected them, and a bowler hat for the baby, which he thought would be ‘jolly useful later on’. I got nothing. There was no comment from Prince’s Gate. Mrs. Denham-Cookes had been so sure that I should have a girl, and now that we had got the boy Arthur most wanted, she was indignant.

  ‘We ought to call him Passchendaele,’ said Arthur when next day the papers told us Passchendaele had been captured.

  ‘We certainly shall not!’ I replied, and he was called Philip. It happened to be my mother’s favourite name for a boy, and as I could not call him after her, this was the next best thing.

  Arthur and Nurse quarrelled. Disliking his disturbing me she would lock me in my bedroom when she took the baby out, so he could not come in. He would then conduct a blasphemous conversation (about her) through the door which terrified me lest some of the servants would hear and be shocked.

  Ten days later Arthur left King’s College Hospital, to go to Craiglockhart where he would go before a board and might be invalided from the Army, which I prayed would be true.

  Mother had left me her furniture which was now in store at Frinton where I hoped eventually to return, for I felt that it would be such a delightfu
l place in which to bring up a little child. One day perhaps the war would end. One day the bewildering maelstrom in which I was living would change, and then things would be more serene.

  Nurse went off to another case, and I was left with abscesses and the plain fact that having a baby was not something from which one recovered in five minutes. My mother-in-law did not telephone or write, but then the poor thing had much to endure for accruing taxation was worrying her stiff. Arthur went before his board, was invalided out with a small pension, and would be coming back to me quite soon, then we should be starting the ordinary civilian life together. Yet when he walked into the house in civvies (I had never seen him in them before) I hardly recognized him. His skin was clearer, his eyes calmer, the cure had worked, for he actually asked for a glass of milk. Yet when we walked out together and a man outside a public-house told him that he ought to be in khaki, instead of letting other poor chaps fight for him, a brawl ensued.

  ‘It’s my temper,’ he confessed. ‘All my family have this Irish temper, though it doesn’t mean a thing at all, at all. I hit out. Never mind, it takes all sorts to make a world, and I’m a nice little fellow when you get to know me!’

  On Christmas Eve I received a letter Joscelyn wrote to me.

  Gaza.

  December the 1st, 1917

  Dear Ursula,

  I’m glad the baby is a boy, but I shouldn’t call him Philip. I was five pounds when I arrived, whatever made him do that? The Gyppos say that the war will be over this year. There are constant riots, sandbags and such. I went out on a horse to help a nurse in a wagon who was trying to get through the mob, and they were pretty nasty. I killed the first man I have ever killed and I wasn’t sorry, for he was trying to get me and I saw him just in time. He got down into the dust and aimed with a gun, and I split his skull in two with the butt end of my rifle.