Authors: Virginia Nicholson
One’s mind seems numbed, and the last day or two I go on, keeping on the surface of things as it were, lest I go down and be drowned. Every moment Alan is in my thoughts, every hour I send out my love to him – and wonder and wonder.
For the 224,585 British troops
who escaped from Dunkirk alive the reception was unstinting. The British woman lived up to her
image during this most mortifying episode of the war. Tirelessly angelic, patient, nurturing and endlessly kind, she was the apotheosis of the perfect housewife. She cut sandwiches, washed up for hours on end, bandaged, healed and produced inexhaustible supplies of clean clothes. As the trains bearing the exhausted evacuees rolled slowly into London the WVS parked their mobile canteen beside the railway line and handed buttered buns and sandwiches to them through the train windows.
At Joyce Green Hospital in Dartford the message arrived overnight that the hospital must start preparing to receive wounded soldiers arriving from Dunkirk. At 2 a.m. the nurses were woken;
Peggy Priestman,
a twenty-year-old nurse, worked fifteen-hour shifts from then on, dealing with injuries ranging from broken arms to shrapnel wounds. Peggy had not been trained to extract shrapnel, but the doctors were too busy to do everything. She had to dig fragments out of the patients’ heads, and then stitch them back up. ‘You just got on with it and did the best you could.’ Worse than shrapnel was gangrene. In many cases there was nothing for it but amputation. Another nurse,
VAD Lucilla Andrews,
received wounded evacuees arriving at a military hospital on Salisbury Plain and took notes on her experiences, which later ended up in a war memoir:
Men too tired to remember to swallow a mouthful of soup or keep their eyes open, but not to mumble, ‘Thanks, nurse … ta, duck … that’s great, hen … grand, luv … I say thanks awfully.’
Day after day of washing from the bodies of exhausted men the sand of Dunkirk, the grime of St Malo, of Brest, of Cherbourg, the oil of wrecked ships, the salt from the Channel.
The ATS came into its own.
Kathy Kay’s platoon
was based at a militia camp in Cambridgeshire. Here, hundreds of straggling evacuees arrived, many in tatters, all needing food and beds. The platoon was immediately detailed to undertake the ‘hard and tedious’ jobs required to care for them: food preparation and washing up, re-equipping them with clothes and other necessities. Like all the others, Kathy was ungrudging. She knew how grateful the troops were, how glad they were to be back on home soil.
Mary Angove was another,
a seventeen-year-old based at Penhill camp near Newquay: ‘We got thrown in the deep end. There was no bread-cutting machine – I was cutting hundreds of
slices of bread and laying on liver sausage sandwiches. No dishwasher either – I was sleeves rolled up with my hands in a deep sink full of greasy washing-up water. The men were coming back all over the country … and they were just so tired. They didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Not that we asked, we didn’t have time, we just had to look after them, and then they got sorted and sent on leave.’
WAAF Joan Davis,
based at Calshot near Southampton, witnessed the Dunkirk evacuation, both before and after. As the rescue vessels slipped into Southampton Water there was an atmosphere of anticipation and dread. Within a short time many of the small ships returned, bearing exhausted soldiers. Many of them were half-naked. Joan and a companion were ordered to collect as much clothing as possible from the stores. The spring weather was unnaturally hot, and the pair worked for hours on the dock, distributing garments to tattered, filthy men. ‘The stench was terrible.’ Inevitably the soldiers were in great distress; most of them had lost their belongings, all they had were a few wet remnants and some mementoes and photographs. The young WAAFs were harrowed with pity for these abject survivors. ‘On our return to Calshot my companion, Air Craft Woman Foote, said to me, “I think the real war now begins.” ’
*
The German army proceeded remorselessly across France.
In Villers-sur-Mer
the Henreys believed that Normandy was still protected by the French lines of defence behind Amiens. Their smallholding was Madeleine’s pride. Feminine to the core, she had poured into it all her love for home, for the
finesses
of everyday life. Her identity as a Frenchwoman – her ‘chic’, her
savoir faire
, her domestic artistry – were all bound up in the Normandy farm. That June the garden was a mass of roses, the grass a perfect green, grazed down by her cows. The air was scented with new-mown hay.
At midday on 9 June, without any warning, the sky darkened, the breeze stilled, and the day turned deathly cold. Madeleine and Robert walked out to the Point beyond the village, from where there was a panoramic view across the Seine estuary. They looked out and saw a vast plume of smoke billowing up like a volcano – it was the oil refinery at Port Jérôme, upriver from Le Havre. This refinery held the biggest petrol storage tanks in France. The allies had fired the
tanks at dawn to prevent them from falling into enemy hands, and by lunchtime the cloud of smog had completely blotted out the sun. That evening while eating dinner with Mme Gal they heard planes overhead; bombs were being dropped on Le Havre. Bobby slept in his cot. As the sun set they walked up to the Point again, and watched as the coastline burned. With horror they now learned that German tanks were in Rouen. ‘We both knew only too well what would happen if we left things to the last moment. The baby might get crushed or machine-gunned.’ If they were not to be caught up in the advance they must flee.
As early as possible the next morning Madeleine rose. She made the bed, tidied her room, dusted and put away her treasures. ‘I was determined that our house should be trim when we left it.’ As a final touch she went out to the garden and cut roses to adorn the sitting room. But there was no more time to lose. A neighbour had agreed to drive the four of them ninety miles across country to St Malo, from where they hoped to escape to England. They packed what they could.
We took a last look round the house. The bedroom was bathed in sunshine, and I opened my wardrobes, filled with my dresses, my furs and hats, and looked at them with tears in my eyes. My linen cupboard, scented with lavender from my garden, was my pride … my baby’s cot was all ready for him to sleep in.
I kissed the pillow in the cot when nobody was looking, and I steeled my nerves, driving my nails into the flesh of my hands. I knew there must be no choosing of this or that to take away. The sacrifice must be complete or it might cost us our lives.
Thus the family took to the road. They were refugees. ‘The bottom had fallen out of my dream farm … Would I ever see it again? … It hurts to love.’ Madeleine had stamped this little corner of Normandy so indelibly with her own personality that leaving it was a kind of annihilation.
Two days later, after getting transport and lodging through a combination of persuasion and bribery, they arrived at St Malo, the last of the major Channel ports still not bombed. Here, despite an abundance of luxuries in the shops, the signs of suffering were everywhere. St Malo was overrun with flotsam from all over northern France; they had arrived, like the Henreys, weighed down with prams and
suitcases, and now haunted the picturesque streets, helplessly trying to find some means of getting away.
Transports arrived from England and tied up at the quay. The Henreys went to the British Consulate. Madeleine had a British passport, her son had a British father; there would be no problem for the three of them. Madeleine’s mother was a different matter, however, and the Consular bureaucrat who guarded the gate was deaf to all entreaties. Nothing would persuade him that Madame Gal had a case for returning to London, where she had lived for years, and which she had left in order to help look after the grandchild she had loved, nursed and cherished since the day he was born. ‘My pleading was in vain.’
Afterwards Madeleine saw that she had no real choice in doing what she did; as British citizens she and Robert would have been interned by the Nazis, and their baby might have died. They had to leave France. But on that June day she felt like a criminal. Robert thrust a bundle of banknotes into his mother-in-law’s hand. Madeleine climbed the companion-way carrying the struggling Bobby in her arms, her eyes filled with tears. The danger was still terrible; their little steamer might be strafed or torpedoed. The Henreys stood on the boat deck as Madame Gal’s figure on the shore became smaller and smaller, until she was out of sight. ‘We were free. We were to be given a second chance … The next morning we sailed into Southampton Water.’
Five years would pass before she saw her mother, or her farm, again.
*
The news worsened. Italy joined the conflict. Paris fell.
But the ordeal
of the French invasion wasn’t over for Lorna Bradey. At St Nazaire in Brittany her nursing unit was assimilated into the Base Hospital, awaiting casualties from the fighting. Everyone there was still in total ignorance of the Dunkirk tragedy. But before long wounded men began to arrive, and the QAs were working flat out, knowing that the Germans were gaining ground by the day, and that they would be forced to flee yet again. Rescue arrived in the form of nineteen troop ships which arrived in St Nazaire harbour, and on 16 and 17 June a mass exodus took place, with thousands of troops inching their way on to the vessels waiting to carry them to safety.
With difficulty, Lorna helped to get her patients on board. As the stretchers were carried up the gangplank, the sky was black with Messerschmitts. The killing was indiscriminate, and chaos reigned. As soon as the patients were loaded the nurses headed below decks to settle them, from where they could hear the ceaseless crump of bombs above them, climaxing with a number of terrifyingly huge explosions, which, they were later to learn, had sunk the nearby
Lancastria
, killing at least 3,000 of the troops who were on board.
‘Our turn next we thought. We never thought we’d get away alive.’ Panic started to erupt among the passengers, with a civilian woman screaming uncontrollably; Lorna slapped her face and shook her until she stopped. With great courage the ship’s captain held out till night fell and took the ship out into the Atlantic under cover of darkness. Two days later they docked in Southampton.
Lorna was in rags. Issued with a travel warrant she made her way back to her parents’ home in Bedford, where she rang the doorbell. Her mother answered it and promptly fainted. Lorna was ignorant – till that moment – of what had been unfolding in Dunkirk.
When she recovered I learned that I had been reported missing, presumed killed, for the past ten days. News that No 5 C.C.S. had been wiped out had got to the War Office from Dunkirk, and the War Office presumed we were with them. All those men, all our comrades had been killed. I felt very humble. We had been pointed in the opposite direction by the foresight of our Commanding Officer.
Nobody knows exactly how many men were killed at Dunkirk, but at least 5,000 soldiers from the BEF lost their lives. People all over Britain quaked to think of what the future might bring, but for women whose waking thoughts were with the soldiers in France whom they loved, the lack of concrete news was a daily, hourly ordeal. It was not until Tuesday 16 July, after weeks of rumour and uncertainty – and nearly seven weeks after the army’s withdrawal – that
Clara Milburn heard
the fate of her son.
That afternoon she had dropped in at the Women’s Institute to see how the local produce exhibition was progressing. The judges were busy testing the range of jams, jellies, chutneys and bottled fruit. At 5.30 it was time to take Twink for a walk and, feeling rather heavy-hearted, she made her way out of the village. Two fields away, she
caught sight of Jack waving wildly to her from beyond the hedge. Struggling to dampen the hopes and fears that now surged up, she strode to meet him – the telegram had come:
‘Alan is a prisoner of war,’ he said. There and then, saying ‘Thank God’, we embraced each other for sheer joy at the good news. Oh, how delighted we were to hear at last that he is still alive – and apparently unwounded …
My darling dear, you are alive!
Frances Campbell-Preston,
recently married and with a baby daughter, had to wait even longer to hear that her husband, Patrick, a young officer in the Black Watch, was missing in action. Frances had friends in high places, and the officer network did their best to reassure her that he was a captive, but nothing concrete came through until late August, when one of Patrick’s fellow officers arrived in Britain, having daringly escaped from German clutches. He was finally able to tell Frances that her husband too was a prisoner, and alive – ‘Oh the excitement, joy and God knows what, I can hardly bear it, it is so marvellous.’ Finally, in late autumn, she heard from Patrick himself. A letter arrived addressed Lager Bezefchung Oflag VIIC, Deutschland. He had been wounded in the head, he was safe and he was settling in for a long captivity.
News was even slower
for Barbara Cartland, who heard early in June 1940 that both her brothers, Ronald and Tony, had gone missing at Dunkirk. But she and her mother had to wait until January 1941 for confirmation that Ronald was dead. Tony’s death was not confirmed until the end of 1942.
So Naked, So Alone
As prisoners-of-war, Alan Milburn and Patrick Campbell-Preston were to endure much through the next five years. The women who loved them, and countless others, had to display endurance of a different kind. Mrs Milburn used her diaries to rally her spirits: ‘
Today I have just heard
of someone who has been waiting longer than we have and had news of her prisoner son yesterday. Hope is a great thing and patience a real virtue in these times, but difficult for me,’ she wrote sorrowfully.
The nation now entered the most dangerous phase of the war. The raids began to be stepped up, and some military targets were bombed, though these were pinpricks, compared with what was to come. Seventy years on, we know that the German leadership made mistakes which would eventually cost them victory. But in summer 1940 nobody in Britain could ignore the extreme threat of invasion, which, after France’s surrender, now moved up several notches.