Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Joan Kelsall still lives
in Coventry in a modest but cosy semi-detached house not far from the M6 motorway. In 1940 she was nineteen, living with her family near the city centre, with a good job working at the Scotch Wool and Hosiery store. Her memories of 14 November are more typical:
It was a bright moonlight night. The sirens went off. They’d been going off for quite a while. ‘It can’t be anything,’ we thought. Then all of a sudden we heard this awful drone, so of course we just got straight out of the house into the shelter. And that bombing didn’t stop till it got daylight. It was one continual drone, and bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp. But it never entered my head that I might die.
In the morning I got up, and the smell was dreadful – burning wood and everything – we were only ten minutes out of the town centre, and just up the road was the Daimler factory, which was a target. ‘Well,’ I said to Mother, ‘I’ll have to go to work,’ not realising how bad it was, so I got my bike out and got as far as Bishop Street, and I couldn’t get any further. There were firemen and hosepipes everywhere, and the wardens wouldn’t let you through … It was then it dawned on me. The city was flattened – there was just nothing left. And I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve lost me job.’ So I came home. And the familiar area I’d grown up in had just all gone … But our house had been spared. There were people wandering around – and there was no water on, so they were all trying to get water from somewhere. They looked dazed. But they didn’t moan a lot; you know, it was amazing how cheerful people were. I think they thought, you know, ‘We’ve got to get on with it.’ There was police and the WVS giving them assistance, with canteens and so on.
But I started to cry – ‘I haven’t got a job! I’ve lost me job!’ I was only a teenager. And me mother was very cross. ‘You’ve got your life,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about your job.’
The citizens of Coventry picked their way among the remains of their city, each with their own tragedy to deal with.
Alma Merritt and her family
broke out of their shelter; heat had warped the structure and they had to get free with a mallet. ‘We came out to find our home had gone.’ Twenty-one-year-old Alma went to her job at the Gas Department, but most of her office block was destroyed. ‘I walked into the city centre. In the Cathedral the heaps of stones were still steaming. I don’t remember eating at all that day.’
Joyce Hoffman’s family
escaped from the cellar of their burning house and found safety in a public shelter. They emerged next day to find their home a shell, everything they possessed destroyed. ‘All we had were the clothes we were wearing, and my mum and gran had their handbags.’
The Wall family
were forbidden from taking their dog Skip
into the shelter by an over-zealous ARP; poor Skip was tied to a lamp-post outside, never to be seen again.
Eight miles away to the west,
Clara Milburn arose
after a sleepless night and listened to the radio reports of the destruction over breakfast. She had lain awake in the shelter, listening to the bombardment. The sound – ‘
like old sheets
being ripped up’ according to one woman quaking in her Stratford shelter – could be heard across the Midlands. ‘I feel numb with the pain of it all,’ wrote Mrs Milburn. Shocked and dispossessed people from the city were making their way to the country villages. Clara immediately offered up her spare rooms and donated rugs and deckchairs to the ‘trekkers’ who had straggled out to Balsall Common.
Atrocity on this scale left the habitually gentle sex struggling to express their sense of violation. Where a man might react to massacres inflicted by such raids through physical reprisals, women were often left helplessly venting their fear, grief and sense of wrong. ‘
I coped by getting angry,’
says Joan Kelsall. ‘You sort of think to yourself, “I’ll get them,” and that helps you through.’
Rage against all things German spilled out in some cases into an intensely ‘unfeminine’ hatred.
Cora Styles was sixteen
when a piece of red-hot shrapnel whistled three inches from her head and nearly killed her. To this day she feels Germans are the enemy. ‘Perhaps this is a terrible thing to say, but I HATE the Germans. GOD, I hate the Germans. I said then, if I get my hands on a German I’ll … I’ll batter him with a saucepan!’
Marguerite Patten reserves
her saucepans for the kitchen, but also still finds it hard to temper her profound sense of outrage:
People were terribly killed. I defy anybody not to feel hatred. My God, we thought, let us get up and at them … I agree with my husband who used to say, ‘The only good German is a dead German.’ Oh, yes, we DID hate them. And it wasn’t hatred of the actual pilot who did it, it was hatred of the people who organised them … Oh, yes, definitely – we hated, hated,
hated
them.
Mrs Milburn went out
into her garden and exterminated the pests, meting out a horrible revenge on the vermin that killed her vegetables:
I kill all the wireworms, calling them first Hitler, then Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Himmler. One by one they are destroyed, having eaten the life out of some living thing, and so they pay the penalty.
A Bristol woman working in an aircraft factory told herself that every rivet she hammered into a Spitfire was another nail in Hitler’s coffin; in one week she broke three hammers. In such reactions one can begin to see the breakdown and collapse of familiar models of womanhood. Tender-hearted passivity and stoicism had their limits; stress found outlets where it could.
*
Hatred, anger, aggression: by 1940 the stereotype of the soothing, neutral, deferential woman was starting to erode. The constant nearness of death awakened violent passions, emotional and physical.
The aphrodisiac effect of war on men has often been commented on, brought about by a combination of frustration, excitement and a subconscious desire, perhaps, to compensate for loss of life through the regenerative urge. But women were also touched with a heady mix of impulses: elation, tenderness, impetuosity, arousal. By the time the Blitz started
Joan Wyndham had fallen
decisively for gorgeous Rupert Darrow, who, with his dark hair, aquiline nose and all-over tan blended the looks of a Hebrew king and those of a Greek god (‘bronzed all over … Oh boy, oh boy!’), though her decisiveness failed her when it came to losing her virginity. Rupert was very persuasive:
‘Would you rather I raped you in the proper he-man fashion, or will you tell me when you’re ready?’
‘I’ll let you know.’
… Inside me I could feel every moral code I had ever believed in since childhood begin to crumble away …
Eventually, following much discussion of cocks, orgasms and contraceptives, Joan made her decision sitting in an air-raid shelter with the London streets on fire around her. The flashes, booms and flaming skies had ignited her desires. ‘The bombs are lovely, I think it is all thrilling,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Nevertheless, as the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow.’ That night 430 people were killed, and 1,600 injured. The following day it was Sunday and Joan put on her best black-and-white checked trousers
and went to church. Afterwards she went to Rupert’s studio in Redcliffe Road and they had lunch. The hour was approaching. In the event, Joan’s deflowering was an anti-climax, for her anyway: it combined unpleasant pain with a sense of disappointment and the absurdity of the whole thing. Afterwards, exhausted with stress and over-excitement, she slept through a heavy air raid. Two nights later Redcliffe Road was hit. Joan raced round, faint with fear. Number 34 had caught it. Partly crushed beneath blocks of collapsed wall, the very bed on which she had been seduced hung over the street, balanced precariously on the remains of Rupert’s bedroom floor. Blindly she fled to search for him; could he have gone to her studio? There, propped on the landing, was a note from him, along with his guitar, his cat (in a basket) and his gas-mask. He had, it turned out, been saved by pure luck, having chosen the very moment when the bomb went off to go to the shelter and borrow sixpence for the gas meter. Days later, Joan was still delirious with relief at Rupert’s narrow escape – ‘It took that bomb on number 34 to make me realise how much I love him … this is the happiest time of my life.’
Mary Wesley’s wartime
novels such as
The Camomile Lawn
(1984) give form to her stated view that ‘war is very erotic, people had love affairs they would not otherwise have had.’ In 1940 the then Mary Swinfen, married to Charles Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen, was doing just that with an exiled Czech politician, a British soldier and an attractive Jewish-French barrister who had escaped from the Nazi invasion of France. There were to be many others – pilots, paratroopers, officers, commandos, French, Poles, Americans, flames old and new. For women like Mary, with the audacity to disobey the rules, there seemed nothing to be lost. ‘We had been brought up so repressed,’ wrote Wesley. ‘War freed us. We felt that if we didn’t do it now, we might never get another chance.’ Being a passive, docile instrument of men’s desires was not Mary’s style; the shriek of bombs released explosive energies in her.
With death raining down, sex was a way to challenge extinction.
Phyllis Noble noticed
that the Blitz had reinvigorated her parents’ sex life – she could hardly fail to, walking in from work one day to find them making love in the sitting room armchair in broad daylight.
In the London Underground
shelters, one might catch an occasional glimpse of a couple having intercourse in the darker recesses beyond
the tracks. ‘
I had seen a couple
locked together during the most terrible bombing, absolutely oblivious of anything except each other,’ remembered Frances Faviell. At moments of the most terrible bombing, expressing love physically was an act of defiance against the ruptured bones, the crushed guts – the living urgency of sex a kind of triumph over the gory imperatives of war. The available evidence suggests that fear, loss and destruction seem (to some extent) to have precipitated the sexual liberation of both men and women. Compared to the years before the war, in 1939–45 more women were having sex both before marriage and with men other than their husbands, more of them were contracting sexually transmitted diseases, more were using contraceptives, and women’s knowledge of the facts of life increased. The divorce rate also increased at this time.
The extremes of
Blitzkrieg
exploded our cities, our factories and our infrastructure. Now, as violent death sabotaged family life, as everything dear and familiar to women was smashed to tatters and fragments, it was exploding the sexual contract.
4 ‘Ready to Win the War’
White Alert
The unwritten contract between men and women was questioned as never before in 1941. That year, British civilians continued to endure intense bombing raids, while their forces were beleaguered in the Balkans, North Africa and the Atlantic. It was during these dark days that people began to see that the war could not be won without the active involvement of women.
Most histories of the Second World War trace its narrative from conflict to conflict. The timeline of 1941 pinpoints naval losses, the escalating North African campaign, sea battles off Greece, the evacuation of Crete. This is history experienced by men. For most women it was a different story.
In the summer of 1941
Kaye Bastin’s husband was thousands of miles away, and she was pregnant. Born Kathleen Emery in 1921, she, like so many girls of her generation, had grown up believing that she had no opportunities in the world. Though middle-class, her family had lost money in the Depression. One-time owners of a hotel outside Brighton, the Emerys were reduced to living in three rooms above a sweetshop. The best cards in Kaye’s hand were her looks and her educated speaking voice. A personable blonde with a tidy taste in clothes, she was also intelligent and straightforward in manner. But she was forced to leave school at fourteen, and life lacked promise:
I had no ambitions. I just got on with what I had to do. I never thought I’d get married, because we hadn’t any money.
Kaye got a job in the accountancy office of Plum & Roddis’s department store in Brighton. On seventeen shillings a week she could afford to go dancing with a girlfriend, so long as she did her own dressmaking and never went to the hairdresser. Nothing in this limited life had given her any foretaste of the licence and self-determination that war would bring with it. That summer, from
the window of her office overlooking the coast, Kaye was able to watch dogfights between German bombers and Spitfires launched from RAF Tangmere just twenty-five miles away. In August 100 Stukas dive-bombed the airbase, flattening it and killing twenty people. Brian Bastin, a ground-based engineer with the RAF, was one of those who had a narrow escape; that night he slept in the fields. A few months later Kaye and Brian met on the dance floor:
They had a ‘Paul Jones’ – you know, when the music stops the boys keep moving, and you get a change of partner. But Brian wasn’t dancing, he was hiding behind a pillar – and he came forward and took me. And that’s how I met my husband-to-be.
Afterwards, he asked if he could walk me home, and he saved my life. He had heard some German aircraft unloading their spare bombs. He grabbed me, and pushed me against the wall.
Kaye found Brian irresistible. Not only was he her saviour, but he also turned out to be musical and well educated. And as if that weren’t enough, Brian Bastin had the dash and glamorous good looks of a young Clark Gable, pencil moustache and all. The pair got married in April 1941. Kaye was twenty.
The wedding was a very simple affair. I had a piece of nice blue material and a friend made up my dress for me, with a hat to match. And it was lovely, getting married.
Afterwards we were going to live in Rustington, near where Brian was stationed. Well, on our wedding night there was bombing. And we hadn’t gone to the shelter – one didn’t, always – and the ceiling fell in on our bed, the first night.