Authors: Virginia Nicholson
57.
Frances Faviell. (From
A Chelsea Concerto
)
58.
An old woman shovelling debris in the Russian Zone of Berlin. (Getty Images)
59.
Vicar’s wife and activist Irene Lovelock, flanked by two other leaders of the British Housewives’ League. (Sport and General Press Agency)
60.
The harvest of peace, July 1948: the inauguration of the National Health Service. (Topham)
61.
Happy ever after? Helen Vlasto’s wedding day, 28 November 1946. (From
Change into Uniform
)
62.
Peter and Phyllis Willmott in 1948, at the start of their forty-two-year marriage. (From
Joys and Sorrows
)
63.
Laura Jesson chooses home and hearth in Noël Coward’s
Brief Encounter
. (ITV/Rex Features)
Illustrations in the Text
p. 27
‘But What About the Gases that Burn?’, advertisement in the
Daily Sketch.
p. 29
‘With the Home Guard’, wartime postcard.
p. 43
‘Your New Ration Books’, public notice issued by the Ministry of Food.
p. 51
‘My nerves went to pieces …’, Horlicks advertisement.
p. 91
Evening Standard
story on the rescue of Lifeboat 12.
p. 95
An illustration from the
Fire Party Handbook
showing how to put out incendiaries.
p. 112
‘The Shape of Things to Come’: Bevin’s attempt to persuade women to accept conscription, cartoon in the
Daily Sketch.
p. 121
Doris White’s illustration of herself and her mum arriving in Wolverton, from
D for Doris, V for Victory
.
p. 131
Humorous postcard showing the problem of substandard underwear elastic.
p. 145
Sketch of ATS ‘kitting-out’ session, cartoon by ATS recruit ‘Panda’ Carter.
p. 147
Women in pubs, from
Punch
, 28 July 1943.
p. 153
A Kentish land girl’s view of cabbage-cutting, sketch in the diary of Barbara Hill.
p. 177
‘Shoot straight, Lady’, advertisement in the
Daily Sketch
.
p. 183
Female clippie on the bus, from
Punch
, 30 August 1944.
p. 185
Factory worker and baby, from the
Daily Sketch
, 1942.
p. 196
British women and American GIs, from
Punch
, 1 November 1944.
p. 223
‘I had a simply wonderful leave …’, from
Punch
, 5 May 1943.
p. 226
‘Jane’ in the
Daily Mirror
.
p. 240
Sister Lorna Bradey’s citation, ‘Mentioned in Despatches’.
p. 255
Vera Lynn, the voice of the war, from the cover of a publication of wartime music and lyrics.
p. 262
Doris White’s illustration of glider-making, from
D for Doris, V for Victory
.
p. 290
‘Up Housewives and at ’em!’, advertisement in the
Daily Sketch
issued by the Ministry of Supply.
p. 299
Sketch of a concentration camp survivor by Eric Taylor.
p. 325
Women enraged by obstructive fishmongers, from
Punch
, 5 May 1946.
p. 330
The irrelevance of the election to many women, from
Punch
, 18 July 1945.
p. 334
‘It’s a new kind of bomb, darling …’, from
Punch
, 29 August 1945.
p. 348
Wren Rozelle Raynes’s sketch of herself setting out to seek her post-war fortune, in
Maid Matelot
.
p. 351
Newlyweds viewing a new ‘house’, from
Punch
, 31 October 1945.
p. 358
‘Tighten your belts everybody, please …’, from
Punch
, 18 August 1948.
p. 376
‘Greetings from Rainbow Corner’, wartime postcard.
p. 405
Winter 1947, from
Punch
, 12 March 1947.
p. 417
Dior’s New Look,
Punch
, 19 May 1948.
p. 431
Shopping by the help-yourself system, from the
Daily Express
, 20 January 1947.
p. 441
‘With these modern inventions housework’s a pleasure’, from
Punch
, 11 December 1946.
Author’s Note
In July 2005 the Queen unveiled a memorial in Whitehall dedicated to ‘The Women of World War Two’. This massive bronze structure, twenty-two feet high, is studded with a row of oddly spooky disembodied uniforms. Hanging from the monument are the clothes and belongings of the servicewomen, factory workers, farm-workers and women who worked in hospitals, emergency services and volunteer bodies across the nation between 1939 and 1945. They are suspended in a featureless void, with no faces, no personalities. In its way the monument is a perfect metaphor for our state of national amnesia. Six million-odd women threw their energies into the home front. 640,000 British servicewomen played their part in helping to win the war. Of these, 624 died for their country.
*
But many of them are still alive.
Surely their endurance, their adventures, their sacrifices, their personalities are worthy of a deeper appreciation. This book asks, who were they? And what did it feel like to be them? I wanted to find out not only what they did in the war, but what the war did to them and how it changed their subsequent lives and relationships.
The chapters that follow are arranged chronologically, with the personal stories of a fifty-strong cast of characters in the spotlight against a backdrop of important social, political and international events: a momentous decade, seemingly familiar to many of us, but seen entirely through the eyes of the women who lived it. My approach to historical research is, as far as possible, to merge it with biography, and the telling of stories. I believe that the personal and idiosyncratic reveal more about the past than the generic and comprehensive. (A small note here: my intermittent – but, I think, authentic – use of the word ‘girl’ to describe the young women of the 1940s may sound a little patronising today, but back then it was
their own preferred term, and was also universally used in the press and literature.)
Among the many elderly women whom I interviewed and whose stories appear in these pages is my mother, Anne Popham, as she then was. Not because her experiences were unusual or heroic, but precisely because they weren’t. There have been numerous books celebrating the courage of women agents parachuted behind enemy lines in France, women in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, women pilots from the Air Transport Auxiliary who delivered Spitfires to their airfields. Odette Hallowes and Dame Margot Turner have earned their place in history alongside Douglas Bader and Stanley Hollis. My mother is now ninety-four years old. Like most of our mothers and grandmothers, and like the majority of women in this narrative, she grew up in a world that seemed small and sedate and did nothing starry or distinguished in the war. When it was declared in 1939 she was ordinary, frightened and unsuspecting. But six years of conflict reordered that world; along with an entire generation, she awoke to her own post-war potential. In all these respects she was entirely typical of the many millions for whose sake I have borrowed my title. (
Millions Like Us
was a propaganda movie made by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat in 1943, to persuade women to join the war effort.)
If I could have chosen another title, it might have been ‘We Just Got on with It’ – the mantra of every woman I spoke to who lived through the war. So this book is not only an attempt to characterise that faceless war memorial, it is also my tribute to a generation of brave, stoical, unselfish, practical and uncomplaining women, whose values, along with their deeds, seem to be passing into history.
Prelude
A little over eighty years ago
a very ordinary girl
named Phyllis Noble was growing up in a terraced house with an outside toilet in Lewisham, south London. She was born in 1922. Her dad was a jobbing builder, and like many in the 1930s his trade was falling off; the Nobles’ financial situation was not improved by his fondness for the pub. Phyllis’s mum looked after the extended family of grandparents, in-laws and her own three children, who all lived under the same roof. As a role model Mum never overstepped the limits; she was first, foremost and exclusively a housewife, whose life revolved around the daily routine of shopping, cooking and washing. Despite the family’s straitened circumstances Phyllis had a happy, rumbustious childhood. The kitchen in their cramped terrace house was a haven, and even when Dad had had a drop too much the family was united, roaring and joking when he let out one of his spectacularly loud farts. Phyllis was clever; but when she succeeded in winning a scholarship to a grammar school in Greenwich, Mum, disgusted at the expense of the uniform, launched a family battle to stop her daughter going. In any case getting educated would, in her view, be a pointless waste of time, since there was no alternative to the trap that she had herself been forced to enter twenty years earlier: that of marriage and motherhood.
To Phyllis’s relief Mum was overruled by Dad, and in 1933 she took her first apprehensive steps away from the crowded, working-class, patriarchal world of her childhood. A better accent and a better life beckoned, alongside dreams of romance and escape from her proletarian background. But by the time she was sixteen it was 1938. Dad sat gloomily at home reading the newspaper reports about mass unemployment and the threat of war.
In June 1939, aged seventeen, Phyllis Noble joined the ranks of the so-called ‘business girls’. She was to be a ledger clerk at the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate. Her workplace was a gloomy, noisy Victorian hall. Seated on a backless stool before her cumbersome ledger
machine (a kind of monstrous typewriter), Phyllis was one of hundreds like her who spent their days sorting through piles of cheques, orders and statements to reconcile the bank’s accounts. Prospects for women in this world were ‘virtually nil’. Like their working-class counterparts, the maidservants in their basements and pantries, the business girls tended to be time-servers, dreaming of ensnaring their boss or male colleague into marriage. Then they could leave:
For women the main road was to matrimony. Judging by the total absence of married women and the scarcity of older, unmarried ones, this was a destination which most women who strayed into the banking world reached soon enough. And indeed with so many young men around, head office at least served well as a marriage market.
Years later, Phyllis told the story of her teenage years and early adulthood in two short memoirs entitled
A Green Girl
(1983) and
Coming of Age in Wartime
(1988). She had grown up, married a man named Peter Willmott and become, not a film star or a literary virtuoso, but a respected social scientist. There is little to set her early life apart from the great mass of the working class to which she belonged – so what made her think her unexceptional adolescence was interesting enough to be the material for a book? And yet it is, for the reason that she lived through extraordinary times. Phyllis’s life, like that of millions of her contemporaries in mid-twentieth century Britain, was about to be shaken to its foundations by uncontrollable international events. It would never recover its stability.
For skinny Jean McFadyen
– like Phyllis, born in 1922 – a life of obscurity and narrow horizons was also about to be changed for ever. Jean had been brought up in a remote country area of Argyllshire. With an ailing mother and little twin sisters who needed looking after, she left school at thirteen-and-a-half to help. But when her mother regained her health the family couldn’t afford to keep Jean in education. There was no local work for girls, so at the earliest opportunity her parents sent her off to be housemaid to a landowner in Inveraray. ‘I was the junior of the housemaids, so I got all the dirty work to do …’ From morning till night there were beds to make, commodes to empty, grates to black-lead. Eighty years ago there was nothing unusual in such a life for a country-born Scottish teenager, but even then Jean could sense that there was no future in it. ‘It was a
dead-end job,’ she recalls. ‘I was seventeen – very quiet and shy, and I hadna mixed very much with people my own age. But I knew there was other things in the world. I knew there was something that I was not having, and I wanted a share of it.’ The disaster that befell Europe a few years later brought untold evil and tribulation, but for Jean the Second World War was to offer an education, a chance of liberty and a source of self-confidence.
Five hundred miles away in Somerset,
Patience Chadwyck-Healey
, the daughter of a city businessman, was growing up to be waited on by young women like Jean. The Chadwyck-Healey family divided its time between London and a country residence near to Exmoor. ‘We rode and hunted all day - I lived in the saddle. There was a large staff who looked after us, and we were brought up not to go into the kitchen or do anything for ourselves. In fact my aunt was proud of the fact that she didn’t know how to make a cup of tea.’ Patience was born in 1917; in her nineties she is still poised and sprightly, a product of her class. Her education consisted of day school in London, followed by six months being ‘finished’ in Paris (‘as so many of us did’). In 1935 she donned her ostrich feathers and was presented at Court, before ‘doing’ two glitzy seasons as a debutante. ‘We were very ignorant and romantic … attracted in a starry-eyed way to the young chaps we were dancing with. I had no ambitions. I lived very much in the present and enjoyed what there was. I don’t ever remember thinking ahead as to what my eventual life might be. I think I hoped that it would be rather nice if I met a young man …’ For a brief moment Patience considered doing an outside course at university, ‘… but I had no idea how it worked. Then they wrote back and told me I had to sit some exams, so I thought better of it.’ Nothing had prepared this young lady for the approaching derailment of her privileged life at the age of just twenty-two.