Millions Like Us (25 page)

Again and again women cite uniform as being the key factor in their choice of service. With her fearless look, sprightly smile and upright bearing, the image of a woman in collar, tie and a jaunty hat came to epitomise the British war effort. She radiated from thousands of recruitment posters, magazine covers and advertisements.
A dazzling Wren
exhorted the public to buy Kolynos toothpaste; three immaculately-coiffed servicewomen beamingly beseeched the public to invest in National Savings Certificates, while in an ad for sanitary protection two ATS girls were seen striding confidently to their duties: ‘Women are winning the war – of Freedom!’ ran the copy, which also included the useful reminder that ‘Tampax takes up next to no kit room.’ As a role model the woman in uniform was glamorous and gung-ho, willing and steadfast, stout-hearted and dedicated. But her unshakable direct gaze also called into question centuries of doe-eyed submission, replacing fuzzy sweetness, modesty and humility with an entirely new incarnation of womanhood. This was not the devil-may-care hoyden or flapper of the 1920s; nor did she have much in common with her 1930s successor, discreet and golden-voiced, whose sole aim was to marry the boss. This young woman was imbued with a higher purpose, she had a vision. For her, King and country came before hearth and home.

Not everyone welcomed this unfamiliar reversal.
Clara Milburn and her husband
were deeply shocked when they heard that Princess Elizabeth had joined the ATS: ‘We did
not
approve.’ Early on,
the
Daily Mail
invited readers
to send in their ideas for what they most hated about the war. ‘Women in uniform’ came top. Servicewomen had to contend with prejudice and intolerance. Often, women themselves were hostile to their own kind.
Vera Roberts trained
with the ATS at a base near Harrogate, a bastion of the Yorkshire bourgeoisie:

A lot of people had a real down on women like us in uniform … and the Harrogate ladies gave you a dirty look and just spat in front of you. They thought we were the lowest of the low – that we were common, I suppose. I’ve never forgotten that.

The implication was that a woman prepared to wear collars and ties and brass buttons – not to mention the horror of trousers – must be immoral. Men equated ‘masculine’ garments with the possession of masculine characteristics: as in ‘
she would immediately stride
and
shout and swear and drink’. There was the fear that such women might stray into male territory, and avail themselves of male liberties.
It still wasn’t
thought proper for women to enter a pub, ‘not if you were what was considered well brought-up. Only tarts did that!’ The public – as here, interrogated by Mass Observation – viewed drinking servicewomen as sexually ‘easy’:

Those ATS girls
were a disgrace. They come into this pub at night and line up against that wall. Soldiers give them drinks and when they’re blind drunk they carry them out into the street. And we’re paying public money for them too!

‘Time, gentlemen, please.’ Women in uniform, and women in pubs. What was the world coming to?

Army girls in particular, perceived as lower class, were singled out for abuse: ‘
nothing but a league
of amateur prostitutes’, ‘bloody whores the lot of them’. And the wits had a field day, attaching innuendoes to volunteer and conscript alike: the ATS were ‘
officers’ groundsheets’,
while the WAAFs were ‘pilots’ cockpits’. If you joined the Land Army, it was ‘Backs to the Land’, or if you preferred the Naval Service, it was ‘Up with the lark and to bed with a Wren.’

It would appear from this that much of the public found it hard to cope with the reinvention of womanhood through uniform. The
look, the anonymity, the sense both of cohesiveness and confidence delivered too many mutinous messages. Joining up meant escape from controls and subjection, but it also meant laying yourself open to abuse and vulgarity. You couldn’t win.

Or perhaps you could.
In her account
of life in the ATS, Hilary Wayne reflected that putting on uniform had a transformative effect.

I think we not only looked different, we felt different … I personally felt less self-conscious … The fact that we were all dressed exactly alike gave me the comfortable feeling that, whatever happened, I could not be conspicuous.

And it could be better than that: for its wearers, uniform served as a guarantee of respectability, inviolability almost. Drivers, for example, gave you lifts and bought you meals. ‘
I never had any trouble
at all,’ recalled a nurse who like many others regularly thumbed rides when she was in uniform.
Eileen Rouse came back
to her native Plymouth after six weeks’ ATS training in Honiton, pleased as punch with her new clothes: ‘Oh dear me, I thought I was the cat’s whiskers with me shirt and me tie, and I don’t mind telling you, me mum and dad was proud of me when I came home!’
For Pat Bawland,
a childhood of poverty, hunger and pawn shops had been followed by work as a lowly invoice typist on fifteen shillings a week. Putting on the uniform of the Wrens was for her a crowning achievement:

I’d always had hand-me-down clothes. When I actually was supplied with my uniform, it was wonderful – the quality of it!

Pat’s time in the Wrens had given her a precious, and enduring, self-esteem:

Going in the Wrens changed me. I learned that, though you could be proud when you’re wearing rags, you can do better when you’re smart. And the beautiful lace-up shoes! – I polished them till they shone! I was the smartest one in our group. And being in uniform I became one of many the same. The only difference was in our speaking and our jobs, but we all sat down to the same meals. I didn’t have to lie about my dinner. I didn’t have to lie that I’d had breakfast. And I didn’t have to think about pawn shops any more. I could live like a normal human being.

Few servicewomen seem to have had their new self-respect dented by the continued mutterings about immorality. The pride, esprit de
corps and the sense that being in uniform gave, that one was part of something bigger than oneself, all contributed to the reality of wartime emancipation.
Flo Mahony’s feelings
were typical of many:

In my uniform I was confident to go anywhere and do anything. It was quite different to being a civilian. In a way it was the making of me. Wearing a uniform, you felt part of something bigger. And you really felt you were
somebody
.

The Lowest Form of Life

The Women’s Land Army was regarded by many as being at the bottom of the status pile; the clothes were inferior, and the work would ruin nicely kept hands. Even so it had special attractions. Some fearful recruits saw it as an escape from the bombing, others as offering a less regimented life with fewer brass buttons to polish.

Twenty-year-old Jean McFadyen
from rural Argyllshire felt she was a nobody. Her decision to join the Women’s Land Army was based on her humble view that this service was the right level for her. But she too was among the approximate 40 per cent of women who chose it because she actually liked the smart uniform:

I wouldn’t have minded if I thought I could have got into the Wrens or the WAAFs, but I didn’t want to go into the ATS. I didn’t like the uniform! That horrible khaki!

So one day I was out walking through the central part of Edinburgh and I saw a cardboard cut-out of a girl in uniform. They were recruiting for the Women’s Timber Corps. And when I saw the cut-out I thought, ‘That’s for me, that’s the uniform I want’. So I went in and volunteered.

Till 1942, Jean’s world had been confined to the sculleries and pantries of the lairds and moneyed individuals who employed her in Argyllshire and Edinburgh. Jim Park, her boyfriend, had worked in a biscuit factory but had been conscripted into the 51st Highland Division; the relationship had not developed as far as a commitment before he went abroad. Knowing that her own call-up was imminent, she was one of many who decided to leap before they were pushed.

The Timber Corps was a section of the Land Army. Jean was
handed a registration card; she still has it. It proclaims: ‘You are now a Member of the Women’s Land Army. Your Country Welcomes your Services.’

Peggy Scott described the Land Army girls in
British Women at War
. Scott presented a version of them as free spirits who preferred rosy cheeks and a windblown hairstyle to the buttoned-up presentation of the ATS. Cleaning out pigsties held no horrors for this type; her motherly instincts stood her in good stead caring for animals and milking cows, and the fresh air did wonders for her complexion. In the evenings there was time to take up water-colouring, and in spring to rhapsodise over the antics of newborn lambs. In reality the Land Army, especially the Timber Corps, was far from being a pastoral soft option.

Jean McFadyen was sent to a remote area of Aberdeenshire, where she was trained in the use of tools and the basics of forestry work, including axe-swinging. The girls were issued with work clothes – a greatcoat, bib-and-brace denim overalls, a mackintosh, Wellington boots and two pairs of thick woollen socks – all a far cry from the smart ‘walking-out’ uniform that had attracted Jean on the cardboard cut-out. ‘The get-up did absolutely nothing for our vanity!’ The girls lived in communal huts, working and eating together. Their diet, she recalls, was principally spam, and mince. They slept in rows ‘army style’, alternately head-to-toe. ‘Your head would be at the bottom of the camp-bed with two pairs of feet on the beds either side of you. If you were caught moving your pillow up the other end you were in trouble … Lots of the girls cried themselves to sleep every night. We had blisters on our hands and feet.’

Once the training was over they were sent out to start their duties. Meeting Jean today, it is hard to imagine such a slight, bird-like woman undertaking such arduous work. Some of the girls worked in sawmills using chainsaws; but Jean was out felling, cross-cutting and snedding
^*
the timber by hand.

In summertime we started very early, but in winter we didn’t leave the camp till 8 in the morning. We had up to an hour’s drive away from the camp on an open-topped lorry before we got to our place of work. The first winter I was there it was freezing, and when I came home I couldn’t walk because my legs were rubbing against the damp denim. The next day I went to work wearing my pyjamas underneath my overalls! And that work was not easy. I had a sore back, sore legs, sore arms – and massive muscles!

Despite being skinny and barely five foot tall, Jean took her share of the weight, lifting whole felled trees and throwing them on to a stack taller than herself. It could take a dozen girls heaving together, always with two ‘heavyweights’ at either end, to get each trunk up on to the stack. They loaded the lorries, and two girls drove them to the station, where they were then unloaded on to the trains. Jean took her turn too with the sawmill teams – ‘I was always scared I would lose my fingers … it was known to happen.’

Despite the hardship Jean never regretted her decision to join up:

The war opened up life for me. I escaped from my mother’s eye. And I met people my own age, which I would not have done had the war not happened. I’d have probably gone on in service, and finished up an old maid.

For even in rural Aberdeenshire there were social compensations: on Friday nights the girls jumped off the lorry, fought for the bathroom, donned a dress, then walked three miles to the nearest village, where there were dances that lasted till one or two in the morning. By 1942 attractive men were in short supply – ‘there were farmer boys, wee laddies … But we danced with each other mostly. There was always a live band with accordions and fiddles, for reels and Scottish dancing.’ On Saturday afternoons they caught the bus into Aberdeen and went straight to the picture house. Jean’s trips into the city, thronging with servicemen, gave her a taste of bustle and activity: ‘it was a bit more fun, a bit more
life
, as it were’ (though she still felt incapable of entering a pub – nice Scottish girls simply didn’t). Jim, her boyfriend, was far away in North Africa with Monty’s Eighth Army; she felt no obligation to hold every soldier or sailor at arm’s length for the duration. ‘I was not above a kiss or a cuddle, no, that was permissible! We had a life!’

Nevertheless, the girls scrambled every evening for the post to see if letters had arrived from their sweethearts. There’d be giggles at the acronyms on the backs of envelopes: HOLLAND, for ‘Hope Our Love Lasts And Never Dies’, or ITALY, for ‘I Trust And Love You’.
It was Jim’s mother, however, who contacted Jean to tell her that her son was missing after the Battle of El Alamein. Days of suspense followed, before she got the news that he had been captured by the Germans. ‘It was horrible. But it was happening every day to somebody. Not that that helped.’ Jim spent the three remaining years of the war suffering mistreatment and malnutrition in a POW camp in Yugoslavia. Jean kept in touch, but she had her life to get on with: