Authors: Virginia Nicholson
‘
Hearts do break,’
remembered Bradford shop assistant Dorothy Griffiths. The staff of the branch of Marks and Spencer where she worked was fragmented by the war. Early on, one of her male colleagues had been shot down in the sea at Dunkirk. Ada, who worked with Dorothy in menswear, came from a family which seemed to have been singled out by a merciless fate. Her sister’s fiancé had been drowned in a submarine; her brother Tommy had also been lost at sea. His wife Sally was helpless, distraught: ‘[she] had only lived for the time that Tommy would come home.’ Then it was Ada’s turn: she contracted TB and died at twenty-one. Not long afterwards, Dorothy herself was at work when she received a cablegram telling her of the death of her brother Neville on board his ship in the south Atlantic. ‘I collapsed under the counter. I remember someone helping me upstairs to the rest room. I couldn’t talk … They sent me home with one of the girls. I’d no tears left.’ Later, she had to give comfort when Mollie, one of the other shop girls, got the news that she had dreaded. Her husband, who worked in bomb disposal, had been the victim of an explosion. ‘There were no survivors. We were all devastated for Mollie.’
Today, Cora Williams
(née Styles) lives alone in a spotless bungalow near the Hampshire coast. Now in her late eighties, she’s still full of fight, plain-spoken and secure in her opinions. She has learned that life is a battle.
Cora Styles was only fifteen when she met her fiancé Don Johnston at a dance hall in 1938, ‘and by golly, couldn’t he dance too!’ Don joined the Royal Navy when war broke out, and in 1941 Cora left her office job at Ingersolls watch and clock factory in Clerkenwell to marry him. Her in-laws, whom she adored, were as happy as she was. ‘It was a lovely old-fashioned wedding. Don looked so handsome in his uniform. To be together was all we wanted.’ They started their married life in Londonderry, where Don’s ship was based. She was happy in ‘beautiful Ireland’, and her young husband was everything to her: ‘We were always laughing. Life was so good, you know – he was such fun. But it wasn’t to be.’
Don’s ship was on Atlantic convoys – ‘[He] was gone a couple of weeks, home a few days and then gone again.’ Then they were recalled to the navy’s main base at Chatham. Sadly, they missed seeing Don’s parents, who had sailed only two days earlier for America. ‘We tried to resume a life.’
It never, never occurred to me that anything would happen to him. Never. Well, in May ’42 Don was put on the aircraft carrier the
Avenger
as a stores rating. And then one night I was at my mother’s, and he rang me there and he said ‘I shan’t be seeing you for a while.’ Well of course he couldn’t say anything more precise than that. And so I said OK.
It was at this point that Cora decided to volunteer for the Wrens:
They used to say ‘Release a man for the sea.’ I thought Don would be pleased, when he eventually knew …
Well, it turned out he was back on the convoys. The
Avenger
sailed from Scotland and took troops down to North Africa. And having left North Africa they were off the Portuguese coast and a U-boat came up at half past three in the morning and fired a torpedo and it went amidships and hit the bomb room. And the ship blew in half, and nearly 600 men were lost. And I think actually that most of them didn’t know it happened. They must have been blown to hell.
But the first I knew of it was when I looked in the paper. They used to publish a list of ships that had gone down. And when I saw it I thought no – it can’t possibly be, they must have made a mistake. I had had no telegram, so it could not be right.
Disbelieving, Cora waited. Soon after, a cable arrived from Don’s parents, asking for news of him. She went down to the Naval Barracks Welfare section, and it was only then that she discovered what had happened:
It seems Don had never changed his next of kin when he married, so the telegram reporting him missing must have gone to his parents’ old address, and I assumed it got lost, as they were in America.
When I left the barracks, I felt stunned, I just could not believe what I had been told … It was raining stair-rods. You’ve never seen rain like it, it was literally throwing it down from the heavens. My mind seemed to have gone blank, I hardly noticed how wet I was getting. I started counting the bricks in the six-foot wall I passed, which stretched back to the High Street. The most sad thing I then had to do was cable Don’s parents: ‘Missing. Presumed killed.’
I was in a bad state. One didn’t have an understanding of what these men had gone through. They’d been blown apart. Years later I managed to get in contact with one of the survivors. He’d been on watch the night before, when they were coming out of the Med. And he saw the torpedo go past and hit the ship. And he said, ‘It was the most terrible sight I’ve ever seen in my life, and it still lives with me today.’
Widowed at eighteen, Cora Johnston (as she was now) took stock of her situation. She was waiting to hear from the Wrens, and she had no more than £49 in the bank.
I sat down and thought about things. My parents wanted me to go home and live with them and I said, ‘No, I’m going to stand on my own feet.’ So I went to the Post Office and volunteered for a Christmas job.
However, the Christmas job defeated her. Weighed down by cumbersome parcels – many of them containing bleeding gifts of furred and feathered game sent by sporting Scots to their protein-starved southern relatives – she gave in her notice, exhausted.
But the Wrens were to prove a lifeline. ‘On January 3rd they sent for me.’
Cora still had a long road to travel.
I’m someone who fights back. I’ve done it all my life. And I’m still doing it. I’m like a dog with a bone – I never ever give up.
But take it from me, you never get over it. The pain is there now, today – you never ever lose it. I still get upset. It’ll stay with me until the day I die – but whether I shall ever meet him again I don’t know.
*
Cora feels that her life has been ‘a fight from the cradle to the grave – the latter being a way off yet! I think the war turned me from a silly lovesick girl into a strong woman.’
Her experience, and that in many other accounts of lives lived through the 1940s, suggests that by its midpoint the war was starting to have a transformative effect on the women of this country. The demure, retiring, unambitious young woman of 1938 had had some hard knocks. She had felt fear, smelled death in the Blitz, dealt with body parts, seen her possessions scattered and her home destroyed. She had been bombed, bullied by regimental sergeant-majors, burned by slag and blinded by hot steel. The hierarchies that had structured her everyday existence – class, culture and sexual divisions – were all being challenged. She had new skills, new responsibilities, while at the same time learning to live without much that, materially, she had taken for granted. Meanwhile, the men she loved were far away. At any time the news might come that they were wounded, imprisoned, disfigured or dead. But she was adapting, starting to become stronger, more independent, more reliant on her innate wits and abilities.
Ask any woman who lived through that time how she coped, and the chances are she will give the same simple, stoical answer: ‘You just got on with it.’
*
A spotlight is all the brighter when the other lights are lowered. Perhaps living through those troubled, blacked-out times sharpened a sense of gratitude for moments of uncontaminated pleasure. And, too, the delight in nature and landscape; in affection and gratified desire; in food, sleep, laughter, dancing, art, a new hat or an afternoon at the pictures were in some measure enhanced by the constant reminders that love would pass and life was short. Perhaps they just
had no tears left. How else to account for the curious statistic that emerged from
a Blitz survey,
that a fifth of women felt happy more often than before the war?
On 10 May 1942, the same day that three Royal Navy destroyers were torpedoed in the Mediterranean with over 100 lives lost,
Nella Last and her husband
packed a picnic of stewed prunes ‘and a tiny piece of cake’ and drove to Coniston Lake, their favourite beauty spot. After they’d eaten Nella napped in the car, then went for a stroll in the wood:
The fragrant larch boughs swung in the wind, but as I went deeper all was quiet and still, and the blue hyacinths shimmered in shafts of sunlight. Such peace, such beauty.
Doffy Brewer still remembers
the rapture she felt when her work as a kine-theodolite operator took her to the deep west of Wales, where gunners were sent to train:
We were in Manorbier, which is a tiny village on the coast near the most beautiful countryside you’ve ever seen, with cliffs, and flowers. Oh, it was exquisite, it was absolutely lovely.
Our spirits used to go free, up on those cliffs. I learned to breathe, to be, to enjoy just being alive …
I used to lie down on those flowers and imagine all the plants that were there. I was enjoying myself in a way I’d never done before. I felt transformed.
And when she wasn’t kitted out for an evening’s dancing at the Institute,
Doris Scorer’s days off
from the Wolverton Works often meant sunny afternoons at the ‘bathings’ – a stretch of the River Ouse on the town outskirts where teenagers like her met to sunbathe, splash and flirt. It was here that Doris first met Frank White – ‘we were like soul mates’. Frank, though by origin a townie like her, knew the countryside like the back of his hand and, with Doris in her fancy shoes picking her way between the cowpats, the pair would roam the river meadows among the primroses, skimming stones and startling the water rats. Later in the year they gathered blackberries and investigated animal tracks in the snow. One evening they saw the Aurora Borealis. ‘Happy days.’
For those like Nella, Doffy or Doris who weren’t homeless,
maimed or bereaved, maintaining non-stop gloom was just too much effort. The human instinct for pleasure found outlets where it could. Nella was perhaps happiest when she felt she was using her housewifely skills to greatest effect. At the end of an exhausting day unpicking a second-hand mattress, washing its cover and remodelling it into four smaller mattresses with the aid of half a dozen sugar sacks, she recorded: ‘I think I’m the tiredest and happiest woman in Barrow tonight!’ She had the capacity to find fulfilment in the small finite tasks of the home, each with its own sense of meaning, its own sense of completion. Christmas 1942 was a time of profound shortages. Being able to poach some hard-won eggs and open a hoarded tin of apricots, to be served with ‘cream’ whisked up from powdered milk and water with a little sugar, gave Nella intense satisfaction. ‘Never since the boys left home have I prepared Christmas Eve tea so happily.’ And what joy she felt, opening her presents the next day, to find two pairs of silk knickers in a parcel from her daughter-in-law Edith, and a book of stamps from her young neighbour Margaret.
Small delights grew in proportion to their scarcity. At a time when eggs were almost non-existent
Mary Fedden went
to the grocer and managed to get two, one of which had a double yolk. ‘We thought that was the luckiest thing that happened to us in the war.’
Barbara Pym was
even luckier; she got hold of a seven-pound jar of marmalade: ‘Not even love is so passionately longed for.’ At the end of a day of black depression, missing her prisoner-of-war son, engulfed with uncertainty about the future,
Clara Milburn found
that going to church lifted her spirits. And later she went out into the garden, rejoiced quietly at the fading colours, took true pleasure in her new permanent wave and felt blessed by the regeneration of a damaged thumbnail that had finally ceased to be unsightly. What luck, too, to possess a wickerwork wheelbarrow, a sweet dog like Twink, friends and a home.
Hard work brought unexpected rewards.
Susan Woolfit’s war work
as a member of the all-female crew of a narrow-boat plying the inland waterways of Britain gave her life new meaning; petty irritations melted away in the face of an engrossing and physically demanding activity. Housework, queues, rations, responsibilities, keeping up appearances and the sheer ennui of war were replaced by thrilling excitement: ‘I was enjoying every second of it.’ She loved
the boats themselves, their cosy cabins shared with congenial companions; she loved the still black nights on the canals, and the early mornings as the boats started up again, with the locks clanging and the water surging. Her work left her ‘revitalised and vibrating with life and new hope’.
‘
You lived at that period
from day to day,’ says Cora Johnston. ‘You had to because you would have gone under if you hadn’t. Today was IT – because you never knew if the next day was going to be your last.’ In some ways war made life less complicated. ‘Why hesitate? Why defer?’ was the insistent message that drummed through every disaster, every blow dealt by fate: ‘Do it today. Do it now. Work – travel – experiment – enjoy – dance – love – live.’
Out of Bounds
Phyllis Noble longed
for adventure. But, aged twenty-one, she felt trapped in a backwater. She had never in her life travelled more than 50 miles beyond London. Now, three and a half years after the declaration of war, she was still living under her parents’ roof in Lewisham, still a wage-slave, still enduring the daily ordeal of travelling through bombed streets to her ‘reserved occupation’ in the foreign accounts section of the National Provincial Bank. ‘That wretched bank. I’m so fed up with the endless routine work I could scream and scream every time I sit down at that hateful machine … It is high time I started making up my mind what I really want in life,’ she confided to her diary, listing love, travel, a minimum of two babies and educational improvement (‘there is so much I
want
to learn’) as essential must-dos for the future.