Authors: Virginia Nicholson
14 March 1942
Let us see a state-sponsored plan for the systematic increase of our population before it is too late.
9 October 1942
What are we doing about our … birth-rate, the increase of which must be considerably curtailed by the fact that innumerable husbands serving in the forces have been sent overseas for the duration of the war?
One explanation given for the statistics was that parents were too filled with gloom about the future to go forth and multiply.
Mass Observation interviewed
a young woman – a midwife – who angrily accused the authorities of trying to persuade women to breed more soldiers as cannon fodder: ‘I think it’s horrible. They don’t want the babies for their own sakes at all, just for wars.’ However,
the 1943 figures, when they were published, showed an unexpected turnaround. Nicola was one of 811,000 babies born in the UK that year, a rise of 115,000 from 1941 figures. After that, the figures continued to increase. The analysts breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed that the practice and profession of motherhood would not go into irreversible decline and that we would not, after all, be overtaken by the fecund Germans. (When Naomi Mitchison’s daughter-in-law told her she was expecting a baby at this time, Naomi’s reaction was: ‘
It’s one in the eye
for Hitler.’) An explanation for much of this boost was that large numbers of young people born in the last, post-First World War baby boom were now reaching maturity. There was also the fact that 1939–40 had been a peak year for marriages. However, included in that 1943 figure of 811,000 births were 53,000 babies who were illegitimate – a figure also set to rise as the war progressed.
Behind the statistics lies a multitude of sad case histories.
On 23 March 1943
Nella Last confided to her diary the upsetting tale she had been told that day by a complete stranger at the WVS centre. This woman had burst into tears without warning; Nella fetched her a glass of water and listened while she unburdened herself: ‘I feel I’m going out of my mind with worry.’ Her twenty-three-year-old daughter, it appeared, was a married Wren, whose husband had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk. However the girl had no intention, it seemed, of repining; she was always the life and soul of every party, and it now transpired that she was five months pregnant. Between sobs, the mother told Nella that she and her husband were being torn apart by their daughter’s predicament; the father, in a great rage, accusing her of being a slut, with the mother inclining to believe her daughter’s tale: that she knew nothing of how this had happened and must have been ‘tight’ at the time. Nella sat with her and did her best to soothe her, but the poor woman was distraught.
Unmarried servicewomen who fell pregnant were duly noted on a POR, or Personal Occurrence Report, then issued with ‘Paragraph 11s’ and dismissed from the force. In the WAAFs, for example, ‘
it was a fate
worse than death to get pregnant – you were out!’
One ATS officer
posted to the Orkneys commented on the extreme number of ‘Para 11s’ issued in her company – inevitable, she suggested, given that there were no fewer than 10,000 men on the island
in two ack-ack brigades. However it could be hard to tell if the girls were pregnant, as the ATS uniforms were oddly bulky and could hide a multitude of sins. One girl was heard screaming in her hut; she was packed off to hospital with a case of ‘severe constipation’, where it turned out that she was giving birth.
Far worse was
the nightmare ordeal suffered by QA Lorna Bradey, who in 1942 was based in a Cairo hospital. While there she got a surprise message from an old nursing friend who had come down on leave from her hospital in Eritrea. ‘Could I come at once to her hotel … urgent.’ Lorna went down as soon as she was off duty and found her friend lying on the hotel bed, bleeding copiously. She had become pregnant by a very ‘high-up’ official and had travelled to Cairo for a backstreet abortion. To Lorna, who had studied midwifery, it was immediately plain that her friend could die at any moment and must be got to hospital. The friend begged her not to betray her secret, leaving Lorna no choice. She massaged her uterus, packed her out with towels, and obtained black-market antibiotics. ‘Sepsis was the thing I feared most. I made her swallow a good handful of these.’ Throughout the night Lorna sat with her, taking her weakening pulse, mopping up as coagulating blood and fragments of placenta came away from the welter of redness between her legs. At long last the antibiotics took hold, and the bleeding slowed. Lorna, having saved her friend’s life, visited her over the next week as she improved, after which she returned to her unit – ‘weak but alive’ – and well enough to spin a tale about ‘gippy tummy’. Despite Lorna’s stupendous efforts, this friend broke off contact with her after the war. She knew too much.
Barbara Cartland stressed,
however, that pregnant servicewomen like this were in a tiny minority. In her view, it was only surprising that there weren’t more illegitimacies in the services, considering the danger and proximity that men and women underwent together.
Civilian women were often fair game for the soldiers.
Seventeen-year-old Vivian Fisher’s
husband first deserted from the army and then walked out on her. Left on her own, Vivian took consolation in the arms of a soldier serving with the Royal Engineers; she had a baby girl by him, but he too beat a retreat. ‘I was devastated … it took me a time to get over the hurt.’ Her next baby, a boy, was born to Jimmy, an attractive GI who promised to marry her and
take her back with him to America. She would have gone had her errant husband not returned unexpectedly.
Another woman whose husband
was abroad slept with a GI and got pregnant but decided her lover must not know, otherwise he would never let her go. Heartbroken, she finished with him, while suffering torments at the thought that she was also deceiving her absent husband.
Distance could cause terrible misunderstandings.
A soldier based
in Iraq went to his brigadier in great distress, having received the following cable from his wife: SON BORN BOTH DOING WELL LOVE MARY. He hadn’t seen her for two years. The brigadier did his best to comfort the poor man, who departed – only to return shortly afterwards waving a letter which explained everything to his entire satisfaction. ‘It’s all right, sir, it’s not her it’s my
mother
. She’s a widow. Must have been playing around with some man.’
The agony aunts
did their best to respond to desperate women like this one who wrote in about their infidelities:
My husband is a prisoner of war, and I was dreadfully depressed and lonely until I met two allied officers who were very sweet to me. Now I realise that I am going to have a baby, and I don’t know which is the father.
Do anything to avoid hurting your husband, advised
Woman’s Own
.
Motherhood in wartime carried its own particular burdens.
Pregnant mums
(dubbed Woolton’s ‘preggies’ from the minister’s concern to distribute rations among the ‘priority classes’) didn’t get extra clothing coupons. They were expected to let out their existing dresses to fit, though with their green ration books they were first in line for extra milk, meat, eggs and orange juice concentrate. Bombs were blamed for miscarriages; babies might be born in air-raid shelters or under tables in the blackout; traumatised and exhausted, their mothers often found their milk supply dried up.
If you took the decision to evacuate your children for their safety there was the pain of separation. But
Madeleine Henrey
and her husband decided to stick it out in London for the duration. Little Bobby, born in summer 1939, grew up to the sound of exploding bombs, and his loving parents, who had already had to take the dreadful decision to leave Madeleine’s French mother behind in German-occupied Normandy, were reluctant to split up their family more than they had to. The Henreys had taken a small flat in the
Shepherd Market area of Mayfair; it was modern and solidly built. With a very young baby, Madeleine was not expected to take on war work; she spent her days wheeling the perambulator down the shrapnel-strewn pathways of Green Park, with Pouffy the Pekinese snuggled into Bobby’s coverlet. She got reproachful looks from some of the local Londoners who thought her misguided for keeping the child in the city, ‘but he grew plump and rosy-cheeked, oblivious of the thuds that woke us from time to time’. After a while the market costers and other shoppers got to know Bobby as ‘the child who would not be evacuated’ and treated him as a kind of mascot. When Robert Henrey returned from his office at the end of the day, he was often greeted by strangers giving him cheerful updates on his small son’s progress.
Verily Bruce was another
young mother who had no misgivings about her role in the war. In August 1940, when she married Donald and became Mrs Anderson, she reflected that she had now found her ‘real aim in life’. She continued to harbour writing ambitions, but despite Donald’s ministry post she was mostly kept too busy to fulfil them. Pregnant during the Blitz with the first of her five babies, she took up knitting ‘tiny garments’ and found the work so soothing that she was able to ignore the bombs. In spring 1941 Verily was awaiting the birth in a maternity home in Esher, in the next bed to Julie, a lively and loveable Cockney evacuee. Verily had Marian ten days after Julie’s little boy James was born. The mum network quickly proved valuable for them both. Julie was lodging with a horrible landlady who made her wash the baby’s nappies in a bucket in the yard; she was miserable. The Andersons had a spare room. Why shouldn’t Julie and her baby move in with them?
‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely!’ she said. And then she came back and said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t do it …’ And I said, ‘Oh, but it’s all arranged, our babies are going to be brother and sister …’ At which point she burst into tears and said, ‘You see I’m not married.’ ‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘that’s nothing! All the more reason why you should come.’ So she did, and she was absolutely wonderful, because I was very ill after the birth, and she just took over both babies until I was better and could help. And she could do the housework very much better than me!
By the time air raids on London resumed Verily had two small children. Three-year-old Marian found that the bombing provided a thrilling distraction from bed-time. As newborn Rachel slept beatifically in her cot she would bounce excitedly on her parents’ bed listening to the bombs whistling over St John’s Wood:
‘One two three and a –’
‘Bang!’ she shouted with delight as the bomb exploded.
‘More bangs?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Oh, the woos,’ she said regretfully of the all-clear, knowing it meant she must return to bed.
Soon after, Verily and her two small daughters evacuated to Gloucestershire and set up home with a couple of friends who were there, working as land girls. Their husbands were abroad, and one of them had a young baby. Cockney Julie and little James joined them, and Donald came when he could. While her friends were out milking cows and lifting turnips, Verily took lodgers, did the cooking, looked after the dogs and ran a kind of women’s baby co-operative for all four children.
Verily Anderson’s memoir of her wartime experiences sits oddly beside the piles of books written by so many of her female contemporaries, with titles like
We All Wore Blue
,
A WAAF in Bomber Command
or
The Girls Behind the Guns
. The servicewomen write about uniforms and drill, camps and operations, romances and mess dances. In
Spam Tomorrow
, Verily – and she was typical of many thousands – writes about maternity wards and sick infants, orange juice and sweets, about threadworm, tonsillitis, cod-liver oil and the balloon and cracker shortage, and about how the only way to obtain a nursery fireguard was to salvage one from a bomb site. Babies had become her life. Even when a well-meaning friend persuaded her to take an evening out and go dancing at the Bagatelle she found she had lost the appetite for adult dissipations. Reluctantly she put on her best dress, donned false eyelashes and accepted a glass of champagne. It was no good. Her favourite club just seemed tatty, and the clientèle looked shallow and laughable capering around the room. ‘We were … too sapped by the war and work and babies to do more than sit and wilt until the time was decent to go home.’
Under the Volcano
War and work and babies. Verily had a Cockney mother’s help and a husband at home, but she still felt drained and exhausted.
War and men, war and sex, war and relationships. Negotiating a personal life while holding up a gruelling job proved formidable enough – all the more so for the many whose war work took them far from home, at times into the field of battle.
In 1942–3 QA Lorna Bradey’s
career was to bring her up against some of the toughest challenges she had yet faced. She, and many women like her, endured the worst that battle zones could throw at her, proving the equal of men in stamina and courage.
Lorna’s story, told thirty years after the war had ended, is not exceptional. Her experiences were typical ones for the indomitable nurses who staffed army hospitals in combat zones wherever they were needed, but they offer a vivid case history of the everyday stress, danger and brutally hard work that women like her encountered on active service abroad. At the same time, Lorna’s account reminds us of the rapture, the thrills and the intensity bordering on hysteria that often accompanied the pressures. For Sister Bradey, those were days never to be forgotten.
Almost a year after Alamein, and with the Americans now firmly entrenched in the war, our enemies were beginning to take the defensive position. Early in July 1943 160,000 Allied soldiers landed in Sicily, taking the Italian and German divisions by surprise. From a British perspective, it was too early for a Second Front, and victory on the Italian mainland would re-establish Mediterranean dominance.