Millions Like Us (53 page)

The League, while stoutly maintaining that it was non-affiliated, drew its membership from the conservative middle-class. Because of this, it was infiltrated and identified with the doctrinaire right wing of the Tory Party, who feared and resisted socialism in all its guises. Rationing, and controls, came under that heading. Soon the BHL’s crusading protest on behalf of the housewife began to look like bigoted and reactionary extremism. The press reported scuffles and disturbances at BHL gatherings. Labour politicians took advantage of the mixed messages to discredit the housewives’ cause as propaganda, denouncing these ‘middle class women’ for stirring up unrest and disaffection with their policies. Women’s primary interests – home and family – fell victim to dissent, and before long the protesters were regarded as a parochial, if strident, minority.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Irene Lovelock and her tribe of honourably intentioned mothers and grannies. For six years they had meekly accepted the need for every aspect of their lives to be regulated by the state, and now their patience was wearing thin. With supply problems becoming ever worse, worry about food was even more intense in the post-war period than it had been during the years of conflict. Bread rationing, introduced in June 1946, was the last straw. But another whole six years would pass before queuing for brisket would become a memory.

*

Shirley Goodhart’s Mass Observation
diary provides an insight into the way intelligent women thought about politics in the weeks immediately after the war. A conversation Shirley had with her mother shortly after VE-day shows them both thoroughly engaged with the question of their future government, but it also shows a generational divide:

May 20th 1945

Mother and I sat up till midnight talking politics … Of Attlee: ‘I used not to like him, but I am changing my opinion and I think that he will be our next Prime Minister …’

I have said that I expect the General election to bring a Labour government with either Attlee or Bevin as Prime Minister. If Mother were free, I believe that she would vote Labour, but for my father’s sake I expect that she will vote Conservative. He always has been Conservative and is too old to change. Thank goodness she expects me to vote Labour! My parents-in-law would be horrified and to avoid arguments I shall have to be quite dumb about politics when I see them in the summer.

On 5 July the British electorate voted; the results were delayed three weeks until the 26th, because postal votes had to be gathered from servicemen and women still stationed abroad. Opinion polls which indicated a swing to Labour were generally disregarded, and few doubted that Churchill would gain a majority.

The Oxford student
Nina Mabey had decided to join the Labour campaign. Already this vibrant, clever young woman had broken loose from her parents’ right-wing political opinions, which to her seemed inexplicable. Nina felt unaccountably lucky to have got a place at a top-class university. At Somerville College, where she was reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics, she had given the matter much thought. It would be a betrayal, in her view, to use her classy college education to fast-track her way into the privileged ranks. Enthusiastically, she had joined the Labour Club. ‘Our duty was to make sure, when the war ended, that a new, happier, more generous society would take the place of the bad, old, selfish one.’ And this was the line she had argued, vehemently, one evening in 1944, with another undergraduate in her year-group who, she discovered, was steering an opposite course by joining the Conservatives. The young woman in question was chemistry student Margaret Roberts, later to become
Margaret Thatcher. She was ‘a plump, neat, solemn girl with rosy cheeks and fairish hair curled flat to her head who spoke as if she had just emerged from an elocution lesson.’ Though Nina felt her idealistic arguments to be compelling, she became aware after a while that they were not getting through. So she changed her tack. How on earth could one want to be associated with such a stuffy institution as the Conservative Club, when the Labour affiliates were all so much more fun? All the
really
interesting people were members.

Margaret smiled, her pretty china doll’s smile. Of course, she admitted, the Labour Club was, just at the moment, more
fashionable
– a deadly word that immediately reduced my pretensions – but that, in a way, unintentionally suited her purposes. Unlike me, she was not ‘playing’ at politics. She meant to get into Parliament and there was more chance of being noticed in the Conservative Club just because some of the members were a bit stodgy.

By the summer of 1945, however, Nina and her ‘fashionable’ friends were electioneering in earnest.
The Labour manifesto,
entitled
Let Us Face the Future
, promised the Dunkirk spirit applied to the tasks of peace. ‘The whole Labour movement was riding on a high tide of hope.’ Nina and a group of Socialist activists from Oxford decamped to nearby Reading and threw their energies into Ian Mikardo’s campaign. Mikardo, a prominent advocate of nationalisation and the extension of wartime controls, was hoping to overturn a safe Conservative majority of 4,591. The students were swept up in an atmosphere of feverish political excitement. In bus queues, in pubs and on the streets Nina sensed that the British people truly wanted change; from demobbed soldiers to grandmothers with shopping baskets there was, she felt, a groundswell of longing to make the world anew. Things could be different. There could be a free, equal society. They pounded the streets, knocked on endless doors and chanted their new campaign song: ‘Vote, vote, vote for Mr Mikardo, chuck old Churchill in the sea.’ Nina stood on a soapbox on a corner fighting to make her voice heard above the lively crowds. Her feet were blistered and her throat was sore. She lived for a week off marmalade sandwiches.

Naomi Mitchison had mixed
feelings when she heard that her husband, Dick, had been offered the Labour candidacy of the marginal seat of Kettering. As a candidate’s wife she worried about looking the
part and felt she ought to acquire some stockings. But Naomi was essentially a bohemian and drew the line at wearing a hat. While Dick played by the rules in a city suit, his loyal wife supported him in gipsy glad rags, ‘eating chips out of a bag’. For his sake she canvassed, addressed envelopes and made speeches at street corners, but her heart was not in it. She preferred to spend time in Scotland, dealing with the practical needs of her estate, and writing. ‘They [Dick’s campaign force] don’t recognise that a wife has any job apart from her husband. Nor does Dick really recognise this farm. And never has recognised that writing is anything but a spare time occupation. I suppose the next generation will be better,’ she wrote sadly.

But Naomi had no doubt that this election was of supreme importance. Everyone knew that a massive task lay ahead.
Britain was still living
with the legacy of the 1930s Depression: child poverty, slums, ill health and the spectre of unemployment loomed. War or no war, nobody had forgotten the Jarrow marches. The country owed £3.5 billion. Bombs had destroyed or damaged three-quarters of a million houses; willow herb flourished in the craters where buildings once stood. The streets were full of rubble, the roads potholed, trees and public spaces neglected. The houses that remained needed paint and repair work. All the park railings had been removed and replaced with barbed wire or nothing at all. Trains were late and slow, and there was little in the shops.

Rations continued short.
Nella Last couldn’t get
any bacon; people in Barrow were having to wait a fortnight for sugar, and there were queues everywhere, she reported, ‘for wedge-heeled shoes, pork-pies, fish, bread and cakes, tomatoes’.
In Slough, Maggie Joy Blunt
complained of the unvarying diet on offer where she worked: ‘We have had nothing but cabbage on the menu in the canteen for weeks and weeks.’
Barbara Pym often felt
close to tears when, after waiting for ages, buses failed to stop because they were too full. Queues were so bad that she often decided to go without things rather than join them. She was bad-tempered and irritable, and her nerves felt frazzled.

This sensation was shared by many.
Mary Wesley remarked
on a generalised feeling of ‘sadness and emptiness’.
In Paris,
the British Ambassador’s wife, Diana Cooper, was ‘overcome … with the
miseries, the senselessness, the dreadful loss’.
People laughed when
the radio comedian Robb Wilton seemed to catch the national mood, joking about his wife’s gloomy reaction to VE-day: ‘Well, there’s nothing to look forward to now. There was always the All Clear.’ But it was close to the truth.

‘By the way, dear, did anything come of all that election fuss we had a fortnight ago?’ To many women, post-war politics seemed irrelevant to their dreary, everyday lives.

The middle-aged novelist
Ursula Bloom felt badly let down by the peace, which seemed to have little to offer women of her class and generation. Ursula was fifty-three, and came from solid patriotic middle-class stock. Her parents had gone without to bring her up nicely; she had always supported herself, had maintained standards by sheer hard work and had married a naval commander. At the end of the war she felt she deserved some respite from all the penny-pinching and self-denial, and she yearned to eat steak. ‘I’m growing very old, I thought, because after all I’m not even glad that the war is over. Apathetic.’ Now Ursula couldn’t get decent meat or a live-in maid for love or money. Above all she felt enraged and compromised by the black market in hard-to-obtain goods and luxuries. Even
reputedly high-minded pillars of society cheated and lied to get whisky, nylons, eggs, petrol coupons or – her personal undoing – digestive biscuits. ‘I wanted to rejoice,’ she wrote, ‘[but] rejoicing did not come.’

And now, in the summer of 1945, Ursula looked on with mounting disquiet as the election campaign proceeded to confirm all her worst fears. She predicted class warfare, culminating in revolution. The nation seemed to be turning its back on Churchill, though he had saved the world for them. She caught a glimpse of the old man in his car looking pale, weary and shrunken, ‘making the V sign which was already very out of date’. Nobody was cheering him. Fearful for the outcome, Ursula offered her modest services to the Tories but shrank at the sight of the sullen young men from the opposition staking out the Conservative committee rooms. With their shabby clothes and aggressive postures, they seemed hostile and full of rage. ‘ “Vote Labour. Vote Labour. Vote Labour,” they muttered.’ Nevertheless, Ursula set out in a spirit of patriotism. Canvassing round Chelsea, she knocked on the door of a surly woman who told her she wanted a new government because she couldn’t get rusks for her baby. Ursula, a practical woman, brightly suggested that she bake bread crusts in the oven. It had worked for her when her own son was little. But her well-meaning advice was met with black looks.

’Think I have time for that?’ she challenged. ‘Besides, the little bastard isn’t worth it.’ … She was furious with me for being kind. ‘The likes of you have never had to work,’ she said, and went away growling: ‘Vote Labour. Vote Labour. Vote Labour.’

What kind of a fair world was this, reflected Ursula. Surely this was no way to help one another? On another doorstep she tried to explain to an unwelcoming woman that the rich were bled so dry by taxation that they could pay no more. There were no rich people left. Her own earnings, Ursula admitted, were ravaged by the taxman at up to twelve shillings in the pound, which went to support individuals like her. ‘More fool you!’ came the tart rejoinder. It was all utterly discouraging.

In Reading on election results night Ian Mikardo invited all his volunteers and supporters to a party and rewarded them with large quantities of whisky. Everyone got roaring drunk.
But Nina Mabey couldn’t be there.
It was the height of summer, and in the Shropshire village where her mother was now based she was needed to help with mail deliveries while the postman got his harvest in. And so she heard the news as she pushed her bike up the hills and freewheeled down the vales of the Welsh borderlands, her letters and parcels in her basket. After the three-week wait, the results were announced in a cascade of hourly bulletins. Farmhouses and cottages alike had their windows open; from inside, she could hear the election results being broadcast across the valleys and pastures:

‘Labour gain,’ the wireless said. ‘Labour gain, Labour gain …’

Nina could barely prevent a foolish grin from breaking across her face at every halt on her route, hardly stop herself from asking the farmers and smallholders she met what way they had voted. In any case, this Montgomeryshire constituency was true Liberal heartland, its outstanding MP Clement Davies the leader of his party.

Later that day she got the full picture. It had been a Labour landslide; the party had won an effective majority of 146 seats over all other parties combined. Ian Mikardo had gloriously justified all their efforts in Reading by bringing in a majority of 6,390 over his opponents. The Tories were wiped out. That evening Nina stood in Montgomery’s market square and listened to Clement Davies’s victory speech, in which he generously conceded to Labour’s spectacular win. He spoke passionately of tolerance and goodness, wisdom and hard work. She was immeasurably touched: