Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Unfortunately, his manhood was doomed to disappointment, that night anyway. More or less reconciled, the Scannells went to bed. Tenderly, Chas reached out an affectionate arm to draw Dolly to him. As he did so – ‘a little voice came from the corner, “Can I come in your bed, Mummy?” ’ Dolly’s maternal heart softened; she understood that to the child her father seemed an interloper. She was about to gather her up, but Chas intervened with a sharp authority in his voice: ‘No, you cannot, just close your eyes and go to sleep.’ Tears were the result.
Recent books by Julie Summers and Alan Allport
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have combed the sources for similar tales of woe and incompatibility. Both books demonstrate how the war had derailed relationships, with stories of
resentment, disillusion, dysfunction, exclusion and anti-climax on both sides. From men:
‘
Probably, “When I was in Peshawar in
’43” is just as boring to my relations as their accounts of shopping trials are to me.’
‘There seems to be nothing but the dull prospect of a pre-fab, raising the family, the 8.30 up and the 5.15 down … the prospect appals me.’
And from women:
‘We were two different people, so much had happened in those years apart.’
‘When their war ended, our war began.’
Desert Rat Charles Hopkinson
walked through the door of his home after four and a half years abroad. The conversation went like this: ‘Hello, Muriel, how are you?’ ‘Oh, Charles, I am fine. How are you?’
Thousands of married couples were trying to rebuild their lives, but they were strangers.
Divided We Fall
Once demobbed, Chas Scannell
found work with a dockland shipping company; thankfully, he quickly lost interest in the household accounts. The Scannells were saving to repair and modernise their Ilford home, and by 1946 Dolly was pregnant again. She was broody and quiescent; nothing surfaced to upset the gentle routine of her days. Susan was at school, and she made sure that Chas’s meals were always on the table when he got home from work. The baby boom was approaching a crescendo, and their son William was one of the 891,920 babies born in Britain that year; Dolly felt she should be counting her blessings:
The war was over, my husband was safe home again, I had a son and a daughter, a house with a garden, a husband with a job he liked. What more can a woman desire?
But perhaps she missed the friendships and flirtations, or even the dynamic efficiency, of her American army camp in 1943?
I was restless. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what I wanted.
Already, the post-war idyll was showing signs of strain.
Cookery expert Marguerite Patten’s
constant contact with housewives gave her an insight into their conflicting motives and influences:
A lot of women were glad to be housewives again. They said, ‘
Oh
, how lovely to go back home,
oh
, I don’t have to get up so early in the morning,
oh
, I don’t have to spend time with those tiresome people in the factory, and I don’t have to get dirty doing all that work,
oh
, what a relief!’ But then when it happened they weren’t so sure.
Others weren’t glad: for example, they hadn’t got their own money. They didn’t like having to ask when they wanted a new pair of shoes, you know, ‘Can you let me have the money?’ And they missed the excitement, they missed the number of people they met; they wanted to go out, and they felt very closed in by the four walls of home.
There were very mixed feelings among women.
How could Dolly Scannell explain, without seeming ungrateful, her bouts of irritability at Chas’s childishness? He would come home late and blame her for the spoiled dinner and grumble when his tea wasn’t how he liked it. One day as he sat at breakfast whining about how the rinds hadn’t been cut off his bacon, it all got the better of her; she seized a dinner plate from the sideboard and smashed it over his head. But Chas was completely unrepentant; with ‘a look of fiendish hate’ he grabbed a cut-glass bowl and hurled it at his wife with all his might. It missed and shattered into shards beyond the kitchen door, through which it had pierced a jagged aperture. Shaking, shocked, the Scannells faced each other across the debris of their kitchen. In the ten years since they had been married, Dolly had been through the Blitz, and Chas had survived the desert war and the Italian campaign; but never before had a domestic row come so close to physical injury:
We both knew ‘what might have been’ … I knew then, that although Chas and I could argue happily until the cows came home, I must never ever lay my hands on his person again, however lightly, for both our sakes!
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Dolly Scannell took responsibility for, as she saw it, stepping out of line. She saw the dinner-plate incident as a wifely transgression, and
felt only pity for Chas over his uncontrolled act of violence with the cut-glass bowl. There was a sexual deal at stake. Men were entitled to their anger over uncalled-for bacon rinds. Women were supposed to be modest and compliant.
The apparent collapse of the deal made for good journalism.
Ann Temple’s finger
was on the pulse; heading her
Daily Mail
column ‘IS MODESTY NOW OUT OF DATE?’, she stirred up a reader controversy around a topic that clearly pushed a number of sensitive buttons. Had the war turned women into insubordinate hussies, smoking and swearing? What did men want? Female readers writing in to the
Daily Mail
took the view that men preferred modest women. The Cheshire mother of two adult sons wrote to say that her boys enjoyed the company of modern girls ‘with a real kick’, but that both were resolutely ‘pre-war’ when it came to looking for brides: ‘They are both firmly determined to choose old-fashioned girls with old-fashioned virtues for their wives.’ Another correspondent asserted simply that ‘An immodest woman is handicapped both in her personal and business relationships with men.’ Only one woman disagreed: ‘Modesty has to be out of date. How can a girl keep a modest manner when she has to maintain military discipline, or obey it … Think how in the last five years we have all been herded like cattle, crammed into rooms, houses, hostels, barracks, shelters … No privacy, no leisure, and no soap.’ But far more typical was Rose, from Durham, who expressed the view that ‘Most men like to draw out a woman’s charms, not have them thrown at them.’ Or dinner plates, one might add.
Rose from Durham was speaking for a widely held view, shared by the self-help guru Kenneth Howard (author of
Sex Problems of the Returning Soldier
, 1945), who had no qualms when it came to defining respective sex roles. Husbands, Howard explained, were expected to be chivalrous, masterful and reliable. It was their responsibility to earn a living and make tough decisions.
But in the normal household the woman’s job is primarily a dependent one, and it is right that it should be so … Her role is not primarily to go out and struggle with the world. She is not fitted emotionally or physically to do so … Her greatest asset is her weakness and her capacity for love.
It is hard not to wonder where Mr Howard had been during the previous six years, while thousands of women were demonstrating their
strength and competently struggling with a world full of danger and hostility. His sympathies are clearly with the scattered armies of men, for each of whom home was a rose-tinted memory; when he got back, ‘ ’er indoors’, presiding goddess of the hearth, would be there to meet him, the eternal feminine, surrounded by adorable clamorous children, bringing the pudding in from the cooking end. ‘He has been dreaming of his home and his wife, and looking forward all the time to getting back to things as they were when he left home … What he really wants is for things not to have changed at all.’
And yet after the war the sexes were still poles apart, seeing each other, more than ever, through a distorting mirror. All too often, the man’s dream of home and wife was a fantasy. Justifiably, Kenneth Howard tried to warn his readers how false this picture could be:
He conveniently forgets, for example, his wife’s irritating habit of having meals always ten minutes late; he forgets that the garden badly needs new fencing. To him it all seems like a perfect paradise.
He also pointed out that their wives, when they got home, would not be how they imagined them. They might be fatter, or thinner, with more wrinkles, and rationing would have played havoc with their wardrobe.
Howard also made an apt observation about war when he declared that ‘it is impossible to tell men to go and kill an enemy and risk their lives in doing it, and expect them at the same time all to be honest, chaste, kind and unselfish all the time’.
For the ‘perfect paradise’ was tainted, too, by sin and betrayal.
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Though marriage in 1945 was a far more durable institution than it is today, the war placed unprecedented strain on it. At 47,041 the 1947 divorce figures had nearly doubled in just two years.
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Too many unions cracked under the strain of long absence, estrangement and, all too often, infidelity. There is no way of knowing how prevalent wartime adultery was, though there does seem to have been a general rise in illegitimacy and in bigamy cases. Reactions
of returning British servicemen to their wives’ infidelity ranged from
the big-hearted tolerance of Greg James,
who smilingly accommodated two little cuckoos smuggled by his wife Lilian into the family nest during his absence in the Far East, to
the murderous rage of Private Reginald Keymer,
who strangled his adulterous wife in a fit of jealousy. Keymer was acquitted. This was far from being the only case of wife-killing by ex-servicemen; the Sunday papers greedily lapped up the lurid details, as tragedies piled up. Sergeant Albert Nettleton was given five years’ penal servitude for beating his wife, Ivy, to death with the iron. Father of four Private Cyril Patmore was also found guilty of manslaughter after stabbing his wife Kathleen to death on 4 August 1945; he escaped the death penalty after Kathleen’s adultery was cited as provocation. But on 28 May 1946 ex-serviceman Leonard Holmes was hanged after striking his wife Peggy on the head with a coal hammer, then, seeing that she was still alive, strangling her.
Such sordid incidents have happened throughout history, but placed in the post-war context they acquire more than usually troubling overtones of dissociation and misogyny.
For the waiting wife, the fantasy of a perfect husband was often just as illusory.
One of the few things
that had kept Margery Baines going during the bureaucratic travails of 1943 and 1944 was the thought that her absent husband, William, would admire her fortitude. She equated success as an army officer with success, in his eyes, as a woman. ‘I had to do well to please him.’ Margery’s ordeal in the ATS had left her in full retreat from all her bright dreams of leadership, and, after her breakdown in 1944, she felt like a failure on every front, with nothing to show for her efforts, her ambitions. There had to be something she could do. Becoming a mother had the merit of conforming to expectations. If she couldn’t run a platoon, then perhaps she ought to be focusing on what women were supposed to do and run a family instead.
Misfortunes now accumulated. Margery found herself pregnant with twins; they were born in 1946, but one of the two babies was stillborn. Three weeks after her confinement, while she was still adjusting to the loss of her daughter, Major William Baines abandoned his wife for another woman. Since their marriage in 1940 they had spent barely a year together.
At thirty-one when I was suddenly left with a baby of three weeks, and the world to face, I saw only finality and despair.
Utterly humiliated, Margery felt that she had failed as a woman. Mysteriously, the sun continued to rise each day, and baby Gillian continued to breathe and sleep, but the collapse of Margery’s marriage caused her to feel annihilated. If she wasn’t a wife, she was nobody. To be somebody meant that William had to recognise her qualities. ‘Why hadn’t my
husband
seen them if they existed?’ Margery now channelled what was left of her self-belief into supporting her baby; as a single, husbandless mother, she was the victim of society’s hostility towards the scorned and spurned wife. She felt like an ‘odd woman’ – an outcast and a freak.
The divorce figures in 1947 were tangible evidence of the mismatch between fantasy and reality; but innumerable unmarried women also succumbed to the emotional aftershock of war. The carefully controlled morals of generations of young women had been scrambled and derailed by wartime freedoms. More affecting than statistics are the repeated appeals sent by married and unmarried alike to the magazine problem pages. Here is just a handful, from the many hundreds sent to Leonora Eyles, Evelyn Home, Mary Grant and their ilk:
I am going to have
an illegitimate child, and I am afraid its father was a young Allied soldier whom my family liked and trusted as a son. I have now discovered that he was married all the time.
I am ashamed to say
that I have fallen in love with a new clerk in our firm. I am ashamed because I am already engaged to a boy in the Forces overseas.
I am engaged
to a boy I love very much. Since he has been away, though, I have been going out with an Allied soldier. I am now expecting a baby by him … What am I to tell my fiancé?
The need was great, and the agony aunts did their best; the Marriage Guidance Council, first formed in 1938, now came into its own. Between 1943 and 1948 the volunteer counsellors in their small London office helped over 8,000 clients who were trying to unravel their matrimonial tangles.