Millions Like Us (6 page)

If any picture encapsulates those early days of the war it is the heart-wrenching images of small children clutching teddy bears, labels round their neck and gas-mask boxes strapped to them, gallantly grinning at the camera as they wait to board special trains. Behind each picture lay a tale of soul-searching, uncertainty and loss. Few mothers wanted their little ones’ safety on their conscience, and yet sending them away felt like a violation of their deepest instincts. In a sense, sending their children away denatured them as women.
Mrs Lilian Roberts
obediently tied her children’s gas-mask boxes on strings and pinned their names to their lapels before delivering all five, aged between five and thirteen, to catch the bus to the railway station. ‘The police on duty told us to turn our backs, so as not to upset the children if we could not hold back the tears. We had no idea where they were to be taken, and it was a most dreadful feeling, losing my five children in one day.’ Mrs Roberts had to wait several days before she heard where her children had been taken. They had been dispersed around Sussex between Brighton and Hailsham. ‘With the children gone, I felt completely at a loss.’

All over the country little flocks of desolate six-year-olds arrived, not knowing where they would be sleeping that night. The evacuee hosts were equally unprepared for what to expect. Though superficially the entire undertaking was a model of calm organisation, in the circumstances many of the best-laid plans collapsed. In the cities, the children had been loaded unceremoniously on to whatever trains happened to be waiting. Friends were separated, schools scattered. Dirty, hungry, tired and bewildered families arrived at unknown destinations after hours spent in crowded trains with no food or toilet facilities. Dismal scenes ensued as the evacuees were taken first to ‘dispersal centres’, then paraded before the householders commandeered to take them in.
The diarist Frances Partridge
recalled one scene at Hungerford in Berkshire:

The bus came lumbering in …

[They] stood like sheep beside the bus looking infinitely pathetic. ‘Who’ll take these?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Oh well, I can have these two but no more,’ and the piteous cry, ‘But we’re
together
.’ It was terrible. I felt we were like sharp-nosed housewives haggling over fillets of fish.

Nothing except the widespread certainty of serious and imminent danger could have persuaded Britain’s housewives that such an upheaval to their lives was a necessity. But if there were any sector deserving of praise throughout the evacuation proceedings, it was surely the WVS.

The Women’s Voluntary Service
had been set up initially in 1938, under the chairmanship of the formidable Stella, Marchioness of Reading. Stella Reading was more than a chairman – she was the founder and inspiration of one of the largest voluntary bodies this country has ever seen. Already in the 1930s such organisations were on the increase. This was the era of the ‘do-gooder’, the ‘Lady Bountiful’, the charity ball and the charity pageant. With vigour and single-mindedness Lady Reading now marshalled the energies of legions of Christian, patriotic and unselfish women. In September 1939 there were 165,000 members of the WVS, by which time the organisation was already making far-reaching plans for the feeding and care of thousands of evacuees. By 1942 that number would grow to more than 1 million – all dressed in green tweed uniform suits with red piping. From the outset these ladies (and ‘ladies’ they mostly were: at least 60 per cent of them came from income groups A and B) dealt with the domestic nuts and bolts of the war. They played to their perceived strengths as women, making innumerable cups of tea. With zeal and a vengeance they cooked, clothed, knitted and sewed, washed, mothered, nursed and organised as the circumstances demanded. They set up an official sock-mending scheme for soldiers. At Lady Reading’s behest they neglected their own housework in favour of ‘the national job’.

A total of 30,000 children were looked after by them. Evacuees were sent to the WVS to be deloused, anointed for scabies and given clean clothes if required. One WVS member claimed to have escorted a total of 2,526 under-fives and travelled 126,490 miles in three years. A typical WVS lady was Mrs Warren of Cambridge: ‘When I saw all those hundreds of little children taken away from their mothers … a lump came into my throat,’ she said, whereupon she promptly accepted nine into her capacious home. She then took on the task of disinfecting their heads, laundering their socks and feeding them. She collected clothes for them, and at night she patched their knickers.
Her two maids helped out and reprimanded the children when they walked on Mrs Warren’s flower-beds.

Helen Forrester’s little sister Avril was lucky. Removed from her impoverished family, the child was put into the care of a benevolent lady, and for the first time ‘knew what it was to have good, new clothes bought for her, sleep in a properly equipped bed and be decently fed.’ But evacuation was an imperfect solution. The uprooting of children from deprived, but familiar, backgrounds required huge adjustments.
Rene Smith, a respectable newlywed
living in Wolverhampton, got her choice of two little girls ‘with fair hair and blue eyes, please’. The children arrived in rags: hand-me-down dresses beyond any repair, underclothes in shreds, crawling with lice. They smelled foul, wet the beds, didn’t know how to eat with cutlery and had never seen domesticated animals. Rene launched herself into caring for her ready-made family. She bought them brand-new clothes and fed them up, and soon saw the rewards. ‘It was most heartening and gratifying to see them develop into two plump, healthy, well-behaved, really very nice little girls.’ History does not relate how the nice little girls’ parents reacted to this transformation.

Class collisions of this kind weren’t always so happily handled.
The Tyson family
took in a couple of little boys aged six and nine. They had come from a poor area of Manchester, and Joan, the daughter of the house, was dismayed at their savage state. At mealtimes they preferred to sit under the table than at it. Evenings were spent delousing the boys with a fine-tooth comb with newspaper spread out below to catch the nits. From time to time their parents would come to visit, always arriving drunk. These were common themes: the evacuees ate fried eggs with their fingers, never washed, slept under the beds, urinated against the walls and used incomprehensible language. House-proud women experienced a culture clash as feral children who had never seen toothbrushes or hand-towels were thrust into their nice middle-class accommodation. Rural communities felt invaded by loud-mouthed city evacuees who drank and swore. Soon village shops were selling out of Keating’s insect powder, soap and disinfectant.

For their part, the city women couldn’t get used to country ways. Who were these uncivilised bumpkins? Where were all the cinemas? Where on earth could you get your hair permed? Was it really three
miles from the nearest bus stop? And how disgusting it was to have to use an earth closet. But in the various billets she stayed in over three years,
Nina Mabey was primarily dismayed
by the lack of books – ‘What did these people do for pleasure? Did they read only in bed? But there were no books in the bedrooms either.’

Worse, there were horror stories - accounts of hostility, neglect, abuse, starvation. These were a minority, but even where ‘foster’ parents were kind and loving the separation and dispersal of families wrought damage. ‘
Despite much kindness
,’ wrote Helen Forrester about her little brothers and sister, ‘… none of the children came through that traumatic time without scars.’

The Darkness

The radio reported alarming news. The first ship to be sunk in the war was the SS
Athenia
, a passenger liner torpedoed off Rockall on 3 September, followed less than a fortnight later by the sinking of HMS
Courageous
in the Atlantic, with the loss of 519 lives.

‘
Our familiar world
seemed to be disintegrating round us,’ recalled Phyllis Noble. Phyllis was still travelling from Lewisham to her ‘business girl’ job at the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate, but her days were haunted by the fear of air raids. She envisaged skies blackened with bombers, the city toppling in ruins around her. ‘I was terrified … more afraid during that first week of the war than I ever was later.’ Stress made her family quarrelsome, and rows broke out with unnerving frequency.

In the early days of the Second World War the unchanging world of the pre-war woman was being slowly eroded. Community, family, routine, order, stability and plenty were still evident, but no longer carried any certainty.
Nella Last recorded
in her diary that her younger son, Cliff, would leave for the Army on 15 September: ‘I have a cold feeling inside.’ After his departure she noticed a crop of white hairs springing from her dark temples, and inexplicable lumpy ridges appeared on her fingernails – from shock, the doctor said. By the 25th she was writing:

I miss my Cliff more every day … I miss his cheeky ways …

It’s no use making ginger-bread or new rolls or pies now, for my husband does not care for them … I smelled ginger-bread baking in a confectioner’s, and it brought back memories of two hungry schoolboys who would insist on a piece of ginger-bread before tea if it was hot out of the oven. I’ve always had rather a narrow life and my joys have been so simple. I seem to have built a house like a jackdaw – straw by straw – and now my straws are all blowing away!

The known landscape of life, with all its comforts, its knitting needles and gingerbread, was taking on a new face: a face of necessity. Early in 1939 the newly formed Ministry of Information had devised a ‘Careless Talk’ campaign, specifically targeting housewives who were seen as the purveyors of harmful tittle-tattle. In late August the government took on powers to issue hundreds of new regulations to ensure public safety, order, supplies and services, and now instructions flooded in:
Make Your Room Gas-proof, Always Carry Your Gas-mask, Protect Your Home against Air-Raids, Mask Your Windows, First Aid Advice, Safety in the Blackout, What You Must KNOW, What You Must DO
…

How to look stylish in a gas-mask. The advertisers of this necessity promoted it alarmingly: ‘The ravages of gas can be frightful, especially to women.’

Abiding by the new rules meant never going anywhere without a gas-mask. The masks came in compact cardboard containers, but a brisk business was done in cases and straps to render them more portable – and stylish.
A woman spotted
carrying hers in a satchel of violet velvet decked out with artificial roses caused a stir, as reported by the
Daily Telegraph
. Nella Last was very struck by the sight of a string of courting couples smooching in her local lovers’ lane, all of them virtuously kitted out with the mandatory gear – ‘a sign of the times’.

The blackout rules favoured such intimate activities. In this time before the bombs, many people rejoiced in the romance of moonlit nights, visible for the first time without garish sodium lighting. In cities lovers took advantage of the sandbagged doorways and the enveloping darkness for their pleasures.
One young woman literally bumped
into a soldier who had lost his way in the pitch darkness; two years later they were married. Other accidents were less happy, as one stumbled over fire hydrants, parked bicycles, letter boxes and cats; blood and bruises were often the result. The blackout was initially imposed strictly from sunset to sunrise; the nightly task of covering windows with heavy black curtains or, in many cases, thick black paper attached with drawing pins being a tedious but compulsory chore. In Balsall Common near Coventry,
the housewife Clara Milburn
spent the first week of the war alternately helping to billet several hundred Coventry children with their teachers in the locality, and making up blackout curtains for her windows. With heavy demand the price of blackout fabric had rocketed by over a shilling a yard, and it was, as Mrs Milburn noted with a housewifely eye, ‘of decidedly inferior quality’. In the hot September weather the new curtains made the house stifling, ‘but it is wonderful how one can conform to an order when it is absolutely necessary to do so’. Doing one’s duty brought satisfaction.

There was a sense of the world shutting down. By common consent the social season was suspended entirely. Though they were to reopen within weeks, orders were issued for all theatres, cinemas and dance-halls to close. Three weeks after the declaration of war petrol rationing came in. Throughout the war
the writer and journalist Mollie Panter-Downes
indefatigably reported on Londoners’ doings to the American press. On 17 September her weekly bulletin informed the readers of the
New Yorker
that nearly everything the British enjoyed was now banned:

Happy accidents in the blackout.

With, on the whole, astounding good humor and an obedience remarkable in an effete democracy, they have accepted a new troglodyte existence in which there are few places of entertainment, no good radio programs, little war news, and nothing to do after dark except stay in the cave … ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving so late into the night’ has taken on a significance that Byron never intended.