Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Bang! Bang! Bang! they were shouting as they took aim at each other, and one after another would fall to the ground and feign death. Useless to take away the pistols – they found more, and the endless battles went on – every day our block echoed to the Bang! Bang! Bang! and their shouts. Any kind of toy weapons were forbidden by the Allies to the German children who looked on in envy and admiration at the British ones. I felt sick suddenly.
Hate, and the urge to kill or destroy, it seemed to her, were born not out of allegiance to union flags, hammers and sickles or swastikas,
but out of the profoundest depths of male identity. Man’s fundamental need for a weapon seemed ineradicable. Had she lived, Virginia Woolf’s hopes that ‘Hitlerism’ might be conquered if man could be ‘compensated for the loss of his gun’ would have been disappointed, just as the anonymous woman journalist who believed she was seeing the Nazi myth crumble - and with it the ‘myth of “Man” ’ – might well have joined Frances Parker in feeling sickened at the spectacle of a new generation of violence playing among the ruins.
In Berlin, in 1947, what possible hope could one feel for the future?
13 There’ll Be Bluebirds
Flower Women
Will women ever be satisfied? Will a day come when there is no conflict for us between our ambitions and our nesting instincts? Must choice always mean sacrifice? The women who lived through the decade covered by this book learned the hardest lessons of history about strength, self-determination, sacrifice and freedom. Women had proved to themselves that they possessed equal competence with men. If only to themselves, they had exploded the inequality myth. But after six tumultuous years, the desire to retreat from the fight was often stronger than the urge to press unpalatable claims. They wanted a quiet life.
‘
I’m not clever
beyond homely things,’ wrote Nella Last in her October 1947 diary, ‘but if I’d not the delight in a well-cooked and -served meal, and well-kept house and my odds and ends of sewing, I would have nothing to make me happy at all now.’ On the 28th she noted:
My husband says sometimes how lucky he is because I’m always ‘serene and calm’ and ‘there’s always home, thank God’.
The dollies and soft toys she made gave her intense joy.
If peace, for women like her, meant sewing stuffed rabbits by a cosy fireside, the spreading of a clean tablecloth and a husband’s gratitude, then surely they had earned it.
*
While Britain did its best to keep warm during the freezing winter of 1947, the Royal Family were visiting South Africa; the newspapers gave their trip exhaustive coverage. Back home, the March thaw brought with it catastrophic floods. Crops, vehicles, pets and ration books were washed away when rivers across the country burst their banks. With the waters lapping around their sitting-room suites and
kitchen cupboards, East Enders teamed up ‘in the spirit of the Blitz’ to rescue furniture and belongings from ground floors.
But floods and austerity hadn’t quenched our appetite for hearing about the lifestyles of the ruling class.
Mary Grieve, the editor
of
Woman
magazine, knew that her readership was in thrall to the House of Windsor and its doings: ‘In the late forties the devotion to the Throne … built up into a fever of intensity.’ Six years of hardship unleashed pent-up longings for an infusion of glamour into our grey lives. Tiaras, ostrich feathers and a hint of royal romance tapped into the yearnings of a public starved of dreams, and nostalgic for a time when the world had seemed a safer place. Princesses on horseback and kings on thrones represented a fast-disappearing world of order, security and Empire.
On 10 July suggestions of wedding bells became a delicious certainty when Princess Elizabeth’s betrothal to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten was announced by the Palace. ‘Enthusiasm and affection boiled over,’ wrote Mary Grieve. ‘In 1947 the country needed something to rejoice about,’ and next day thousands waited all afternoon outside Buckingham Palace for the young couple to emerge on to the balcony.
Clement Attlee’s post-war government had embarked on an ambitious programme of reconstruction, social welfare and redistribution. There was no doubt in the minds of either the middle classes or the rich that their comforts were being eroded not just by strikes, power cuts and burst pipes, but by Labour’s fiscal policies, designed to penalise the wealthy at rates of up to 95 per cent. ‘
The rich could not pay more,
because with the present taxation no rich were left,’ moaned Ursula Bloom.
But who would have guessed that the upper classes were feeling the pinch? In 1947, when Buckingham Palace announced that presentations were to be revived after the wartime suspension, no fewer than 20,000 debutantes were awaiting the summons to curtsey to their Majesties.
Frances Campbell-Preston’s family
held an austerity dance for her sister Laura. Her father got in cider cup from the local pub landlord (‘I told him to put in very little gin’), someone, somehow, found enough sugar to whip up cakes, and armfuls of flowers were brought in from the garden. Though guests came in dresses run up from muslin curtains it was a huge success, with Princess Elizabeth herself leading the conga.
‘
The war certainly taught
us to improvise,’ recalled Barbara Cartland in her memoir
The Years of Opportunity
. Her own experience in recycling wedding dresses for Service brides served her well when her daughter Raine was due to be presented at Court in spring 1947. Typically, she managed to lay hands on a vintage Molyneux frock for this occasion. But Raine had a whole season of balls ahead of her, and Barbara was determined that her daughter should star. Undeterred by the impossibility of buying large quantities of fabric in Britain, Barbara holidayed in Switzerland ahead of the Queen Charlotte Ball and managed to bring back several bolts of white tulle, which she had made up into a spectacular full-skirted gown in the style of the French Empress Eugénie. A blue taffeta dress, bought for £3 from a school friend and embellished by her mother with a deep hem of velvet and off-coupon artificial flowers, also earned her rapturous compliments.
Indeed, anyone who had hoped that the war would, overnight, level out our caste system had not reckoned with those centuries of entrenched privilege. Memories of desert warfare, death camps and troop ships were banished by nurses and FANYs alike; there were those among them who retreated to the shires, changed each evening into low-cut dresses and jewels, to be waited on by liveried footmen. ‘
Allowing for the general impoverishment,’
commented George Orwell in 1946, ‘the upper classes are still living their accustomed life.’
*
Britain had voted in a Labour government, but it seemed, by tacit consensus, that even under socialism the rich man – and woman – would remain in her castle, the poor woman at her kitchen sink. After such a war, who wanted revolution?
In 1948 the sociologist
Pearl Jephcott interviewed a sample of young, single, northern, working-class girls about their aspirations:
Q. Do you think a lot about any one thing today?
A. Yes, getting married.
Jephcott’s conclusions were unedifying:
The majority regard 23 or 24 as zero hour as far as matrimony is concerned …
Practically every girl says that she will want to give up her job when she gets married.
On the whole work appears to call forth no strong emotions, only a feeling of relief at the end of the day, when you are rid of it and free to do what you like … They seem to have few ambitions which relate to their work.
Jephcott’s study concluded that what changes there were were subtle and small. Anyone who had expected, or feared, that the war would ignite a feminist revolution could be comforted by the thought that the nation’s women were not about to mount the barricades.
Almost two years after its end,
Nella Last began to assess
what ‘coming through’ the war meant for women like her. She would have agreed with Pearl Jephcott that what changes there were were modest ones. For example, it was now more acceptable for women to brave the world on their own. Nella thought back to when her old Aunt Sarah, who had been widowed, had decided she wanted to live alone and refused a home with her relatives. There had been amazed shock in the family – it was just unthinkable, in those days, for a woman to set herself up independently. Today, such an attitude seemed archaic. ‘Everyone asks more of life and that they should be let to work out things for themselves.’
In May 1947, in fulfilment of her own words, Nella planned a holiday – by herself. She would visit her son and daughter-in-law in Northern Ireland. Her husband would not be left to fend alone though; Aunt Eliza would cook Will Last’s lunches while she was away and feed the cat. Will refused to make any contribution towards her jaunt, so Nella applied for a travel permit and withdrew £10 from her bank. The journey involved a train to Liverpool, connection to Speke airport, and a flight – her first – to Belfast.
My extra holiday is my own affair. When I felt the surge of joy run through my veins, I thought surprisedly that I’m not as old as I thought, that it’s rather the monotony of my life that tires and ages me.
Afterwards ‘I couldn’t have had a better break,’ was the verdict.
Monotony, austerity and stewed whalemeat continued to be everyday realities in 1947, but a nation of war-weary women had begun to feel, like Nella Last, that they had earned a little pleasure. The continued threat of economic strictures hung over the nation, but after
six years of nervous tension, trauma and hardship it was time to slow down, to step off the treadmill. In compensation for the brutal winter, the summer of 1947 was long and hot, a time conducive to leisure and relaxation.
I am having a deliberately,
deliciously idle afternoon on my bed. Weather is perfect; wonderful, brilliant, golden days. Why can’t our summers
always
be like this?
wrote Maggie Joy Blunt on 13 August. And on the 17th:
‘The crisis – where is the crisis?’ asks the
Observer
. ‘With Parliament dispersed, Ministers going on holiday – and the country bathed in a drowse of August sunshine …’ Why should I worry about a crisis?
On a sunny August day all Maggie – and thousands like her – wanted was to be able to pause, forget and, as far as possible, bring back those happy remembered days before the bombs and sirens shattered their peace for ever.
Legislation had been introduced entitling workers to an annual paid holiday, and most of them took it that year in Britain, whether hiking in the fells or staying in a Blackpool boarding house, or at a Pontin’s, Warners or Butlins holiday camp in the popular resorts of Skegness, Pwllheli or Hayling Island.
The holiday-camp phenomenon
was huge. One young working girl who went with her family to a Warners camp at this time recalled the mounting excitement as the family journeyed from Leicester, via Victoria Station (crammed with holiday-makers heading south) to Hayling Island. For this fifteen-year-old every detail remained impressed on her memory, from the orderly flower-beds, to the bottle-green chalets with their white window-frames, to the cheery waitresses. After long, happy days on the beach, you could take part in obstacle races, donkey derbys, fancy-dress and knobbly-knees competitions or the drag contest held on ‘Topsy Turvy night’ – it was all ‘clean fun’. The evening’s entertainment ended with the singing of ‘Goodnight Campers’ to the tune of ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’. ‘We had not had so much fun for years.’
At
the other end of the social scale
Glyndebourne, the originator (in 1934) of the ‘country-house opera’, was back in production by the summer of 1947 after a wartime interval when its stately interiors were made over to evacuees. Now Victoria Station also offered the
spectacle – at 2.45 in the afternoon – of a host of opera-lovers boarding the Eastbourne train in full-length evening dress and mink stoles rescued from their wartime mothballs. The hit of the season was the lustrous contralto Kathleen Ferrier, in Grecian tunic and bay leaves, singing the title role in Gluck’s
Orfeo
. Audiences were offered a special cocktail named after her, a hideous-sounding concoction of crème de menthe, brandy and lime juice. All was not austerity.
And there were other signs of a returning light-heartedness, even at this time of generalised hardship. On 28 August the
Daily Graphic
sent its female staff out on an assignment headlined ‘WOMEN WITH THEIR EYES OPEN’, to report on whatever they saw that raised their spirits:
– the nonchalant way people eat peaches at five for a shilling as if they had never been a luxury …
– a glimpse of the screen star Margot Grahame wearing earrings ornamented with her initials …
– the Oxford-street fashion parade of gay summer dresses and smart shoes that was a triumph over austerity. Nearly all the girls had longer skirts – about two inches below the knee. Very attractive.
*
Two whole inches below the knee? Could it be that those fabric-skimping, miserly, military, masculine, so-called styles which had defeminised so many fashion-conscious women were finally to be consigned to history?
The New Look,
which filtered gradually across to these shores in 1947, was the vision of fashion designer Christian Dior – a man whose astute commercial instincts were equalled only by his romanticism and intuitive understanding of the 1940s
Zeitgeist
. On 12 February 1947, in the midst of the bleakest winter in living memory, Dior’s new couture house released a collection featuring sumptuously billowing skirts swirling below waspy waists, with curved shoulders, fluttering bows and generous bosoms, requiring up to 40 metres of material to create. Dior, a keen gardener all his life, named his new collection ‘
Corolle
’, a botanical term which means the crown of petals encircling a flower’s centre. His dream was nothing less than the reinvention of womankind as flowers in bloom: Eden regained.
After six years of khaki battledress, masculine overalls, hair above the collar, queue misery and utility furniture, nothing could have tapped more successfully into women’s deepest longings for a return to femininity.