Authors: Virginia Nicholson
The characteristics of good humour and stoicism were to be tested to the full, but at this time cheerfulness still came easily to teenagers like Joan Wyndham. ‘
This war really isn’t at all bad
,’ she wrote in her diary during the second week of September. ‘We make the best of things.’ However, she noticed her own tendency to say ‘bugger’ when beaten at ping-pong and to crave French books ‘of an immoral nature’. A fortnight in, very little had happened, but stresses were starting to show.
By October
Clara Milburn noted:
‘The paralysing effect of the first few weeks of war [have begun] to wear off …’ But a shocking reminder of war’s reality came on 14 October with the loss of another British ship. The
Royal Oak
was sunk, lying at anchor in Scapa Flow, with the loss of 800 lives. But the promised enemy air raids had failed to materialise. During this so-called ‘phoney war’ fears of disaster were allayed, but were replaced by endless inconveniences and intrusions. You couldn’t get a seat on the train, or a cup of tea; you might twist your ankle falling off a pavement in the blackout; and with petrol rationing came the imposition of a 20 mph speed limit. Housewives oiled their old bicycles and pedalled out to do the shopping; in the country pensioned-off ponies were rehabilitated and ancient carts and traps refurbished. Income tax went up, and so did the price of many basic
groceries. War and its fearsome realities loured in the background like an incipient headache. The majority of wives and mothers continued their primary activities. In the circumstances of the blackout people stayed in. Everything associated with home assumed increased importance: its safety, its cosiness and its guiding deity – ‘Mum’ – all took on the roseate glow of something loved, and something under threat.
Though two months into the war not a bomb had been dropped, women listening to
a speech broadcast on the wireless
by the Queen on 11 November, Armistice Day, would have felt boosted by Her Majesty’s acknowledgement of the part they would play in the imminent conflict:
War has at all times called for the fortitude of women … we, no less than men, have real and vital work to do. To us also is given the proud privilege of serving our country in her hour of need. The call has come, and from my heart I thank you, the women of our great Empire, for the way in which you have answered it …
Women of all lands yearn for the day when it will be possible to set about building a new and better world, where peace and goodwill shall abide. That day must come. We all have a part to play. I know you will not fail in yours.
But while playing that part would surely involve unimagined adventures and hazards, right now the requirement appeared for the most part to be more prosaic.
Mum kept house, looked after her children, got her hair done and occasionally (when it reopened) braved the blackout to go to the cinema. She also went shopping – with a cautious eye on cost and durability. Fish was dear, bacon scarce. West End stores reported buoyant sales in indestructible tweed suits and tough but colourful housecoats. The factories that made them would soon switch to making uniforms, and those who had bought their tweeds early felt smug as woollen goods began to disappear from the shops. Trivial annoyances loomed large. There was a run on number 8 torch batteries, and queues formed wherever they appeared. Orders were issued regarding paper salvage, and a packet of paper handkerchiefs which had once contained fifty now only contained forty.
In a St Albans store
the shop assistants – once prohibited from being rude to their customers – were told by their managers that the rule had been relaxed; from now on it was all right to answer back to selfish
shoppers who grumbled when they couldn’t get swansdown powder puffs.
For downtrodden women in underpaid jobs like this, the scenery was beginning to change. Some found themselves redundant when firms producing unnecessary goods were forced to scale down. In 1939 the government took a laissez-faire attitude to women’s employment. The frenzy to get women into war work was still to come, but in that first autumn of the war there were already openings for women in engineering, in the vehicle industries, in metals and chemicals, utilities and even ship-building.
Those openings were to siphon off almost half of all those working in domestic service over the course of the Second World War. Now, in 1939, the servants were already starting to leave, causing upheavals for their mistresses, and for many middle- and upper-class women it was a question of starve or learn to cook. How did one set about it? One approach was to ignore economy altogether, still possible in the early days before rationing turned cheese and chocolate into scarce luxuries. In September
Woman’s Own
was still publishing recipes that needed three eggs, six ounces of margarine and twelve ounces of icing sugar. If making breakfast proved too challenging,
there were still croissants
to be bought from the Chelsea patisseries, as Joan Wyndham’s mother found out after their cook deserted them. She also discovered how to make hot chocolate by melting down a bar of Cadbury’s and adding cream. For dinner they had baked oysters in cheese sauce. ‘Everybody was sick,’ recorded Joan in her diary. ‘Maybe somebody should give Mummy a pep talk about wartime austerity.’
‘Women are busier than ever before,’ claimed
Woman’s Own
that autumn. ‘And if there are any who aren’t busy, I’m sorry for them! There is nothing like a definite job, and now there is no excuse for moping at home.’ Skilled and non-skilled found niches, some obvious, others obscure. Young and old took on fire-watching duties – one of these was
music teacher Mary Cornish
, who sternly applied herself to her nightly vigil in the vicinity of her Baker Street flat. Telephonists and drivers adapted to work in exchanges and ambulance units; for others the outbreak of war shifted their career on to unexpected paths. The daughter of a plumber,
Vera Welch’s career
as a popular vocalist was just getting off the ground when war was declared. She had chosen the stage surname Lynn, her grandmother’s maiden name.
Vera remembers how she and her parents had been sitting in the garden when the announcement came over the air, dashing her hopes of a successful singing future. ‘I thought, that’s the end of my career … There won’t be any call for frivolities and entertainment with a war going on.’ Happily for everyone, radio broadcasts remained an outlet for the singer’s silvery, heart-stopping vocals, and before long parted families were sending in requests for Vera to sing what was to become the Second World War’s best-loved refrain, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. At the same time up in the north of England
Marguerite Eave found herself
promoted to a job as senior home economist demonstrating kitchen appliances in the Lincoln area. Marguerite, then as now, had confidence, charisma and aplomb. With food shortages already starting to have an impact, the Council hired her to go out to remote villages and educate the local housewives about how to cope with limited ingredients. Setting herself up in disused schoolrooms with archaic equipment, Marguerite now started out on a career that – after her marriage to RAF officer Bob Patten – was to bring her nationwide acclaim on the radio show
The Kitchen Front
.
Meanwhile, many women who had got left behind in the pre-war rush to join training schemes joined the war effort in droves. If they weren’t in the WVS washing nits out of evacuees’ hair, learning to cook, knitting cot blankets or obeying orders with the FANY or ATS, they were doing jobs with new status. Office workers had to adapt to new surroundings as their firms evacuated to country locations away from the bomb threat. Schoolteachers, workers in food production and supply, nurses and certain clerical jobs – all of which employed large numbers of women - were on the schedule of reserved occupations.
Uncharted Territory
Helen Forrester was one
of these; she did not volunteer. Her existence was so hand-to-mouth that she could not afford to give up her job as a social worker in Bootle; even then she walked daily to work to save the twopenny bus fare. When her shorthand pupil was evacuated to Southport money became even tighter. In the long, dull autumn evenings Helen sat in silence with her bullying, unresponsive
mother over cups of tea. An envious, unfeeling woman, Mrs Forrester kept her daughter on a tight rein. What money Helen earned, she pilfered. What clothes she owned, she pawned. And any independence that she had, she resented. At twenty, she was drained, physically and mentally.
The nights drew in, blackout came earlier, but as the fear of being bombed receded that autumn, Helen Forrester’s depression deepened. Finally there was a crisis. It came after she had to spend twopence on a phone call for work and as a result found herself without the tram fare to get home. At intervals on the long trudge down Stanley Road she sat down on a wall or on the steps of a church. She was completely exhausted. The future seemed an abyss. Finally at home her last reserves gave out; leaning over the kitchen sink she gasped out her misery in shuddering sobs. The suppressed anguish from years of neglect broke out of her in uncontrollable howls of unhappiness – ‘the revolt of a human creature nearly pressed out of existence’.
They put her to bed. As Helen lay weeping in the dark, her parents quarrelled downstairs. She confided in her sister Fiona: how penurious she was, how she could never make any headway in her job without a proper education, and how frightened and crushed she felt. How their mother pocketed everything she earned. How she had no clothes and never went out – ‘I want to have fun, and go dancing.’ Fiona had seen her sister as ‘the clever one’, with no desires in that direction. ‘I didn’t think you were interested in clothes and things like that.’ But Helen’s collapse had frightened the family, and soon it was established that a financial compromise would have to be agreed. Her mother couldn’t provide love, which was all Helen really wanted, but now she was offering a modest gift of second-hand clothes from the pawn shop, weekly pocket money and a three-and-sixpenny hairdo.
A week later, still sodden with weeping, Helen was sitting with her head studded with metal curlers and her hair doused in chemicals as Betty at ‘Lady Fayre’ plugged her into an electrical contraption hanging from the ceiling. There was a strong smell of burning, and smoke rose up as the perm took effect. Betty took pride in giving Helen her first make-over: ‘Yer know, yer could do quite well for yourself – if yer wanted. If you like, luv, I’ll make your face up too. Just so you can see what a difference it can make.’
The result was striking; as Betty said, tweezering a few stray hairs
from between her brows, ‘proper pretty’. The salon girls gathered round to admire Helen’s new halo of soft curls, her lightly pinked-up cheeks and touch of lipstick. ‘You’ve missed your vocation – you could do real well for yourself. Why, Nick was only saying the other day, you got style – only needs bringing out.’ Nick? It dawned on Helen, as the girls grinned admiringly, who he was. She passed his beat most evenings on her walk home past the Rialto cinema – he was a well-known pimp.
‘Sure. He’s set up a lot of girls in his time. Buys ’em clothes. Finds them flats. He’s fair … Yer should get to know him better – you’d do fine with him. He moves his girls into real good districts.’
I was shocked. ‘Oh, Betty. I’m not that kind.’
Betty’s face lost its smile, and hardened. ‘We’re all that kind, luv, when times are like they are. Better’n slaving in service or standing on your feet in a factory all day – or being so clemmed in like you are.’
Betty meant well. From her perspective there weren’t that many options for girls without an education. There was a sadness in her voice as she took Helen’s three-and-sixpence: ‘Don’t be offended. Some nice lad’ll know a good thing when he sees it – and take proper care of you.’
Poor as she was, Helen’s background was profoundly middle-class, her values fundamentally respectable. Prostitution could not be, for her, an escape route; she knew too, from her work with the unemployed, that the reality of that profession was often far from pretty clothes and nice flats, and that there was a price to pay. But what else did life have to offer in wartime Liverpool? If poverty didn’t get you first, the bombs surely would. Ultimately Betty and Helen were in the same boat, with a three-and-sixpenny permanent wave and a splash of lipstick spelling the difference between hope and a dead end. The future was bleak unless you were pretty enough to make a man want to care for you, one way or another.
*
The future in any case had little meaning in those early days of the war. Over by Christmas? Over in three months? Three years was being predicted by some as the worst possible scenario. Each day was measured out with BBC bulletins, beyond which lay uncharted
territory. But the nation stepped up its readiness, and partings and upheavals started to become the norm. Male conscription proceeded slowly; by the end of 1939 the army numbered 1,128,000 men. Smaller numbers joined the navy and the RAF. The streets were full of young people in uniforms, and the trains were clogged up with troops. By December five regular divisions had been sent out to France to help man the allegedly impregnable Maginot line.
For Frances Faviell in Chelsea
‘life resembled a transit camp’, with friends using the camp-bed in her studio for a couple of nights before leaving en route to unknown destinations.
For Helen Forrester the family scare and the perm were liberating; lipstick and new underwear released a new confidence. A Liverpool Cinderella, she decided to go to ballroom-dancing classes. Rigged up in sparkly taffeta redeemed from the pawn shop, she managed each week to extract the necessary shilling from her mother and braved the blackout to learn waltzing and fox-trotting to the music of a wind-up gramophone. Norm and Doris, the instructors, recognised her aptitude and encouraged her to try for her silver medal. Dancing now became her lifeline – ‘I always put on my little satin slippers with a feeling of pure joy’ – and wounds inflicted by years of poverty and unhappiness started to heal. Though still crippled by shyness, Helen’s undeniable talent on the dance floor meant she was rarely without a partner.