Domestic Soldiers (14 page)

On some nights she patrolled darkened Birmingham as an ARP warden. But after the last major blitz on the city in May 1941, there was relatively little action in the skies. The same could not be said about the streets.

On duty a few weeks after she volunteered, Alice and another warden walked alone through the blackout. Vic slipped his arm around her waist ‘as though it belonged there’. Alice didn’t balk: it was all in the interest of science. In fact, she had tried to meet Vic alone once before, but when he appeared at the appointed rendezvous point, with his wife in tow, Alice breezed by the couple as though nothing were amiss. This evening, as they walked together, she left his arm where it was, but told him she was only interested in him ‘from the fun side’.

Alice was curious about men’s behaviour under the cover of darkness, but since Les wasn’t interested in going out with her, she was also searching for a companion to take her dancing, to the cinema or simply an ear to bend. When it was clear that Vic wanted more than a movie date and sparkling conversation, she told him she had no intention of becoming sexually involved with him. She was ‘fun starved, not love starved’. Furthermore, she blasted, Vic could never measure up to her husband, ‘who was an artist at lovemaking’, in her eyes. As they approached the ARP post, she gave
Vic a kiss (‘all he’s ever likely to get from me’) and bade him adieu.

A week later, she fixed Vic a cup of tea and flirted with him at the ARP post. ‘I intrigue him, I tease him, I tantalize him, he gets worked up to fever pitch,’ she boasted to M-O, ‘and then I tell him it’s time he went.’ After he left, she went out on patrol with a Mr F, but his embrace reminded her of a ‘jelly fish’, so she shook him off and beat it back to the post. ‘It just goes to prove how everything, the blackout … the wardens’ hours … can and does make morals lax,’ she mused in her diary. She, however, was entirely ‘above board’, she promised M-O. ‘What fun I can get decently I’m going to.’

Alice ‘tantalized’ Vic all that summer, but when he failed to meet her one night, she slit his tyres. Just to make him squirm, she told Vic that she was writing about ‘sex life in the area’ and had committed their tryst to paper, expecting it would be published soon. He ‘nearly passed out’, she reported, pleased with herself for bringing him down a few pegs. But Vic had not seen the back of her: Alice confided to M-O mischievously, ‘I haven’t finished with his peace of mind yet.’

Although she continued to volunteer at the ARP and to taunt Vic, by 1943 Alice’s curiosity about ‘sex life in the area’ led her to spend more and more time at the local casino. Here, she would eye the crowd from the balcony, make eye contact with interesting-looking men and await an offer to dance. Whether she danced or waited, Alice persuaded the men around her to talk about their private lives and about current issues so that she could report the conversations to M-O. She asked a Canadian soldier what he thought of Britain, and he responded that everything was out-dated and
ran too slowly. Other men talked about their personal philosophies – most of which centred on the pursuit of happiness to the exclusion of all else. After dancing with a black GI, she learned from a ‘large fat (let the war go on, I’m doing alright) man’ that no American would ever ask her to dance if she danced with a black soldier. Alice wasn’t worried. Americans had a reputation for being cocky and immature, she said, and she could do without them.

Some of these conversations led to long-term relationships. While she enjoyed mixing with various men at the casino, Alice preferred a reliable dance partner. Since some men were reluctant to dance, others poor dancers, and still others looked too shady for a turn on the dance floor, a dance partner ensured that she regularly danced, which – though she sometimes protested otherwise – as the war progressed, seemed more important than her scientific mission.

She met Fred at the casino in the spring of 1943, and since she liked him and he was an excellent dancer, he soon became her regular dance partner, but by October, the relationship had become serious. Fred turned up at her house when Les was at work, brought her gifts (many of which could only be appreciated in wartime, such as a No. 8 battery), and wrote letters professing his love to her. Alice resisted, telling him she did not love him, insisting all she wanted was a friend, and threatening to break it off. They continued to go dancing, but he was so sullen that Alice complained she could find no fun in it. Finally, she scheduled a meeting with him to discuss the relationship. She met him in town, brought him home and made him tea. If they couldn’t be friends, Alice told Fred, the relationship was over. He told her his delicate state was her fault: ‘Fred says
it’s the fact that I’m so darned good that’s made him fall in a big way for me.’ He then made vague remarks about ending his life, to which she responded a bit callously that she knew an excellent place where he could do so without raising suspicions.

When Alice appeared at the casino the next week, Fred was there, and they spent the afternoon together. He was still ‘glum’ and Alice was irritated that he ruined her fun. She came home late that night and met Les just as he was going out of the door for firewatching duty. He was ‘steamed up boiling pitch’: tea wasn’t ready, the blackout hadn’t been installed and the fire hadn’t been made up. He left without eating or changing out of his work clothes. Alice gave him a feeble lie to explain her tardiness, but she ‘felt like a pig’ for the intrigue. It made it worse that Les was drenched to the bone by a cloudburst after going out.

Les’ misadventure in the rain caused bronchitis to settle in his chest, and on his birthday several days later, he was in bed. That didn’t stop Fred from coming by to see Alice. She did tell Les that she had a visitor, but Alice explained to M-O that she wanted to spare Les the ‘disadvantage’ of being seen in his dressing gown by her dancing partner, so she didn’t let on who the visitor was. With Les in bed upstairs, Fred watched Alice wash the dishes – ‘not exactly conducive to romance’, she admitted. When Fred did anything ‘saucy’, she playfully splashed him with water. Once the dishes were finished, she walked Fred down to the end of the street. He left without his usual kiss because Alice knew ‘the eyes’ of the neighbourhood were upon them.

‘The eyes’ watched Alice’s intrigues – they knew when Fred stopped by, they had witnessed Alice toy
with men at neighbourhood dances and they knew that Alice entertained more than one man while Les was at work. The gossip was scathing, but she told M-O she didn’t care. The liaisons with Fred and with others at the dances, she reasoned, were mostly good copy for M-O, and the men who stopped in during the day were there for her advice.

For several years, she went to a weekly ‘discussion group’ led by a psychologist. They talked over common texts and debated current psychological questions. She took the knowledge gleaned from these discussions and counselled anyone who asked for help. In fact, while Les was kept generally in the dark about the dancing partners, he knew about the advice his wife doled out; he was sometimes present when the men called in the evening, and she was very open about it. She was not, however, forthcoming about kissing her dancing partners. Les was jealous of the various men in her life, but most of it was a vague jealousy, for she never gave him any solid evidence of what went on in private. He never knew the line that his wife had drawn in these relationships.

Fred was still involved with Alice in November 1943, when they celebrated his birthday. She bought him a pipe and a birthday card. By now, she told M-O, he knew her rules of engagement: the only form of affection she allowed was kissing. But even that was too much for Fred, who exclaimed, ‘Good God, your kisses thrill me!’ after he thanked her for his gifts. ‘What would you be like if—’ he contemplated aloud, and then sighed, ‘Oh skip it, what’s the use?’

Beyond some saucy stories to recount to M-O, there were a number of fringe benefits to these trysts. For one, Alice told M-O, they made her more affectionate
with her husband. All the pent-up sexual tension of her daytime adventures was apparently saved for Les when he came home and ‘went all romantic’, as she called it. She also made new friends, went out more and became more empowered than she’d ever felt before. The men she met flattered her, and told her how beautiful and intelligent she was. But it was also clear that Alice held a certain power over the men: seeking them out, enticing them and creating boundaries that she seems to have policed with relish.

Her shameless flirting, though, had a particular edge to it, a fact that came to light when she confided to M-O that as a teenager she was nearly raped. The power to police those boundaries that had once only narrowly escaped being violently shattered remained intact as long as Alice didn’t fall for her partners. She enjoyed Fred and Vic’s company, but she didn’t love them. She appreciated Les’ trust in her, as ‘He knew I would never do the unsporting thing.’ But at the same time, Alice confessed to her diary, ‘What a blessing I never
have
fallen really in love with another man.’ What if she did fall for someone?

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE SUN NEVER SETS

Edie pounded the typewriter keys with ferocity. The nerve. Of all the ‘dirty low down tricks’, she fumed. Well, she reckoned, he was growing old. He had done some good in his time, but now, he was increasingly becoming a ‘nuisance’. The British Empire would be better off without him. Best to let him die rather than give in to him, she thought.

It was 23 February 1943. Gandhi had been on hunger strike for thirteen days, but with eight days left in his twenty-one-day protest against his imprisonment and the rough treatment of prisoners throughout India, his kidneys failed. The crowds assembled outside the palace of Aga Khan in Poona, Gandhi’s prison since August 1942, were allowed inside, and reverently filed past the ailing seventy-three-year-old. All were convinced this was the end. While his family and supporters steeled themselves against the inevitable, Rutherford’s office mates in Sheffield were of the opinion that, ‘He should be allowed to die if he persists in his fast.’ Edie told M-O that, although she felt the British could not afford dissent during the war, and Gandhi’s death would almost certainly unleash chaos,
mass protest and the ‘attendant killing’ in India, she was nonetheless convinced, ‘In the long run to be rid of Gandhi would be a good thing.’

Winston Churchill agreed. When Gandhi had been imprisoned six months earlier, in August, the Prime Minister was so jubilant to learn that the Indian leader was in custody and out of the way that his doctor overheard him singing gleefully in the bath. Churchill told Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India and Burma, ‘If [Gandhi] likes to starve himself to death, we cannot help that.’
1
With Japanese forces at the gates of India and British losses everywhere mounting, Gandhi had given Churchill cause for much concern, for he led a movement of Indian nationalists who felt that the time was ripe to break away from Britain.

Gandhi’s Quit India Movement erupted in 1942, a moment when Allied fortunes across the globe looked particularly grim. The Russians, who were now Britain’s allies after the Germans attacked the USSR in June 1941, had suffered grievously in the first six months of the German invasion: at least four million Soviet troops had been killed or captured. By the summer of 1942, as Gandhi’s independence movement gathered momentum, most Britons watched anxiously as the Soviets engaged in a desperate battle to defend Stalingrad. The Americans, drawn into war in December 1941, had yet to find their stride, and British interests were everywhere being rolled back by seemingly invincible Japanese and German forces.

On 7 December 1941, the same day that Japan launched its attack against the Americans at Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces were also moving on British territory in Hong Kong and Burma. In the early hours of the morning, even before the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Japanese forces landed in northern Malaya and began their trek south through supposedly impenetrable jungle towards an apparently indomitable ‘Fortress Singapore’.
2
That evening, Singapore received its first air raids. It was an easy target: unlike the darkened cities of Europe, there was no blackout and the lights of Singapore glittered, creating an irresistible target for the night-time attackers.

A few days after Pearl Harbor, Britons were stunned to learn of their own naval disaster. Enemy aircraft patrolling the Gulf of Siam in the South China Sea had sunk two British ships,
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
, sent to thwart the Japanese landings in Malaya. The ships were the pride of the Royal Navy – one,
Prince of Wales
, had recently hosted a meeting between the Prime Minister and President Roosevelt – and the commanding admiral was a personal favourite of Churchill. The incident was a significant turning point – one that signalled that Britain no longer ruled the waves. Japan reigned supreme in the east; the empire was now, according to Churchill, ‘weak and naked’. Churchill later recalled, ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock’ than when the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, rang him with the news.
3

Not long afterwards, Britain would lose its oldest possession in Malaya, the island of Penang. Under severe Japanese bombardment, European inhabitants of the island were given strict orders to leave behind local staff and servants and evacuate. Some were disgusted at the ignominy of the orders, but nonetheless they obeyed and boarded the ferries to leave the island, some of which were manned by the survivors of
Prince of Wales
. It fell to the Indian editor of the local English-language newspaper to lower the Union Jack;
no British officer had stayed to formally surrender. One woman who had tried to stay but was forced out recalled soon after that the evacuation was ‘a thing which I am sure will never be forgo en or forgiven’.
4

For Edie Rutherford, a native South African and proud supporter of empire, the imperial losses pointed out the ‘farcical muddles’ of the government, both at home and abroad. The loss of
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
, for instance, constituted what Edie called a ‘double blow’ to the war effort. On the same day Britons learned the fate of the two ships, she reported that many women received an additional ‘blow’ – to their chances of lending their support to the war effort back home. The government had advertised important work for typists, yet by noon that day, Rutherford noted, it was announced that all positions were taken, leaving ‘thousands’ of women ‘disappointed’. From her perspective, this proved that, although Britain was fighting on its heels, the government nonetheless refused to make use of the millions of eager women, like Edie, waiting to take a crack at Hitler, and now the Japanese.

As Edie nervously watched the empire unravel in the titanic struggles across the globe, she was plunged into her own battle to find meaningful war work. Back on the first day of war, 3 September 1939, Rutherford had resolved that she would do whatever was necessary to help ‘push the ship along’. She seemed closer than ever to achieving that goal in March 1941, when the government decided that all women between the ages of twenty and forty (the requirements would eventually expand to include women between eighteen and fifty-one) had to register for war work. When she heard about the order, Edie thought that the government
should extend the law to include women in their fifties and sixties. Many of them, she thought, could run circles around her because they were through the ‘change in life’ and were more healthy and energetic than someone like her, who ‘still endure monthlies, getting faint indications of what goes with the change, and cannot help at times feeling under the weather, what with one thing and another’.

Like Nella Last, Edie was a skilled domestic manager, a master of rationing and ever vigilant in the battle against waste. But while she was serious about the domestic soldier’s mission to keep her family and community ‘fighting fit’, she felt equally compelled to take on what she considered to be useful war work. Indeed, for her (and many others), paid employment was the most effective way to participate in the war effort and Edie, who was thirty-nine at the time, would now be officially required to register for work in 1942.

She did not, however, wait for the government to find her a job of national importance and instead immediately launched her own search. An occasional freelance writer for newspapers in her native South Africa and, therefore, a skilled typist, Edie felt certain that her talents would be needed by the government. But, as so many women found out, the job hunt was eminently frustrating, especially if one insisted that the job matched one’s experience and skills, as Rutherford did.

Edie went to interview after interview and was sometimes offered work, but the wages were so paltry or the work so unsuited to her talents that she flatly refused. Despite the shock expressed by these employers at her seemingly unpatriotic rejection, she was steadfast, insisting that she was indeed patriotic, but would not be exploited, nor dispirited. ‘I WON’T lose
hope, nor believe my time wasted,’ she resolutely told M-O. Still, it was difficult to be offered such low wages or, as often happened to Rutherford, to realize that her problems often had little to do with her qualifications.

The ‘condescension’ that interviewers took towards her when they learned she had not worked for ten years and had never worked for – nor had references from – a Sheffield employer, was, according to her, ‘pitiful’. Nor did her age help matters. As she left one interview, she saw a long line of women – all much younger than herself – waiting. ‘That’s another job I don’t get,’ she thought bitterly.

The one bright light at the time was the American entrance into the war. Although Churchill fervently desired US help in Europe, many Americans were initially reluctant to go to war there. They much preferred to focus their efforts where they’d been hit: in the Pacific. Four days after Pearl Harbor, however, Hitler and Mussolini gave them no choice when both declared war against the US. Churchill was ecstatic. With the Americans in the war on both fronts, he later wrote, ‘We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.’
5

On Boxing Day 1941, Churchill addressed a joint session of the United States Congress. The Prime Minister charmed the chamber with his humour, as well as his sense of the historical gravity of the moment, and made multiple references to the newly forged ties between the two countries. One
New York
Times
commentator pointed out that it was the first time that Churchill could speak of the two countries as ‘“We” – linked openly and irrevocably together in
common struggle’.
6
As for the members of Congress, many thought it the ‘greatest speech’ they had ever heard.
7
The recent setbacks caught up with Churchill, however. No one but his personal doctor knew – until the truth came out after Churchill’s death in the 1960s – but the Prime Minister suffered a heart attack that night.

The speech was broadcast back home on the BBC, and marked the first time the British public heard a prime minister address the American Congress over the wireless. Most back home cheered Churchill’s speech. Irene Grant exclaimed with delight, ‘Grand old boy!’ and worried over his safe return. Edie Rutherford thought it a ‘good speech’ and believed it wise that Churchill exploited the ‘emotional’ connection he had with the US through his mother’s American ancestry. But what Edie enjoyed most about the speech was that ‘WC’ delivered some nice jabs at the isolationists who had, until recently, refused to become involved in what they saw as European infighting. Although she knew the erstwhile American isolationists would now deny their past, she hoped, nonetheless, that Churchill’s barbs made them squirm.

Natalie Tanner didn’t mention the Prime Minister’s speech that day. Her main concern was the surrender of Hong Kong, which had occurred the day before. As stories of Japanese atrocities filtered into the British press, and those around her waxed indignantly about them, Natalie remembered how apathetic people had been when the Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931. Back then, she had protested against Japanese aggression in China, but she was told to ‘mind my own business’ and was labelled a ‘war monger’. Now, at least, she felt vindicated.

The triumph was hollow indeed, and Natalie could do little more than shake her head sadly at the devastation brought down upon the garrison at Hong Kong. Newspapers reported that lack of food and water forced the troops to give in, leading Natalie to worry that her beloved Gibraltar (where she’d been married nearly twenty years before) might also suffer the same fate. But there was more to the siege of Hong Kong than the official line. The Japanese had been casing the colony since at least 1934, sending in numerous plainclothes spies – such as the naval commander who worked as a barber for seven years, listening carefully to the conversations of the high-ranking British officers who patronized his shop. Japan had an intimate knowledge of the colony, its defence and the behaviour of the defenders before it began its concerted attack in December 1941.

Japan had also succeeded in winning over many locals to its cause and these fifth columnists created devastating unrest, especially in the first days of the invasion. Still, the defenders of Hong Kong – both the British and Chinese Nationalist forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek – acquitted themselves better than can be said for their compatriots in other parts of the Far East, such as Penang. The British had been tasked with holding on as long as they possibly could, and this they did, as isolated islands of soldiers and volunteers fought off larger Japanese forces until their ammunition ran out. They were wholly outnumbered and outgunned on land, sea and in the air. On Christmas Day 1941, the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Young, became the first British governor to surrender a colony since the American War of Independence.