Domestic Soldiers (17 page)

As things began to turn around for women’s rights in late 1942, so the tide began to change in the war. Rays of hope started to break through the bleak midwinter of the Allies’ war effort. After the devastating spring losses in the Far East earlier in the year, the British also found themselves in dire straits in Northern Africa, where British forces had been forced by German and Italian troops into pockets in eastern Egypt and near the Libyan port of Tobruk. At the end of June 1942, Tobruk surrendered, along with 30,000 British and South African troops. ‘Defeat is one thing,’ Churchill said of the loss at Tobruk, ‘disgrace is another.’
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After Tobruk, General Erwin Rommel’s desert troops drove through Egypt to meet the British Eighth Army at El Alamein, about sixty miles west of Alexandria. Rommel would get no further. In late October 1942, British General Bernard Montgomery launched an attack that pushed the Germans 1,500 miles west, expelling them from Egypt and Libya. Two weeks after the attack began, British and American troops were landing west of the Germans on the shores of French Morocco and Algeria. Rommel now faced significant Allied forces on both the east and the west.

The situation in Russia was also beginning to improve that November. On 23 November, over 200,000 Germans found themselves surrounded at Stalingrad. Though fierce fighting would ensue until January, the Nazi advance into the USSR had reached its limit. Russia
would not fall. In India, Japanese forces stalled in the eastern region of Assam. Still, it was only, as Churchill put it, ‘the end of the beginning’.
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Edie’s luck also began to change at the end of the year. As required, she registered with the labour exchange in March 1942 and for most of the year, checked-in regularly with the exchange, going on the interviews they arranged, but was never offered a position. Indeed, though (or perhaps because) she ‘pestered’ the exchange so often during this period, she could do little more than laugh and throw up her hands in disbelief when she received a letter from them stating that she needed to fill in another form, and answer the same questions she had done many times before, or she would be stricken from the register.

Edie complied with the order, re-registered and was given a New Year’s gift when the exchange informed her she was to start an office job at a steel company in Sheffield on 4 January. The job was part-time and, though she was thrilled to work in a position that she felt used her talents and also had a direct effect on the war effort, she soon found that working and keeping the home going was not an easy task in wartime. Receiving a wage packet for the first time in years certainly was gratifying, but this was balanced by the sobering realization that, while the government continually urged women to find work, the home front was not set up for women who actually heeded that call.

Four days after starting the job, the thrill of her first pay packet adding bounce to her step, Edie made her way to the shops. The first stop was the butcher’s, and it was there that the reality of the double burden of work and domesticity sank in. Though it was only
12.30, she was told there was no meat left. ‘Where was our ration then?’ she angrily queried. The butcher only blinked and stared back at her blankly. After a few heated comments about the uselessness of coupons and rationing, she left empty handed and vowed never again to patronize that shop. She ‘traipsed around’ town for two hours, but still came home with nothing. For dinner that night, she pulled together what little food she had left and made vegetables with dumplings and gravy, feeling a little triumphant that the gravy came out quite nice. But her husband baulked at the lack of meat on his plate. Incensed by his attitude, she took a ‘firm line’ – ‘When I work full-time, I shall have even less time to shop … It is not my fault if I can’t get things’– and told him he could very well go hungry that night. He did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

FIGHT LIKE HELL UNTIL ALL ARE EQUAL

Irene stared out at the hill behind her home. Once, horses grazed and farmers ploughed the soft and verdant slopes, but they had long since passed into memory, now only a lifeless, gritty mound glowered back at her: ‘Dull, black, low hedges’ cut across the barren hill like scars, and a melancholy slag heap arose to dominate the view just to the left of Irene’s back garden. As she turned away from the hill and entered the low mean building before her, she was utterly depressed; the hill view punctuated the gloomy, ‘God and man forsaken hole’ that Irene called home.

She resented that she had spent years there, ‘wasting my talents’, making do, mending and patching the old, decrepit structure. Increasingly she was confined to her home by a variety of ailments, including rheumatism and sciatica; the bleak walls seemed to smother her. To Irene’s mind, what made it worse was that, with all its detractions, the cramped two-bedroom house wasn’t even hers. Though most of their friends and family had managed to purchase their own homes before the Great War or afterwards, Tom and Irene simply could
not afford to. Grinding poverty and unemployment in the inter-war years had wasted away all of their savings, and uncertainty made them loath to consider buying, even when Tom was in work.

The war changed all this. As early as April 1940, one journalist reported that Tyneside, where the Grants lived, was humming again after years of soul-rending, emasculating inactivity. Incomes began to increase as wages rose and the drive for more war materiel multiplied opportunities for overtime. By 1943, Britain was operating at near full employment: the 60,000 out of work consisted mostly of those who were moving from one job to another. In fact, the nation that only six years before had experienced nearly 70 per cent unemployment in some of its hardest-hit areas was now recruiting workers from abroad. In this atmosphere, Tom’s work at the chemical plant seemed secure, and the couple once again began saving.

Chafing in the crowded, dingy and rented accommodation, Irene and her two daughters began searching for a new home that they could afford. Their search of the surrounding communities commenced in the winter and spring of 1942/43, as British and American troops were squeezing Rommel’s troops into an untenable position in Tunisia, and Russian troops were driving Germans out of Stalingrad. On 15 November, bells rang across Britain to announce the first significant Allied victory of the war at El Alamein. Most felt the celebration presumptive. Helen Mitchell was ‘appalled by the bells … They are ringing the bells now, but they’ll be wringing their hands soon,’ she was sure. For Irene, the bells sounded joyous, if a little premature: ‘It wasn’t as if war was over … Now let’s
get on and not rejoice until something bigger shows,’ she thought.

Rejoicing could wait until a solid victory was achieved, but the house search could not. While she and her daughters were enthusiastic about the possibilities of owning a new home, Tom was deeply concerned and did all he could to dissuade them from their endeavours. The wartime economic boom simply couldn’t last, he believed, and knowing how the peace had played out after the last war, the future looked bleak: all he could imagine was a replay of the hard times of the inter-war years. While Tom’s job remained stable, the family was comfortable, still he feared that it was financially dangerous to become homeowners.He was determined not to ‘be got into poverty again’, but Irene assured him that they had enough money to comfortably afford a new home. Still, he continued with the argument he always used to shut down Irene’s dream: high taxes, an economic slump and a worthless housing market would surely follow the war and ruin them if they made the move. ‘Oh! the pessimist!’ she exclaimed to her diary, ‘I say we’ve waited twenty-seven years and have a right to move for the sake of the girls (and me).’

Quietly, she resolved not to give up despite Tom’s fears; she knew the finances better than her husband and now decided to take control of all housing matters, knowing Tom would eventually come around. With a new determination, Irene retired to bed, dreaming of a new home.

Tom wasn’t alone in his dreary vision of the post-war future. Most people worried that, in peacetime, the economic hardships and unemployment that had plagued inter-war Britain would return, and the
government would once again turn its back on the people. Very early on in the war, however, many were determined that this time it would be different; lessons could be drawn, they believed, from the callousness of inter-war public policy and the greed of vested interests. In 1940, from Dunkirk until the Blitz heated up in the autumn, J.B. Priestley built his stunning celebrity on this issue.

In those uncertain and momentous days of 1940, hopes for a new world order abounded, and Priestley shaped the debate. In his Sunday night BBC
Postscripts
, he set the tone for the People’s War, reworking Churchill’s moving, but often officious and militaristic, rhetoric into a homely and uplifting chat, embracing everyone in the war effort, and, more importantly, mobilizing them for the People’s Peace. After the last war, Priestley lamented, the very ones who won the war were abandoned: veterans and their families were left to ‘take their chance in a world in which every gangster and trickster and stupid insensitive fool or rogue was let loose’.
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This time, he hoped, the people would work together to build an equitable peace: no one would be left behind.

Most Sunday nights, after the nine o’clock news, that summer and autumn of 1940, J.B. Priestley introduced his burgeoning audience to ‘ordinary people’ and ordinary scenes he’d encountered on his travels across the country: cheerful, good-hearted people and the simple towns and countryside that were the backbone of the nation. For example, there was the young RAF pilot and his wife trying to cobble together a life during the Battle of Britain; the baker in Bradford who refused to close his shop after being bombed; the invalid who served up bubbly ‘repartee’ and spread cheer through
the ranks as she was evacuated from a hospital on the Isle of Wight; even an indomitable mallard duck who bravely marshalled her ducklings despite the Blitz.
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In these evocative and heart-warming tales of Britain, Priestley reminded the people of the very best that lay within them, of the humour, the bravery and the humanity that made them not only different from the ‘automaton’ Nazis, but that would ultimately help them prevail against the forces of evil.
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But the fight was not, according to Priestley, just against the Nazis. It was also against the politics of ‘officialdom’ and the greed and privilege that had prevailed in the inter-war period. ‘We’re not fighting to restore the past,’ he argued one July evening, for ‘it was the past that brought us to this heavy hour.’ Instead, the fight against the Nazis was only an ‘encumbrance’ to be eliminated so that the real work could be done: ‘so that we can plan and create a noble future’.
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That new future was a radical restructuring of society, steeped in equality, in which kindness and decency trumped bald-faced power, and community needs triumphed over the individual. Priestley urged the people to ensure that the post-war era prioritized community and creativity over power and destruction, asking his audience to consider the needs of all ahead of selfish, individualistic concerns corrupted by money and property. To illustrate this idea, Priestley told his audience of a large garden in his neighbourhood that had fallen into disuse because its owners fled to America at the opening of the war. Under the traditional conception of individual ownership the community was supposed to protect that property, but, he argued, that duty to protect the absentee owner’s land made no sense when war workers in the area
desperately needed land for vegetable allotments. The people had every right to take over that land for the larger good.

In order for a new dawn to break after the war, all ordinary individuals had to come together and stand up to the bureaucrats and vested interests that threatened to tamp down popular feeling and put things back the way they were. The failure of the inter-war years, he told his audience, was that they ‘let the old hands, the experts, the smooth gentry’ trick them into believing that ordinary citizens could not grasp the problems of the day, and certainly could do nothing about them. In the process, these ‘old hands’ put their hands back on the reins of power, abandoned the people and ultimately ‘sold [them] out’.
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Priestley’s greatest fear, he made clear on his last regular
Postscript
appearance in 1940, was that the popular spirit of 1940 would evaporate, allowing the ‘old hands’ to enter once more and usher in the bad old days of the inter-war period.

Every time Priestley took to the air, he skilfully entwined his new vision of the world order and a call to popular action as he painted wholesome, kindly pictures of ordinary Britons and Britain. This radicalism increasingly infuriated the upper levels of government (including Churchill) and, though he assured his audience that it was entirely his decision to leave in October 1940, it was most probably his quest for a new world order that was behind Priestley’s departure as a regular
Postscript
announcer. He appeared in the
Postscript
spot several times during the remainder of the war, but never with the regularity of his 1940 stint.

J.B. Priestley’s ‘people’s peace’ message resonated with Irene Grant. Rarely one to miss his
Postscripts
, she also devoured his newspaper columns with great
eagerness. To one article, in which he insisted that the nation could easily get by without the aristocracy and bureaucracy, but would sink into oblivion without the honest workers, she exclaimed, ‘Them’s my sentiments!’ On another occasion, she echoed Priestley’s community-over-individual ideal in stressing that any vacant homes left standing after a blitz be given to the homeless. ‘The poor homeless people are 100 per cent more value than… property,’ she explained to M-O. The failures of the past that so concerned Tom as he considered buying a new home had transformed Irene into a crusader for a better peace, both for herself and for others. ‘Won’t I fight for the new order with Priestley and Co.!… Good old Priestley!!’ she cried.

Irene felt closely connected to Priestley and his calls for a radical rebuilding of society: she felt that he had a special way of expressing her thoughts and feelings in words that she could never conjure on her own. Irene wished that she could be as articulate and persuasive as he was in advocating a world order in which she strongly believed. Though she humbly told M-O, ‘My choice of words is so poor,’ she regularly laid out her hopes for the peace in her writing.

As in Priestley’s vision, Irene’s ideal society emphasized hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, ‘real people’, like her and her family. ‘Yes out goes my chest, I’m
real
,’ she proudly told M-O when she declared that Priestley had the support of ‘real people’ across Britain. She believed that capitalists and ‘Tories the world over’ had lived on the backs of the common people and had hijacked the power of the state away from them. She was convinced, too, that these same Tories had started the war for their own selfish ends and forced working people around the world to fight one another. In the
post-war future, Irene hoped to see a reversal of power through a national takeover of banking and industry, which she believed would undercut capitalist and corporate influence and greed. She also strongly advocated common ownership of land – ‘It ought never to have belonged to any private person,’ Irene asserted.

As she and her daughters went house-hunting, Irene personally confronted another problem of the capitalist basis of British society: the escalation of prices as supply became scarce and demand rose. Many profited from the housing shortage exacerbated by the Blitz; houses that had once gone for £400 were now selling for twice as much, Irene angrily reported. At the start of her house-hunt, she had believed that £600 would be more than enough to buy them a comfortable home, but after a few months’ search, she found that £900 was more like it, a fact that priced her out of many previously affordable homes. ‘Demand and supply is a wicked greed,’ she fumed.

In the end, she hoped to see socialism established in Britain and across the globe. As George Orwell once wrote, ‘The “mystique” of socialism is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.’
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Equality was very much the core of Irene’s understanding of socialism. Indeed, Irene was driven by acute memories of past experiences of inequality. Though her father had been a respectable, hard-working man who never drank or squandered his money, he never seemed to get ahead. The poverty of the father, too, Irene realized, became the burden of his daughters: Irene felt that she and her sisters had been held back because her family could not afford higher education. ‘My decent brain and my good hands (plain truth, not swank)’, she told
M-O, ‘could never have a proper chance because of lack of money, though I come of hardworking people.’ Instead, she watched while others whom she called ‘nin-compoops’ wasted a university education gained simply because their parents had money.