Domestic Soldiers (27 page)

At work in Sheffield, Edie and her office mates listened in. Tears streamed down the faces of some of the ‘girls’ who had brothers, sons, husbands or fathers ‘in it’. Some simply could not bear to hear the reports and left the room. As the news came through, Edie wondered ‘How many wives at 6 a.m. are by now widows???’

In the pre-dawn of 6 June, the main contingents of British troops landed at the beaches code-named Sword and Gold – Ouistreham and Arromanches respectively. Those who fought their way across Gold Beach were expected to take the town of Bayeux that day, while soldiers at Sword were supposed to make it eight miles inland to the town of Caen. By midnight of 6 June, 150,000 Allied soldiers had come ashore at designated beaches on the Norman coast. (Americans landed west of British troops at Utah and Omaha beaches, and Canadians at Juno, between Sword and Gold beaches.) Although none of the troops made it to their objective that first night, an important foothold was established in German territory and casualties were much lighter than feared. Churchill expected at least 10,000 casualties that day, but fewer than 5,000 perished on the first day of action. To illustrate the success of the operation: approximately
350 Canadian soldiers died on 6 June, whereas in the ill-fated debacle at Dieppe in 1942, nearly 1,000 died. To answer Edie’s musings, back home in Britain, over 1,600 wives, mothers or sisters would soon learn they’d lost their loved ones.

When the Tanners reached Newcastle on 6 June, they had lunch and caught the ‘fag end of the one o’clock news’, confirming their hunch: the second front had indeed begun. Afterwards, Hugh left Natalie in town while he went to his business meeting, and as usual on her trips to Newcastle, she caught a tram to the Odeon theatre. The tram was empty, so Natalie chatted with the conductress, who agreed with her that though necessary, the invasion must be ‘wicked’ for the soldiers. On her way to the theatre, Tanner passed a crowd of onlookers who, despite the biting wind and rain, stopped to watch respectfully as a convoy of soldiers passed. There were no flags waving or cheers of excitement, only grave anticipation. Natalie paused for a moment, then carried on to the theatre.

The movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s
Lifeboat
starring Tallulah Bankhead, she thought particularly well done – better by far, she thought, than the much-touted (all-male) Noël Coward film,
In Which We Serve
. Afterwards, Natalie waited for her husband and read in the hotel’s lounge until the King spoke on the wireless. Hotel guests gathered round to listen and everyone stood up when ‘God Save the King’ was played at the conclusion of his speech. Natalie felt sorry for George VI; though they all raved about the BBC’s coverage of D-Day, no one in the group mentioned the King and she personally found him particularly uninspiring.

The next day, a little frayed at the edges from a rough night’s sleep (not so much from worries over the mortal
conflict across the Channel as from the trains, trams and buses that scurried along beneath her window all night long), Natalie went down to the theatre to buy tickets for that evening’s production of ‘Is Your Honeymoon Necessary?’ The Tanners were entertaining Hugh’s clients, the Williamsons, and Natalie was tickled that she managed to get four well-positioned stalls for a little less than £2.

Later that day, Mrs Williamson met Natalie in town and brought her home for the afternoon. It was a nice stone terraced house that the childless couple had only just moved into – a ‘family house’, Natalie imagined. Mary Williamson and her mother were entertaining and accommodating, but Natalie felt somewhat out of sorts. Mary was easily in her early thirties and Tanner was nagged by the fact that Mary hadn’t been ‘roped into National Service’. It was odd, Tanner reflected later, to spend the afternoon ‘with two women who were doing nothing apart from running a home … positively prewar’.

Natalie’s reaction to Mary and her mother can only be described as an amusing case of the pot calling the kettle black, for Natalie’s own situation was hardly different from Mrs Williamson’s. At forty-four, Tanner was fit enough herself to be ‘roped into’ war work. Since her son was under fourteen, however, she was exempted from official conscription. Still, as her son was away at school near Manchester, he was rarely at home, and one would think Tanner capable of volunteering, as she thought the Williamsons should have done.

Natalie may have thought that the difference lay in the Williamsons’ close proximity to the large city of Newcastle. Tanner kept up with the events of the
war and wrote about them for M-O, but there was little else she could do but take care of her home, her husband and her son, she explained to M-O, because she lived too far outside a major town. And yet, Natalie regularly found her way to nearby Leeds or Bradford for shopping, lunch and/or dinner, and usually a play or film. In fact, Natalie’s war was rarely spent at home, but rather more often in these two towns or in London.

At least twice a week, and always on Fridays, Natalie – sometimes accompanied by her mother, who lived up the hill from their cottage – hitched a ride with Hugh into the nearest village. Here, Natalie ordered coal and her groceries for the week, and exchanged library books. On occasion, she ate at the local British Restaurant – non-profit, self-service cafeterias originally named Communal Feeding Centres, where one could get a cheap and generally filling meal.

There was little else to do in the village beyond the usual weekly errands and so, once these were done, Tanner usually caught a bus into Leeds or Bradford. In Leeds, she spent her mornings in the cafes at either Lewis’ department store or the Great Northern Hotel. Here, Natalie sipped coffee and wrote letters or read until noon, when she moved on to the Gambit cafe for lunch and conversation with other regulars. Some of the Gambit grazers were politically conservative and Tanner, a communist and staunch supporter of the USSR, took great joy in crossing ideological sabres with them. Others were socialites, conscientious objectors and actors. After lunch, Natalie frequented a bookstore where she debated political issues with the bookseller, a member of the Communist Party, and picked up her regular
Daily Worker
, except from January 1941
to September 1942, when the communist paper was suppressed by the government.

Next, Tanner usually stopped at the cinema for a movie or two. Because of fears of mass casualties, cinemas and football stadiums had been closed during the first weeks of war, but, after raids failed to materialize in that time, and once people began to complain, cinemas and sporting events soon reopened. George Bernard Shaw called the closures ‘a masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity’ that could only be disastrous to morale, leaving people to ‘cower in darkness and terror’.
5
From then on, movies were a popular wartime diversion. Despite the fact that an entertainment tax was levied on seat prices, attendance grew from 1939, when about nineteen million people a week went to the cinema, to 1945, when thirty million allowed themselves a few hours of weekly escape.

When M-O asked its writers to list their top six movies of 1943, Tanner duly responded with seven. The number-one spot on her list was a tie between two American films: Orson Welles’ follow-up to
Citizen
Kane
,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, and
Mission to Moscow
, a movie that was part of President Roosevelt’s strategy to garner more popular American support for Russia. Tanner saw
Mission
twice and liked it because, ‘I am always glad when the case for Russia is put by the Capitalist.’ Further, she thought the movie ‘authentic’ and ‘beautifully acted’. Though she felt the story was ‘rather trite’,
The Ambersons
offered a nice break from war-related films and was well-directed, produced and acted.
Casablanca
also made her top seven, as did the Russian film,
Alexander Nevsky
. The M-O directive must have been difficult to answer for Natalie the film buff, who intimated that, ‘Actually I could make
the list much longer,’ and proceeded to add another ‘memorable’ seven to her response, such as the British war films
Went the Day Well
,
We Dive at Dawn
and Noël Coward’s
In Which We Serve
. Tanner’s movie-going went far beyond most during the war. About a third of the population said they went to cinema at least once a week, but she easily saw at least two films a week during the war, if not more.

Although she had seen several films in 1943, and said she enjoyed going to the movies, Nella Last could barely conjure more than three specific film titles for her M-O list:
Penn of Pennsylvania
(‘I like “pioneer people” … and my forbears [sic] up to my Gran’s time were Quakers’),
Yankee Doodle Dandy
, and her favourite actress, Greer Garson (of
Mrs. Miniver
fame) in
Random Harvest
. Stuck at home, suffering from arthritis, Irene Grant did not see any films in 1943. Edie Rutherford went to the movies very little, but said she enjoyed
Bambi
because ‘It was good propaganda for animals and against man with his blasted gun.’ She also saw
Two Yanks in Trinidad
, which ‘infuriated’ her because it underlined the ignorance and indifference of the Americans, who ‘didn’t think there was a war before Pearl Harbour’. Alice Bridges did not go in for movies, but enjoyed dancing and socializing instead. Unsurprisingly, the lonely and isolated Helen Mitchell had ‘not seen a film for three years’.

Natalie Tanner, the upper middle-class Cambridge-educated housewife, hardly fitted the profile of an avid film-goer during the war, who tended to be younger, urban and working class. She was, in fact, a film connoisseur – a woman who might have had her own film critic’s column in a newspaper, women’s magazine or high-brow film journal. Instead, she reserved her
criticism to her social circle and M-O. Like a film critic, she enjoyed, or endured, almost every production that hit the silver screen during the war.

On one of her usual Friday excursions to Leeds in 1944, she caught the American film,
The Hour Before
Dawn
, an adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel in which a Nazi spy marries an English pacifist to help Hitler plan his invasion of England. Despite the fact that she ‘knew it would be bad’, she went to see it nevertheless. ‘The whole thing was bogus and preposterous,’ she wrote, and the lead actor ‘definitely miscast’. As might be deduced from this commentary, her criticism often went beyond storyline to casting and frequently to direction, lighting and camera angles. For instance, she thought the French film,
Le Jour se
lève
(
The Day Rises
), ‘well done’, and her analysis of it led her to remark that some British films were equally impressive, if at times they looked ‘poverty stricken’. The problem with British films, she mused, was, ‘They never seem to realize that there is any other position for the camera except bang in front.’

It is unsurprising that Tanner’s film criticism extended into the art of casting and production, since she and her husband were also intimately involved in the dramatic club at the Civic in Bradford. Her trips into Leeds often included a jaunt into Bradford, where she sometimes took in a rehearsal, a play reading or production at the Civic and then topped the night off with a few beers across the street at the Junction with the theatre set. When Hugh’s busy schedule allowed time, and when the petrol ration allowed for daily drives into Bradford for rehearsals, he sometimes acted in Civic productions. Natalie dabbled in acting herself, taking lessons in December 1939, but it
seems that she enjoyed being entertained rather than entertaining.

In order to have time to shop, discuss politics, graze and drink at local establishments and criticize movies and plays, Natalie was generally unfettered by the obligations of domesticity. In her diary, days spent at home were given short shrift. Diary entries on these days usually mentioned the book she was reading, made reference to the weather and finished with a curt, ‘Cooked. Cleaned.’ On the other hand, when she ventured away from the cottage, Natalie’s writing was much more detailed. Clearly, these excursions were more interesting and important to her. She enjoyed connecting with others, shopping and engaging her mind through film, theatre and the mountain of books she borrowed from the libraries in the nearby village and Leeds.

Though she could, and on occasion did, cook, Tanner ate many of her meals out. This is especially true during the times when her son was away at boarding school. When he was home, a flurry of domesticity – cooking, ironing and constantly tidying in James’ wake – took over her routine. Still, his presence did not interfere with Natalie’s trips into town. She simply brought him along, treating him to ice cream at Lewis’, lunch at the Gambit and a movie (or two) of
his
choice. On occasion, he attended plays at the Civic with his parents and acquired the family penchant for dramatic commentary. When the weather allowed, the family walked the four miles over verdant rolling hills to the village pub for lunch and sometimes stayed for dinner and drinks. The beer flowed easily and locals’ tales of the harvest and town history made for interesting amusement, as, for example, on the night when a good-natured argument broke out over which village installed the first electric light.

For those with money, eating out was a way to stretch rationing. Individuals were not required to give up rationing coupons when they ate at restaurants, and though the government tried to limit abuses by placing a maximum of five shillings for all meals (except in classy establishments, where such a low-cost meal would never cover their costs), there were ways around this restriction. In theory, restaurants, tea shops, cafes and pubs were given the same level of rations as the ordinary housewife received. In reality, the shortages felt keenly at the local grocer’s or butcher’s were rarely perceived in eating establishments. Indeed, although Natalie sometimes complained about rationing, her family never wanted for much during the war because they frequently ate out. While other people were counting their coupons for a can of salmon in the stores, Natalie could find a delicious Dee salmon off-ration in a restaurant.