Domestic Soldiers (29 page)

While the war seemed remote in the Highlands of Scotland in August of 1944, the Allies were clawing their way through France. Near Newcastle, Irene Grant spent the summer hanging on every scrap of news about Allied progress or setbacks on the Continent and lamented the ‘slaughter’ suffered on both sides. She found it particularly upsetting to hear about British and American troops ‘wiping out pockets’ of German resistance; it was too dehumanizing. On 25 August, after four years of Nazi rule, Paris was finally wrested from German hands. When Irene heard of London bells peeling in celebration, she wondered if it wasn’t a little premature, ‘Why could they not wait to be sure?’ The battle for France had been too hard run for her to believe that the Allies actually had control over the capital. ‘We cannot be sure of anything over the radio. Hear of town liberated, then next day still fighting,’ Grant complained.

A day before the liberation of Paris, Helen Mitchell returned to Kent. On her journey through London and the south-east, she was ‘horrified at all the new damage’ the V-1s had inflicted on the region. Within days of Helen’s return, British troops overtook V-1 launch sites on the French coast. While V-1s still dropped across Britain through Christmas, the threat from the doodlebug had been largely contained. The official death toll from the summer of the V-1 numbered close to 5,500.

The end of the V-1 menace did not, however, spell the end to bombings in Britain. Indeed, just days after the liberation of Paris, Britons were greeted with a new form of attack, the V-2. This new ‘revenge’ weapon improved on the V-1 substantially. Now, civilians heard only the sonic boom of a rocket that flew faster than the speed of sound, followed by a bright blue flash of light
across the sky and, finally, the massive destruction of a 1-ton warhead. The sound was so loud, people within ten miles of the rocket thought it was right over them. Once again, London and the south coast were in the crosshairs.

To this new hazard that confronted Helen when she returned was added the distant roaring of guns in France and Allied planes overhead, the singing of barrage balloon wires in the wind, as well as an entire house full of hungry tenants. In the housing crunch created by the combination of bombing and employment patterns, Helen’s husband Peter felt compelled to offer his massive home to those in need. Her house now became a haven for workers and soldiers, and their families – all of whom expected to be fed and cleaned after.

To add to the insult and chaos of working-class (whom she called ‘rough’) lodgers invading Helen’s home and middle-class sensibilities, the lodgers were ‘carnivores’ whose dinners required her to deal with animal carcasses that produced thick grease. For a vegetarian such as Helen it was a disgusting and degrading chore. ‘One’s life is a battle with grease, dust, food’, she wrote at this time. On her fifty-first birthday, she began work at 7.30, ‘collecting and cleaning vegetables, went to greengrocer. Mrs B. [a lodger] came about 12 and made pastry to last over weekend. Said she didn’t have lunch, so I couldn’t,’ Helen complained. Afterwards, she ‘finished cleaning up at 4, made the beds, dusted W’s rooms, dug out sheets, pillows, etc. to air’. Exhausted, she then ‘fell into a bath, read
Times
superficially, darned socks till time to get supper’.

‘Will end of war liberate me from house-slavery?’ Helen mused bitterly. Fearing the war would not end
soon enough, she hoped her fifty-second year would be her last if her life did not change. Tortured by the continual rockets buzzing overhead, she did, however, confide to M-O that she ‘preferred not [to be] done in by a bomb!’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ANYONE WANT TWO TIN HATS AND TWO GAS MASKS?

Nella Last looked out into her garden, surprised to find a cheeky little magpie staring back at her. It was ‘so lovely a thing’, and its playfulness was infectious. The gregarious little bird whistled and hopped, performing for a scrap or two from its new audience. Nella could scarcely disappoint.

Day after day, the little magpie returned to Nella’s garden – always vigilantly watching for Murphy, the cat, but happy to perch just out of Murphy’s reach and announce its presence. But never again did the cheeky magpie’s antics raise a smile, for the day after its first appearance, Nella learned that her youngest son had been ‘dangerously wounded’ in Italy. From then on, the magpie would always remind her of 19 November 1944, when she received word of her son’s condition. Cliff had safely fought his way through North Africa to El Alamein and up the Italian peninsula from Naples, but just outside Florence, he encountered a German machine-gun nest. As he advanced on the position, a grenade exploded nearby, shredding his thighs, ripping into his torso and tearing through his right hand.

Though Rome had fallen on 4 June 1944, the campaign to oust the Germans from Italy was nowhere near finished. Indeed, the capture of the Italian capital probably prolonged what was already a costly and nightmarish theatre of war. In the overall scheme of things, Rome was a diversion. Instead of doggedly pursuing the Germans up the peninsula or cutting them off just north of the city, American Lieutenant General Mark Clark sent the lion’s share of his troops into the capital. Clark was known as a publicity hound, and Rome was certainly a perfect opportunity to capture the attention of the media. But while American troops were greeted with wine and flowers by thankful Romans, the Germans melted away to the north.

After Rome, the Germans retreated to the ‘Gothic Line’, just north of Florence, at the foot of the northern Apennines. Here, the Nazi troops built a formidable line of defence. Villages were razed to the ground and trees downed to give Germans clear lines of fire and to minimize the threat of surprise, while anti-tank ditches ran along the length of the German line. The approach to these ditches was littered with tree trunks and sprinkled liberally with barbed wire and landmines, as was the riverbed of the Foglia, which meandered through the region. The hilltops bristled ominously with machine-gun pillboxes. Martha Gellhorn, a
Collier’s
magazine correspondent who witnessed the fighting in Italy, told her readers that the Germans had succeeded in ‘turning the beautiful hills into a mountain trap four miles deep where every foot of our advance could be met with concentrated fire’.
1
These are the conditions Cliff Last encountered as his regiment slogged their way north of Florence.

The Allies would not punch through the Gothic Line until April 1945. The campaign that landed Cliff
in hospital was the longest in Western Europe, fought under horrific conditions akin to the trenches, barbed wire, mud and death of the Great War thirty years earlier. More than 310,000 Allies and over 430,000 Germans were killed or injured in Italy.

Cliff recuperated from his grievous injuries in Italy for a time, allowing the future sculptor time to study Italian art and form. When he came home, he convalesced at Conishead Hospital close to home, just outside Barrow. Although Nella had much to be thankful for – a friend’s son had been blinded in Italy and others had lost loved ones – it was a black time for her. ‘Only my faith and a mother’s anguish of mind kept me keeping on when Cliff was wounded,’ Nella later remembered.

The mother who prided herself on a close relationship with her two sons – a closer bond than she had with their father, and, she liked to say, a stronger relationship than they had with him – found her sensitive younger son aloof, moody and difficult. The homecoming must have been disappointing for Nella, for Cliff seemed to harbour an ‘“agin everything” attitude’. For weeks afterwards, Nella found all her efforts to be close or helpful rebuffed. It seemed that Cliff found everything she did ‘irritating’, ‘if not actually annoy[ing]’.

To make matters worse, the nature of Cliff’s injuries further drove a wedge between the two. The grenade that had ripped through Cliff’s body had imbedded shrapnel deep in his upper thighs and ‘impaired’ his penis and bladder. Nella desperately wanted to restore the deep connection she remembered having with her son as a boy and wished he would confide in her. But while she knew he was too ‘shy’ to talk to her about such injuries, she also worried that he had no one else
to turn to: Will had never gained Cliff’s confidence and his older brother, Arthur, lived in Northern Ireland. Still, it was the gulf that had opened up between mother and son that was heartbreaking for Nella.

Sometimes Nella blamed this distance on Cliff’s injuries, while at other times she thought it an indication of the ‘restlessness’ of his generation – a characteristic she saw often in her beloved young neighbour, Margaret Atkinson. ‘Margaret seems so unhappy and unsettled – she reminds me so much of Cliff,’ Nella told M-O. ‘I wonder if it’s a kind of “modern way” for young things,’ she mused. At times when Cliff pushed her away, Nella also recalled his waywardness as a child or chalked it up to a family trait found in roving ancestors who could never be content with their situation – an aimless angst buried deep in his make-up that made Cliff short with his parents and loathe the backwardness of Barrow.

Age or generational difference, personality or genetics, as with so many returning soldiers, Cliff’s battlefield experience also contributed to the growing separation from his mother. Nella often called herself a ‘soldier’ and made parallels between herself and her soldier-son, considering her work in the community to be her patriotic contribution to the war. Nella knew the two were vastly different, however. Even at the beginning of the war, she feared the impact that an intimate knowledge of death and killing would wreak upon her sensitive son. She entered that dark world when, helplessly, she witnessed him ‘thrash’ about in nightmares, tormented by ‘the fact he had killed people’.

He never talked about his battle experience; indeed, though he proudly showed his mother a letter stating he had been ‘mentioned in despatches’ for his action,
he refused to reveal the circumstances that led to his being wounded. After a few months’ convalescence, he did, however, begin to open up about his injuries. As his Medical Boards increasingly improved, in May 1945, Cliff proudly presented his mother with a report of his progress since Italy. Here, she learned the horrible extent of his injuries and quietly rejoiced that he had finally confided in her. Still, there was much left unsaid and slowly, agonizingly, the rift continued to grow.

As 1945 dawned and Nella tried to reconnect with her son after his injury, Helen Mitchell coped with the almost continual menace of the V-2 bomb. January 1945 was the worst time. Almost nightly, V-2s thundered overhead or struck nearby. Some nights, she switched on the radio to drown out the noise, but on other nights the rockets were so thick even this didn’t mask their terrifying boom. On one such night, she ran round the house, looking for jobs to occupy her mind, until finally, she broke down and wept, ‘the first time in ages’, she admitted. Snow fell thickly and ice coated the streets in mid-month, but, ‘Snow doesn’t stop V2,’ she thought bitterly.

While the V-2s harried residents of the south-east, Allied bombers headed eastwards to rain death and destruction over Germany. The last four months of the war represented the height of aerial bombings and destruction visited upon the enemy. From January 1945 to the end of the war, over 130,000 Germans were killed in Allied aerial assaults. On 13 and 14 February, the Allies bombed the historic town of Dresden and whipped up a firestorm of the order of the one that destroyed Hamburg in 1943. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Soviet army in the east had
poured into Dresden, only to face the terrible inferno fanned by the thousands of incendiaries dropped from above. At least 30,000 people perished in the bombing.

Edie Rutherford could feel little remorse over such destruction. The Germans, she reported with disbelief, seemed far from surrendering. ‘We have battered them on all sides and from the air, and still they won’t surrender,’ she wrote to M-O. ‘I do not understand how the Germans take all we do – such mesmerism has surely never occurred before in all history?’ Edie wondered. Goebbels’ defiant attitude towards the onslaught of Allied bombs convinced her that ‘We’ll have to cover every inch of Germany before we can truly say it’s over.’

Although the horrific firestorm in Dresden and the destruction of hundreds of other German cities saddened Natalie Tanner greatly, it was the targeting of the beautiful Bavarian city of Würzburg which caused her the most grief. On 16 March, Allied bombers destroyed 90 per cent of the city in less than twenty minutes, killing at least 5,000 people. As a child, Natalie had spent ‘four very happy years’ in the ancient city on the Main river. Photographs of the rubble in
The
Times
were difficult for Tanner to bear, and she made sure not to tell her mother, who lived up the road from Natalie, about the devastating fate of their beloved city. Natalie’s mother, Audrey, did not keep up with the war news very often, but when she did, she became agitated and morose; the destruction of Würzburg would be particularly difficult. Unfortunately, one of her mother’s friends – ‘very kind, but exceedingly tactless’ – presented Audrey with the very copy of
The
Times
that Natalie was attempting to keep from her mother, leaving Natalie to pick up the pieces.

After over a month of constant battering from V-2s, the swelling in Helen’s throat and an overexcited heart that had developed in the wake of the continual bombings sent Mitchell packing once more. This time, she rode out the danger at a convalescent home in Anglesey. Peter accompanied his wife on the exhausting trip westwards – the two left on the 6.07 train, four V-2s crashing nearby before they pulled away, and after a few bus rides and a final taxi run, arrived in Llanddona in midafternoon. ‘Could not imagine more peaceful spot,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘beautiful country, no cars passing, no radio or children allowed.’ Even better, there was only the rare plane heard overhead and no bombs. Peter spent the weekend walking the beaches and reading
Sense and Sensibility
to his wife before he went back to London, his work and more V-2s.

For Helen, March 1945 was a peaceful respite from the constant bombs and the usual lonely domestic grind. On her previous trips away during the war, Helen had often made arrangements with friends or acquaintances that required her to perform some domestic duties, whether cooking, cleaning or laundry. But this escape was different. There were no domestic obligations weighing her down, the town was largely quiet and the residents (what few there were) were as cultured as Helen believed herself to be. The owner of the convalescent home read Robert Browning to his guests, guests discussed poetry over tea and went for quiet strolls on the beach or into town. ‘Wallow in absence of bombs, no sight of a kitchen, clean rooms and light,’ she happily told M-O. Thinking of those she left behind, Helen added, ‘Wish everyone else in Southern England could have a spell of such bliss.’

Despite Anglesey being by far the best escape of the war, the stay was not entirely free from wartime obligations and domestic concerns. One of the residents foisted balls of wool on Helen to knit socks for the army. ‘Hoped to have holiday from male knitting but can’t refuse,’ she remarked to M-O. And, since Peter had returned to London, he had penned several letters informing her of a home in Beckenham that he wished to buy. Anxiety over this new turn of events crept into the ‘bliss’ of the Welsh island and, she confided in her diary, ‘Cannot face future life of household drudgery in a town which is much grimmer than in [Kent].’

But knitting for the army was only a nuisance, which didn’t seem to impinge too much on her routine in Anglesey, and the prospect of a new home in dingy surroundings was as yet only a dark cloud on the horizon. Helen continued to read, converse with the residents, go for restful walks and wallow in the peace of the countryside. However, ‘such bliss’ could hardly last. Three weeks after she’d arrived, with the Easter holiday looming and the expense of the home mounting, Helen made her way back to Kent.

The night of her return, she was greeted with a ‘filthy night [of] frequent sirens and two V1s this way about 5 a.m.’ The next three evenings would bring similar torment from the skies, and during the day, ‘the little bastards’ at the school behind her house did little else but ‘singing or screaming in playground’. Adding to her grief, ‘loathsome’ children from the school knocked on her door admiring the daffodils in her front garden and asking permission to take some home; she gave a stern, but exasperated ‘NO’ to all. On 28 March, only days after she’d returned home, Helen noted with glee, ‘Praise be to God! The school breaks up today!’ That
same night, it was quiet over Kent. During the day, there were no bombs to report either, which set Helen to wondering, ‘Either a) It’s all over or b) something dirtier is brewing.’