Domestic Soldiers (3 page)

The frequent playing of ‘God Save the King’ during the Second World War was one of the many annoyances with which Helen Mitchell coped. ‘Why must we so frequently save the King?’ she muttered when the BBC seemed to play the song continually after Italy capitulated in September 1943. Helen’s less than patriotic feelings sprang from a deeper well than the simple, though exasperating, repetition of the patriotic tune:
they can be traced to an unfulfilling marriage and a tragic realization that there was no escape from it. This revelation came to her in 1936, when Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry a divorcee.

On 11 December 1936, it was announced that King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in order to marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. To Mitchell, everything about this episode illustrated the fundamental problems of British society and its conservative stance towards marriage. It was a poignant reminder of her own situation. If the stigma of divorce could not evade even the king, neither could she be immune; if she chose to leave her own loveless marriage, the shame of it would stalk her, too. She was fascinated by the prospects of divorce, and eagerly corresponded with friends who succeeded in breaking away from their unhappy marriages in the 1940s, but something in the abdication kept Helen from leaving her husband. The abdication slammed the door and turned the key on her domestic prison.

Helen married Peter in 1915 and followed her new husband to Newcastle, where he spent the First World War as an engineer. He was shy and hard working, and she was running from a desolate childhood – the youngest child by nine years, Helen’s mother frequently told her she was unplanned and unwanted. Helen saw little of her husband while they lived in Newcastle, and they spoke even less. She remembered that their first years together were awkward. Neither knew much about the ‘facts of life’, nor was she ‘very thrilled about “sex”’. Upon reflection, she figured he ‘knew as little about the job as I did’. They ‘managed to produce a son after 2 years’, but Helen was intensely lonely. Soon after giving birth, she ‘got less keen on the sex business’ and
felt her husband had little interest in her outside the bedroom. He threw himself into his work and rarely noticed her.

After the war, they moved to the outskirts of Aberdeen, where initially, the isolation was maddening. Helen spent these years alone in mind and spirit. She knew no one, felt painfully rejected by her husband and found little comfort in motherhood. Being the youngest child, she had had no experience with infants. They made her nervous and self-conscious, and she had no idea how to care for her own child, no one to help her and very few tender feelings towards him.

By the time William was seven, Helen seems to have finally settled into life in Scotland. For several weeks in the autumn of 1926, she presented a local radio programme on ‘Prominent Women of the Eighteenth Century’, but it would be three more years before she truly came into her own.

In September 1929, she left Aberdeen to study drama and elocution at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London. Helen never explains how she convinced her husband to let her leave, or if indeed she
did
convince him. Nonetheless, she did leave, and since her sister-in-law lived in London, it seems likely that Helen stayed with her during her studies. At the academy, Helen was introduced to a new and exciting world. She found something at which she excelled – receiving bronze and silver medals for outstanding performances on her annual examinations. Helen also discovered kindred spirits in her fellow actors, writers and producers. And for the first time in her life, she felt truly accepted.

The ensuing years in Aberdeen were the happiest of her life, and night after night the house was filled
with music and laughter. She put on bridge evenings and staged plays, poetry readings and concerts, inviting amateurs and professionals alike to her home for grand social evenings. With her husband, Peter, she founded a local Shakespeare society; both Peter and William spent their spare time together building sets for the plays. This period would see the bond between father and son strengthened, as the carpentry shed offered the perfect environment for intimate talks, and a place where William eagerly soaked up his father’s knowledge and technical skills.

Though Helen watched with some sadness as she was increasingly shut out of the close relationship developing between Peter and William, the 1930s were the height of her life. She had made new friends at the RAM and, with a newfound confidence, blossomed in Scotland. With her workaholic husband rarely home, her son at boarding school for most of the year in England, and an efficient servant to take care of the house, domestic life faded into the background and her social life was in the ascendant.

The abdication crisis in 1936 was the first shock to bring her back to reality. The final blow came a year later when, tired of his work, Peter uprooted Helen from the Aberdeen she had grown to love and sequestered her in an old, rambling house in a quiet village in Kent with few friends and fewer reliable servants. Helen was given no say in the relocation; the decision to move was entirely her husband’s.

Moving to Kent would place Helen in the centre of the storm that would soon break over Britain. But while she could not know the struggles she would soon endure in wartime, Helen braced herself for the domestic battle of her life.

CHAPTER TWO

WAR, AGAIN

Irene Grant was on edge. All week, she was nervous and irritable, preoccupied with fears of what lay ahead. ‘War is unthinkable,’ she said to her husband, as if the words were a talisman to ward off impending doom, but her thoughts would not be still. The prospect of a new war recalled the last one, the supposed ‘war to end all wars’. This time, it would be worse. Her neighbour, the wife of a coal miner, told Irene that ‘young people’ did not realize the terror that awaited them, and she confided, ‘I’d rather be dead.’ Images of the coming death and horror flickered across Irene’s thoughts like a nightmarish newsreel, yet the anticipation of nagging day-to-day wartime realities could not be suppressed. She knew prices would rise and food would be scarce, as had happened in the last war. Irene had barely managed twenty years ago – how would she feed her family this time?

While Grant imagined the worst, Natalie Tanner piled into the car with her family. Two other families followed the Tanners into the Yorkshire countryside to take advantage of a warm August afternoon and to enjoy what Natalie called an ‘ordinary middle-class
picnic’. The next day, she went out to pick blackberries while her six-year-old son James tumbled and wrestled with the farm cat’s new kittens. Natalie stayed within earshot of the phone, in case news might come, but, ‘war or no war’, the blackberries needed to be gathered in and jam had to be made. The fact that Radio Luxembourg continued to broadcast reassured Natalie that war was more distant than some feared. The radio station beamed popular programming, including jazz and American-style soap operas, from the tiny European nation to a large audience in Britain. It was the only commercial radio station available in northern England and Scotland, sponsored mainly by American manufacturers, hawking cosmetics, household goods and packaged foods. The radio station, with one of the most powerful transmitters in Europe, would have either been shut down or taken over by Germans if the situation was more grave.

Tanner took the radio’s continuation to mean that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was wavering and would back down, as he always had in the past. The political situation would once again stabilize, she believed. But this was wishful thinking in the wake of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact – making allies of Germany and Russia – signed just days before, on 23 August. In response, Britain signed a pact with Poland, promising support if Hitler were to invade.

To keep her anxious mind from worrying about war, a week after the Nazi–Soviet pact was signed, Nella Last decided to go down to her local Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) centre. The WVS was established in May 1938 as a way to mobilize women across Britain for war. Before the war, they tried to anticipate their community’s – and their nation’s – needs in the
event of hostilities. During the war, WVS women could be found in their distinctive green uniforms amid the rubble and debris of air raids, handing out reviving cups of tea, soothing traumatized victims and caring for the wounded. They were also involved in a surprising array of projects: they ran canteens for soldiers and war workers, knitted socks and gathered books to send to servicemen, organized neighbourhood salvage drives and helped out wherever there was a need. Their motto was: ‘The WVS never says no’.
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When Nella walked down to her local WVS centre on 31 August, she found many women there, undoubtedly also trying to occupy their thoughts. As the volunteers knitted evacuation blankets, they were told of the new sewing machines that were to be installed for making pyjamas and hospital supplies, if war should come. As they nervously chatted together, they discussed how they might plan their household duties to allow them time to volunteer at the centre if their services were needed.

Nella was amazed that no one talked about the ‘big issues’ as they worked, but on the way home she overheard people who were convinced that the British–Polish pact had called Hitler’s bluff and that he would now back down. She was not so sure, for she was haunted by an old ‘prophecy’ her father had heard long ago: Prince Edward would never become king, and in 1940, a war would begin that ‘would end things’. Now, as she remembered Edward VIII’s abdication, she had a ‘cold feeling in my tummy when I think the first came true’.

The next day, 1 September, events made the prophecy seem even more foreboding. Natalie Tanner was shocked to learn of the Nazi invasion of Poland
on the 10.30 news. That day, the Nazis introduced the world to Blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’, as 1.5 million troops streamed into Poland in a swift and well-coordinated attack, involving armoured Panzer divisions and devastating air support. Europe was stunned and Poland overwhelmed. ‘Something had gone wrong with appeasement,’ Tanner thought. Nonetheless, she was convinced that Chamberlain would once again evade a direct conflict, as the British government had consistently failed to support Abyssinia, China, Spain and Czechoslovakia in the recent past against Italian, Japanese and German aggression.

But if the government had been negligent in its duties to defend weak states against strong, it was not entirely blind to the threat of future hostility against Britain. Rearmament and defence spending rose in earnest from 1937, and conscription was introduced in early 1939. Air Raid Precautions (ARP) was created by Act of Parliament in late 1937, and soon afterwards 250,000 body bags were ordered to prepare for the eventuality of bombings on civilian targets. Evacuation schemes were devised to move children and mothers with young children quickly out of the city centres that were expected to be the targets of this deadly onslaught.

The Spanish Civil War, which started in 1936, offered a powerful example of the realities of total warfare, heralding a new era of combat that exempted no one from the horrors of war. The awesome destruction of massive aerial bombing was demonstrated in April 1937, when German and Italian bombers supporting General Francisco Franco’s Fascist troops devastated the Basque town of Guernica in three hours. Marxist scientist J.B.S. Haldane reported that nearly 2,000 people were killed there, ‘many’, he said, ‘roasted
alive’ from the fires started by incendiary bombs. It was this action, and others across Spain and China (which endured similar attacks by the Japanese), that led Haldane to write a handbook in 1938, entitled
Air-Raid
Precautions
, intended to help ordinary British citizens understand and survive such mass civilian bombings.
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By 1 September 1939, Natalie Tanner was well aware of this new reality. Having lived in Spain before the Civil War, she was an enthusiastic supporter of Republican relief projects and closely followed the events since Franco’s military coup in the summer of 1936. Now, having heard so much about that conflict and air raid preparations in his own country, Natalie’s young son James caught the mood of his parents and joined them to listen pensively to the wireless, anxiously awaiting the air raids that would rain bombs down on his own home. Nella Last thought of her son, Cliff, who had been conscripted, and felt ‘like a person who, walking safely on the sea sands suddenly finds [her] feet sinking in quicksand’. At home in Tyneside, Irene Grant could just perceive the cold edge of ‘The Sword of Damocles’, as she called it, hanging precariously by a single thread from above.

It fell on 3 September. That day, Alice Bridges was remembering the Munich Crisis. Almost a year to the day, on 15 September 1938, Hitler had pressed Britain and France for the annexation of the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a significant number of ethnic Germans. The crisis was so grave that the sixty-nine-year-old Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, boarded his first aeroplane and flew to Munich to meet the German leader. Claiming that he was concerned over the treatment of the German population there, Hitler told Chamberlain that Germany was ready
to fight for the area. What he failed to tell the Prime Minister, however, was that the Sudetenland was also strategically important to Germany: without it, and its fortifications and resources, Czechoslovakia could not possibly defend itself. Throughout September 1938, the crisis threatened to plunge the world into another great conflict with Germany. The world narrowly averted all-out war, however, when the British and French conceded to Hitler’s demands at a peace conference at the end of the month. Britons breathed a collective sigh of relief when Chamberlain returned home with Hitler’s promise that this was his last demand. The peace lasted only six months: Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

To Alice Bridges, war between Britain and Germany had been ‘inevitable’ since the Munich Crisis, but still, as she awaited the Prime Minister’s address on 3 September, she told her diary that she ‘hoped against hope for peace’. Regardless of the impending threat, she decided not to evacuate her daughter from their home in Birmingham. Jacqueline was delicate like her mother and very particular about the food she ate, and Alice worried that a new family could not, or would not, take care of her daughter properly.

Others had, however, decided to part with their children in the interests of safety. Hoping to avoid the mass chaos and panic that was expected to erupt when German bombing began, the government instituted an evacuation scheme and encouraged families, especially mothers, to send their children out of the large urban areas considered primary targets. Mothers of infants, and the elderly and infirm were also expected to ship out to safer areas. Entire schools were relocated, and numerous volunteers flooded railway stations,
shepherding masses of young, often frightened, children away to safety. Like Jacqueline Bridges, not all children went: less than half of London’s school age children were evacuated, while a little over 40 per cent of Glaswegian children left, and in Alice’s Birmingham, only 24 per cent boarded the trains leaving home. In the first days of September, more than 1.4 million people were evacuated.

When the news came through at 11.15 that Britain was at war with Germany, Irene Grant shook her head and sadly stated that neither Chamberlain nor Britain could be blamed, for they had done all they could to avoid war. At least the nervous anticipation of the last week was over. Only the day before, on 2 September, everyone seemed steeped in their own quiet waiting. Shopping in Newcastle that day, Irene noticed that the streets were eerily silent; there was none of the gaiety of 1914: ‘All Seriousness’, she wrote in her diary. No one, Irene noted, wanted to talk or be talked to.

Natalie Tanner missed Chamberlain’s announcement, but later found out that Britain was at war when friends came round to take her to lunch in Leeds. As they were leaving, her husband Hugh called from work to tell her the news. Everyone expected the Germans to begin bombing British cities soon after the declaration of war, and Hugh pressed Natalie to stay at home, but she disregarded his advice and went to Leeds.

Within minutes of the announcement, air-raid sirens wailed across London and Britain. Irene Grant heard them from her home in Gateshead and looked out towards the sea, fearfully expecting to see the first wave of invaders. Later, when they realized the sirens were false alarms, Irene and her family drove out to the coast to calm their nerves. Mercifully, as she stared
out at the serenely rolling sea cast against a brilliantly blue sky, she felt her fears slowly ebb away.

As Nella Last walked the streets of Barrow that day, she could not shake off Chamberlain’s words, which echoed ‘slow and solemn’ through her mind. Watching men erecting defences, she looked into their eyes and realized she was not the only one who had once hoped that a ‘fairy’s wand’ might be waved and thus avert conflict. But it was too late for fairytales.

The next day, word came that the passenger ship
Athenia
had been torpedoed by the Germans in the North Sea with a devastating loss of life. ‘Horrors!’ Grant exclaimed, and Alice Bridges wished fervently that the Germans would be wiped from the face of the earth for such atrocities. ‘Until we do so,’ she wrote, ‘we shall never have any peace.’ Natalie Tanner was not so vindictive. Having been born in Germany of British parents, and living the first ten years of her life there, she was fluent in the language and had several close German friends. She decided to reserve judgement and turned to Radio Frankfurt for more information. Since there was no boasting on German radio, she concluded that the sinking was a mistake. She did, however, think it odd that the recent problems with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been all but forgo en in the wake of war with Germany. Only a month earlier, the IRA’s sporadic bombing campaign on British targets throughout 1939 had culminated with deadly force when five people were killed and sixty injured by a bomb in Coventry.

While the others reflected on the international situation, Nella Last prepared to fight the war on her own terms. Working through an unrelenting headache, she cleaned her house and went into town to have
her hair cut short – an easy hairstyle would mean she would have more time to volunteer for the war effort. Knowing she needed to keep busy in order to calm her fears, she committed herself to work for the WVS as much as possible, and converted her back garden into a chicken run and vegetable garden.