Domestic Soldiers (32 page)

When she went into town on 5 July, Natalie ran into a friend who was a staunch Conservative, and, ‘Despite my red rose [he] stood me a glass of beer and I stood him one despite his National colours.' After this friendly exchange, the man (a colliery owner) proceeded to tell Natalie that Labour simply could not nationalize coal mines. ‘You must have discipline in mines,' he argued, ‘and our mines are so peculiar anyway that you can't have up to date machinery in them, and anyway the miners don't want labour saving equipment.' Natalie felt as though she'd been transported back to the nineteenth century. Indeed, he even cited the machine-breaking Luddite movement of that century as evidence for his claims.

Nella Last spent the early days of July on holiday at an old guest house in Bardsea, just up the coast road from Barrow. On the 5th, she and her husband went to Barrow to vote – Conservative – and then off to the market town of Ulverston. Few in Ulverston or at the guest house in Bardsea seemed interested in discussing the election. ‘I never saw so many people “caring less” about a thing,' she observed. Election day passed enjoyably in Ulverston, with little talk of electoral matters among the crowd from Bardsea, but change was in the air. Stopping in a pub for a chat and swift drink, Nella noticed most of the customers were young women. Although they looked like ‘nice ones', they were seasoned pub-goers who clearly knew how to order a pint. As the women sat talking, Nella was alarmed to notice that upon crossing their legs, they showed ‘well above bare knees'. With their cigarettes and relaxed attitude, ‘They seemed so “independent”.'

Election Day for Helen Mitchell was exhilarating and rewarding. The woman who could barely get
through a day of domestic work without taking a nap spent fourteen hours that day helping out at the Labour committee rooms. It was, she told M-O, the ‘most enjoyable day in years'. Unfortunately, the next day, she was ‘the little woman again', doing laundry, sundry chores around the house and shopping in town. Later in the afternoon, she was amused to open the door to a gypsy, who told her fortune. ‘Good luck coming,' Helen cheerfully announced, ‘shall marry again and move, very lucky!'

Such promises were a welcome fantasy for Helen, who had been locked in a bitter struggle with Peter over living arrangements since April. It was an old tale – a story she'd relived over and over during thirty years of marriage. Peter had a predilection for what Helen called ‘genuine olde-worlde houses' with history and charm, which she absolutely despised. For her, there was no charm, only dust, draughts and useless rooms that oozed centuries of filth that ensured her everlasting imprisonment in a domestic hell. He had moved her to Scotland after the First World War, quit his job in Scotland once she'd finally felt comfortable there and moved to another unmanageable home near London and finally settled in Kent, all without taking Helen's feelings into consideration or consulting her first. To make matters worse, Peter rarely lived in the houses to which he bound his wife. Instead, he treated his home as if it were a country hotel that he visited for the weekend, never considering that by doing so he made his wife no more than a ‘servant in own house' – a phrase she used often to describe her situation.

Anticipating the war's end in April 1945, Mitchell began to look for a new home to replace the one she'd come to loathe. The media buzzed with excitement
about rebuilding Britain with new efficient homes, and she hoped to find a small one that would enable her to keep up respectable appearances, and also allow time for her once again to teach elocution and become involved in theatre. Peter also seemed interested in finding a new home, but, as usual, the two had vastly different ideas. He wanted to move closer to work, and though he humoured her by looking at small houses, he soon became obsessed with yet another unwieldy home, in Beckenham. It was advertised in
The
Times
as an ‘attractive detached house' with nine bedrooms, three reception rooms, a billiards room, a three-car garage and garden – hardly the small modern home in the country Helen had envisaged.

As he had done throughout their thirty years together, Peter once again made the decision to buy the house without consulting his wife. Furthermore, he spent an additional £375 (the house cost £3,500) purchasing ‘filthy old linoleum', curtains, billiard room fittings and electric fittings – again, without her approval. Helen was ‘appalled' and ‘shocked to the core' by his utter lack of economy and taste. When Peter showed her their new home, she told M-O it was,

She called it the ‘horror mansion' or, in typically sarcastic fashion, ‘Linoleum Lodge'. To make matters worse, her husband had bought the rambling house with his workers in mind. She, the middle-class aesthete, could now look forward to sharing the vulgar ‘lodge' with ‘toughs' from her husband's factory.

During the summer of 1945, as the election campaign raged on the national scene, Mitchell struggled to make her husband understand how she felt about the prospect of moving into Linoleum Lodge. The rambling old house, with multiple lodgers, would mean, she argued, the continuation of her slavish existence. Furthermore, it would exacerbate her condition, since the house was closer to Peter's work, and therefore, he would necessarily be home more often, wanting food and to be waited on. Neither Peter nor William would lend a sympathetic ear to Helen's concerns. They insisted she could call on servants to assist her, but she knew the reality of the situation. Even if she could procure help, she knew there were very few who could live up to her exacting standards. Night after night, she fought with her husband, tried to coax him to change his mind, cried and otherwise bemoaned her damnable existence.

In July and August, failing to dissuade her husband from his decision and confronting a vast mansion teeming with work and working-class lodgers, Helen toyed with ideas of escape. She could leave him; but Helen did not seem to entertain the idea of divorce so much as living apart. Though certainly fraught with problems, living separately had been a generally acceptable situation during the war – at least more successful than the prospects she faced that summer. Barring an ‘act of God' or awaiting the second marriage that the
travelling gypsy had assured Helen was her fate, it seemed the best option.

Yet reality soon crept in. Without the consent of her husband, and, more importantly, without his financial support, the plan could never work. Helen had no income of her own, and felt unable to support herself alone. In a particularly acrimonious fight in August, she learned that he would not condone or pay for separate accommodations. ‘Consider my position slavish,' she fumed to M-O, ‘work damned hard in a hellish house at jobs I hate and think marriage bloody awful.' The only available avenue of escape now was the one she took at the end of this harrowing evening, and would continue to do for months: ‘to bed … doped heavily'.

Aside from polling day, the one bright spot in the summer was the election return on 26 July. Though she had spent the day working ‘damned hard', packing and cleaning, and though a ‘foul thunderstorm' wore down her nerves, the results were promising. ‘Felt much less cynical and depressed as a result of the election,' she wrote in her diary.

Despite the auguries to the contrary (both a Gallup poll and Mass-Observation pointed to a Labour victory), most believed a Conservative victory to be a foregone conclusion. But Labour had won a landslide victory over Churchill's National Party. ‘Well, well, well,' Edie Rutherford enthused on the 27th, ‘who'd a thought it? Not I. Damn bad prophet me, but how GLAD I am.' Natalie Tanner danced about her room in glee, and local Labour canvassers came out to Alice Bridges' house to thank her for her support. ‘Yippee', was all she had to say. Irene Grant was equally well chuffed.

Labour picked up 212 seats to win a solid majority
of 393 returned to Parliament, while the National Party could number only 213. Liberals were reduced to only twelve and, oddly enough, William Beveridge, the man who had whipped up such hope for building an equitable future in 1942, was among the casualties. Irene Grant's Common Wealth Party was decimated. The leader, Sir Richard Acland, renounced his seat and threw in his lot with Labour, but in fifteen of sixteen fights, Common Wealth did so poorly it lost its deposit. Irene was not disappointed, as she had followed Acland's lead and supported Labour, or more specifically, she stressed, ‘Socialism'. Labour had won a resounding 47 per cent of the vote, while the Conservatives made a respectable showing with 39 per cent.

Nella Last and her entourage at the WVS were shocked at the loss. Mrs Lord, an organizer for the service, came in ‘flushed and upset' at the news and ‘feared riots and uprising'. Another woman was incensed that Nella seemed unfazed. ‘You take things very calmly,' she admonished. ‘Don't you realise we may be on the brink of revolution?' Although she felt the news was ‘fate', Nella, the master of keeping up appearances, was inwardly stunned and ‘would have given a lot to be able to reach … for a bottle of
sal
volatile
'.

More than just the Conservative loss shook Nella's delicately built wartime façade of confidence and happiness that summer. The end of the death and destruction in Europe was certainly welcomed, but the victory was hollow. She felt ‘no wild whoopee' on VE Day, a function of the drawn-out sequence of events leading to Germany's surrender, no doubt; but there was something deeper, for she looked at the end of the war as an end to her volunteer work.
The bitter prospects of returning to pre-war life and the confines of home chaffed her newfound independence.

With the war in Europe over, the existence of the WVS and other volunteer efforts was increasingly called into question. Nella began to have more free time, and capitalized on this freedom by frequenting the cinema and theatres more often – sometimes two to three times a week in June and July. She and Will spent a much-needed week-long holiday in Bardsea in the first days of July. But, while Nella enjoyed a welcome break after six years' hard work, she sadly watched the slow dismantling of those wartime institutions that had given her a little more gumption, and certainly a lot more confidence and recognition.

The realization that things were slowly grinding to a halt dawned on the women at the WVS and the shop in the waning days of May. The mood at the centre was sombre as women recalled the camaraderie and the good times they had together. There was a ‘shadow' over them with the ‘feeling we soon will be scattered … it's been grand to all work together,' Nella wrote. When times were tough, there was always someone who joked, smiled or comforted. One of the women said she'd miss Nella and her cheeky ways most of all. ‘I'll have no one to tease and torment me,' she confessed to Nella. It suddenly struck Nella that everything was fading so quickly. Even the grouses and the office politics, the little arguments here and there, were passing. Their time together was now assuming a ‘golden hue of “do you remember”', and the ‘little troubles like the blitz and its effect on the old building, pipes bursting and heating, times when Mrs. Waite [a WVS organizer] was so cross and difficult' forgotten.

It was the closure of the Red Cross shop, which she had helped build into a thriving enterprise during the war, that underlined the ending of an era. Nella confessed feeling pride in every little parcel sent to a prisoner of war through her efforts at the shop. She had put so much sweat and toil into the shop: cleaning up the space, scavenging for goods to sell, lovingly repairing the odds and ends that weren't quite saleable, making dolls and clothes for sale, and – probably the most rewarding – chatting with customers and helping those in need. The young mothers and soldiers' wives who frequented the shop often found a helpful hand and a titbit of useful advice when Nella was there. Reflecting on the three years of its existence one day, she ‘looked round the tatty shop … [and] thought of all the love and effort it had needed, like a sickly child, it had “taken a deal of mothering”'. She had poured so much into the shop, and ‘Now it will just go like blackout etc., having served its purpose,' Nella wrote morosely.

What wasn't going away anytime soon was rationing and shortages. A week after VE Day, Edie complained that there was no cress, new potatoes or peas ‘about just now'. Furthermore, the ‘variety' of foods available was abysmal. The most worrying, however, was Sid's health. ‘My husband is quite definitely suffering from poor nutrition,' she wrote. ‘He NEEDS more milk, butter, cream.' This cry was not abnormal – many women complained throughout the war that there was not enough healthy and sustaining food available for husbands engaged in physical labour. But, already weakened by his multiple infirmities, Edie feared that austerity measures were further deepening his illness. ‘I'm terribly worried about him,' she confessed. No ray
of hope loomed on the horizon. Indeed, she reported, despite victory in Europe, ‘There are suggestions that we are going to be worse off than ever for food.'

The devastation wrought by the war in Europe exacerbated food shortages. When the Nazi spectre began to recede, all that was left in its wake was utter ruin. Fertile farmland had been decimated, cities were reduced to rubble, homes destroyed, industry crippled and infrastructure systematically dismantled by Germans retreating from Allied troops at the end of the war. Millions of refugees and displaced people roamed the Continent, searching for loved ones, seeking shelter and desperate for food. Most Europeans subsisted on less than 1,000 calories a day – the Viennese got by on 800 calories, while those in Budapest lived on a paltry 550. The weekly ration for many in the Netherlands during the ‘hunger winter' of 1944–5 was less than Allied soldiers were given per day; 16,000 Dutch perished as a result. To the chagrin of many, the Germans did remarkably well in comparison. The average German ate a little over 1,400 calories a day in 1945. As Allied governments tried to assuage the situation, the food crisis in Europe quickly became a problem for Britain. Less than three weeks after VE Day, cuts were made to fat, bacon and canned meat, even the Christmas sugar ‘bonus' of half a pound extra was eliminated.