Domestic Soldiers (34 page)

Nella Last thought the bomb, 

It was a nightmare that some felt they had only narrowly escaped. When the news came through of the huge explosion and mushroom cloud, Les Bridges told his wife that the description matched almost exactly the nightmares that had left him ‘wringing wet with sweat' and terrified during the Blitz. Although Alice expressed her own concern over the potential of the bomb, her blitz experience left her bitter and vindictive. ‘It is awe-inspiring and unbelievable', she told M-O, ‘the only thing is in the case of Japan we didn't drop enough and it's a thousand pities that Germany caved in too soon.'

The shock and shame Helen Mitchell experienced over the bomb was soon somewhat attenuated when she reflected on its impact on the experience of air raids. Not yet informed of the long-term and widespread effects of radiation, Helen reasoned that war would be considerably shorter and more humane in the future. And, most importantly for Helen, psychologically
scarred by the air war, there would be ‘no long endurance of raids, terror, blackout' – ‘One would be snuffed out quickly.'

Already perceiving the uncomfortable gravitational pull that set Britain between the two poles of the developing superpowers, however, ‘The trouble is that one has a permanent background of uneasiness,' Helen noted. ‘Who's going to use it next? Shall we be terrified of offending America or Russia or someone else?'

EPILOGUE

Taking shelter from the dampened VJ festivities, and warmed by their little wood fire, Nella reminisced with her husband about the end of the last war. Will had been stationed in Southampton, Arthur was six and Cliff only a few months old. They were younger and much ‘gayer’ then, Will reflected, setting out at lunch-time with the kids, a pram brimming with tea and festive fare, and enjoying the excitement of the peace together until the small hours of the next morning.

Perhaps it was their youth, Nella agreed, that made them so light-hearted as they celebrated the Armistice and, looking fondly across the years, 1918 was certainly imbued with a warm glow of carefree happiness. Still, she reminded Will, there was little sense then ‘that war could come home to us’. This time, war had ‘come home’ to Britain, and the People’s War had demanded every ounce of dedication and sacrifice they had to give – and more – until all that was left was utter exhaustion. There was no excitement; only ‘thankfulness’ remained with which to celebrate victory. And in 1918, she argued, few could perceive ‘war’s backwash’ of economic slumps and massive unemployment.
Knowledge of the past made the future look bleak. Will acquiesced, but added that he wished ‘we had a Govt. that knew something of the ropes, it’s dreadful to think of such drastic changes now’.

With change in the air and hopes for a more equitable People’s Peace than what Nella and her contemporaries remembered after the First World War, Labour entered government on 1 August 1945. When her husband wrung his hands over the radical changes Labour proposed, Nella assured him that – despite anything he or she thought – their time had passed. In the post-war peace, a new generation was taking over, and social revolution was inevitable, perhaps preferable. Wholesale change was the order of the day, for, as Nella pointed out, ‘It’s no use putting new patches on old garments, we need new ones, even if the coarse sackcloth of them irks skins used to old comfortable garments.’ For so long, she said, the world had been ‘a whirl of battle and death’; now was the time for a rebirth and the attendant, often painful, spasms of creation.

For Alice Bridges and her family, Labour’s post-war social initiatives were a godsend. Early in 1948, Les suffered a heart attack and collapsed. Scraping to feed her family and pay for Les’ medication, she confessed that her family had ‘nearly reached bottom’ by the summer. Neighbours and family brought Alice what food they could to help them get by, but it never seemed to be enough. At the same time, Jacq, now fifteen and exhibiting a precocious talent for art, desperately wanted to go to college. But with the financial circumstances as they stood, they simply could not afford further education, and Alice wrestled with how to tell her daughter that she must leave school and get an office job.

The National Health Service saved the Bridges from reaching bottom. When the NHS opened its doors on 5 July 1948, Les’ medical bills were now covered. Upon learning that her financial worries had been solved, Alice felt an incredible rush of relief. Now, she could focus on keeping her husband comfortable as his health slowly deteriorated. During Les’ illness, Jimmy – now more confident and calling himself James – was still a constant companion in Alice’s life, and often his presence helped her get through the day. But in late 1948, following the advice of his doctor – who felt it ill-advised for his patient to continue seeing a married woman – James found a new love.

In 1949, Alice wrote to M-O as a widow. Though grieving the loss of her husband, she was carrying on, she told M-O. Alice was now working part-time and making do with a life insurance pay out and National Assistance, and a new dance partner had recently come on the scene. Jacq had received education assistance and started her studies at the local college of art. The post-war changes that Will Last had so worried over had, at least for Alice and her daughter, provided some support in times of need. Despite the hardships she now endured, Alice wrote at the time, ‘The country does not let me want.’

In the post-war years, Irene Grant continued to fight a losing battle with her rheumatism. Some days she was able to venture beyond her garden, but very rarely. After March 1950, a serious fall made it even more difflcult to get out. The next year, Rita’s epilepsy, which had been silent since late 1940, returned with a vengeance. She had ‘ten fits (Major Mal) in a week’. Once again, angry confrontations ensued between Rita and
her father, who, frustrated at the outbursts, often flew into a rage. Marjorie had married and moved out a few years before, so it was Irene alone who refereed the shouting matches. Irene would continue to write about her daughter’s seizures until her last correspondence with M-O in the early 1950s.

Satisfied that her patriotic duty had been served, Edie Rutherford left her office job in June 1946, but she would continue to keep an eye on global and domestic events for M-O throughout the 1940s. In those years, she watched as the empire slowly unravelled. Though she believed in granting independence to India in 1947, she was nonetheless reluctant to see the imperial bonds break. The woman who had been so exercised over Gandhi’s intransigence during the war that she fervently believed that, ‘to be rid of Gandhi would be a good thing’, reported with deep sadness Gandhi’s assassination just months after India’s independence. ‘Oh, who could have done such a terrible deed as to kill Gandhi?’ she lamented on 30 January 1948. ‘He was the conscience of mankind, we all know in our better selves that what Gandhi stood for and lived for was the highest ideal.’

In the post-war years, Edie returned to being a full-time housewife, and Sid’s health steadily improved. The long-term unemployment that had plagued the couple after the last war seemed a distant memory, as Sid’s work in the timber trade was secure in the post-war building boom. By 1951, when Edie stopped writing for M-O, she jubilantly announced a return holiday to South Africa, after eighteen years away. ‘Himself disgruntled,’ she said of her husband, ‘swears I’ll never return.’ She looked out of the window, gazing
on the sunbeams as they danced upon the tiny, hopeful tree buds, awaiting the ‘edge’ of the cold April air to soften and allow the ‘leaves to burst out’. ‘Could be,’ she jested, ‘but I think I’ll return alright.’

Helen Mitchell would have appreciated a holiday away – to America or Europe, or even just an extended cruise. After the war’s end, Helen continued to search for ways to flee her domestic drudgery, her crumbling, loveless marriage and to escape the bonds of the country that ‘enslaved’ her in these conditions. Peter worked so much and controlled the finances so tightly that a holiday beyond British shores was out of the question. As in wartime, they did go out west for the occasional holiday, but it was never enough. Helen increasingly grew even more tired of Peter and only wished ‘to get rid of him’.

By September 1947, she decided that her recounting the daily grind of peacetime was hardly worth M-O’s time and left off writing in her diary. She did respond now and again to questionnaires sent over the next few years – one of her last was in 1951 when it was clear that she had not succeeded in escaping. ‘I have now been 5 years in full-time domestic service,’ she wrote:

As for Peter, ‘I regard him as a stomach. We do nothing together, and to me he is now merely an employer.’ This would be her last correspondence with M-O.

After the war, Natalie Tanner enjoyed more and more freedom. The rounds into Leeds and Bradford remained almost unchanged, but as travel restrictions lifted, her sphere of activity widened. The late 1940s would see her in London at least once a month, and in the 1950s, Tanner enjoyed trips to the Continent, thanks to the newly nationalized British European Airways (BEA). Natalie continued to write for M-O until 1968, sprinkling her diary liberally with film criticism, a rekindled love for the game of cricket, travel stories and commentary on international events, from the Suez scandal of 1956 to Britain’s support of the US in Vietnam. Hugh and Natalie celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in the 1970s, quite fittingly, with a quick trip to the Middle East on the Concorde.

Only months after the war had ended, Nella Last lamented that all the volunteer work and the camaraderie that she had enjoyed over the war years had quickly ebbed away. The WVS still limped along, but her work there was hardly as empowering and energizing as it had once been. As the years receded away from the war, Nella also felt the emotional bond between herself and her sons strain, and eventually snap. After Cliff’s injury, Nella never again felt as close as she had once been to her younger son. In 1946, he would make a new life for himself in Australia. Arthur married, had children and moved to London, but although she made clothes for the children and sometimes visited them, she increasingly felt that she was an unwelcome intrusion in her son’s life. After Will retired in 1949, they spent most days at home, shut off from the friends Nella had made in the community during the war.

In 1945, Nella had solemnly vowed never to break down as she had done in the inter-war period. But in 1965, at the age of seventy-five, Nella submitted once again to the old ‘nervous breakdowns’ that war had temporarily cured. The once proud, confident, self-assured and spirited domestic soldier was reduced to a fear of going out of doors, of making decisions and of losing all control over her family and her own life. Within a year, she would stop writing for M-O and within two, she would be dead.

Mass-Observation continued to poll its participants well into the post-war period, sending out directives regarding politics, class and social change until mid-1951. In the 1950s, the group slowly turned from its initial mission to provide ordinary Britons a platform from which to ‘speak for themselves’ and became involved in consumer-oriented marketing and polling for corporations.
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Despite this new direction, M-O continued to collect diaries from its correspondents, and for many the organization still played a significant role in their lives. M-O would be revived as an important social institution committed to its original endeavour of understanding British society in the 1980s and continues to this day. As in wartime, writing for M-O in the post-war peace was (and is) often a cathartic and empowering experience, and the organization remains an important social outlet – even a friend, as M-O certainly was for the increasingly isolated Nella Last.

Approaching the tenth anniversary of the beginning of war in 1949, Nella Last remarked with amazement that she had written a diary for nearly ten years – ‘3650 entries’, she reckoned. ‘I can never understand how the scribbles of such an ordinary person, leading a shut-in,
dull life can possibly have value,’ she humbly wrote. Looking back, she reflected upon the importance of the war and M-O in her own life, remembering the deep well of strength she tapped in wartime – a strength she had never known existed – and one, she lamented, that now seemed to have dried up. M-O gave Alice, Helen, Irene, Natalie, Edie, Nella and hundreds of others a voice to describe the war in their own words, from their own perspectives. Writing the war and peace for M-O provided an opportunity for them to reflect upon their experiences, to parade their talents and patriotism proudly to others or to grouse about restrictions and husbands. Without these diaries, their lives would have passed largely unnoticed by all but their families and their own social circle.

These women show us the personal, day-to-day battles of the People’s War, and, through them, we can feel the profound effect the war had upon their lives both during the conflict and afterwards. Some women, like Natalie Tanner, felt their social lives were on hold while the war raged, waiting only for the peace to release them from their quiescence so they could ‘get back to normal’. Others, like Nella Last and Alice Bridges, were energized by the war and found confidence and social experiences that were unlikely to have penetrated their cloistered domesticity otherwise. However, these largely positive experiences could ultimately have a negative effect, as some women found the depth of possibilities within themselves, only to be forced back into the home and unfulfilling relationships. For Last, the experience of war had particularly tragic consequences as, over the post-war years, she slowly descended into an abyss of loneliness and purposelessness.

For women like Helen Mitchell, the continual wartime call to the colours that so invigorated Nella and the constant air raids that battered Helen’s nerves only deepened the profound depression of an unfulfilled life. Many, like Edie Rutherford, would find in the war a way to express patriotism through a commitment to work in meaningful employment. Others, like Irene Grant, did their best to steer their families heroically through the shortages and difficulties of wartime, despite their own personal challenges.