Domestic Soldiers (4 page)

When she was not volunteering or working in her garden, Nella could not keep her thoughts from turning towards her youngest son, Cliff. She watched him intently during the first weeks of the war, attempting to divine his thoughts or perhaps trying to sear the memory of his face into her mind. As he sat reading the paper one day, she noticed he was distracted, for ‘He did not turn a page often.’ At that moment, memories of the Great War flooded back and she saw so clearly ‘the boys who set off so gaily and lightly and did not come back’; Nella fought hard to stifle a scream of horror.

Rita Grant ‘growled’ at her mother, Irene, and crashed about the house. War news seemed to exacerbate Rita’s epilepsy, and it was all Irene could do not to take her daughter’s actions personally. It also took all her strength, physical and emotional, to restrain Rita’s ‘ten stone of fury’ during her fits. At times, Rita proved too strong for Irene and knocked her down, leaving her mother lying on the floor, weeping bitterly with hurt and frustration. After such episodes, Rita was apologetic and tried to be cheerful, but the knowledge that another seizure might strike at any time kept tension in the house high. Irene told M-O that her daughter was ‘like a piece of tinder’ – anything, even the ‘friendliest of advice’, could act as a ‘match’ to set her off.

During the times when Rita was episode-free, she and her younger sister, Marjorie, helped their mother
with the housework, read newspapers or books, or listened to the wireless together. When their father came home from work, he and Irene had heated discussions about war. In the first weeks of war, Irene often found herself steadfastly defending the government to her husband, Tom. ‘We’ve backed the wrong horse,’ he told her on one occasion. On another, he castigated the government for failing to prepare for war properly and raged that British capitalists had made Germany the menace it was by selling Hitler the materials necessary to build his war machine. Finally, Tom was convinced that a social revolution was near: the people would revolt rather than fight another four-year war. She agreed with him on this point, but most of the time got tired of his tirades and told him to be quiet and let the government do its job.

Within a week of the declaration of war, Natalie Tanner was bored. ‘Nothing happens,’ she wrote in her diary and wondered what the point was in writing for M-O in the first place. Life went on as usual. On 13 September, the Tanners celebrated their thirteenth wedding anniversary with a leisurely trip to a charming country hotel in North Yorkshire. Still, although there was little excitement to report, the future was uncertain and Natalie decided she would send her son back to school as usual. In any case, it was safer there, since the boarding school was far from any major cities.

The real war for Natalie was not in Europe, but rather with acquaintances, the Bingleys, who wanted to escape the potential dangers of the city and move into one of the cottages on Tanner’s farm. In addition to the fact that there was no water laid on there, and that the Tanners were already housing several evacuees, Natalie simply did not want to cope with the
demanding Nancy Bingley and the couple’s children: a disobedient terror of a toddler and a fussy ten-month-old. A few days later, however, Natalie gave in, and allowed her friends to move in, but soon regretted it. It did not take long before Nancy’s overbearing personality harassed anyone who had the misfortune to cross her path. Soon, all the neighbours and evacuees were on an ‘anti-Nancy’ crusade.

If Nancy’s fascist leanings and loud-mouthed demands weren’t enough for the Tanners, the Bingley’s toddler, Mikey, was an absolute menace. He wrecked the other kids’ toys, misbehaved constantly and refused to go to bed when told. They also brought along their dog, Winnie Sims, who had mange. Aside from the Bingleys, everyone thought ‘the wretched dog a nuisance as it pees all over the house and sleeps on the bed’. ‘Personally,’ Natalie confessed, ‘I think it’s the best member of the family.’

But if everyday life and its battles made the war ‘fade away’ for Tanner, the others couldn’t quite forget the horrors that ravaged Poland, or the restrictions that were now imposed on them. All over Britain, people tried to adjust to the blackouts, evacuations, air-raid sirens and food shortages. Tommy Handley, the star of the soon-to-be incredibly popular
ITMA
(
It’s That Man
Again
), made his wartime debut on 19 September with a rollicking lampoon of the numerous restrictions being set out by the government. He played the part of the ‘Minister of Aggravation’, who took considerable joy in his new ‘power to confiscate, complicate and commandeer’ and ‘impose as many restrictions as possible’. If anyone had a problem with his restrictions, the incomprehensible instructions that accompanied them or the new hikes in taxes he proposed, they should, Handley
suggested, complain to the commissioner at ‘Inland Ruin-you’.

While Handley poked fun at bureaucracy and the new constraints on British life, Nella Last worried over the safety of lorry and bus drivers in blackout conditions and about the lack of adequate bomb shelters in Barrow. She thought it abominable that the government had not done enough to care for its citizens in the event of the expected air raids. In early September, Barrow had ‘no dug-outs, no air-raid shelters, no organisation’, but she hoped things would soon change.

Irene Grant cursed the blackout because of the personal inconvenience of it. She simply could not fall asleep without the bedroom window open, but the blackout material made it almost impossible to do so. To surmount this problem, she removed the blackout material every night after she turned off the lights. One night, she forgot that the window was open and turned on the light, eliciting shouts from her husband. If the air-raid warden found even a sliver of light peeking from a window, the family would be handed a hefty fine. People were no longer afraid of Hitler, Irene wrote in her diary, they only had one fear: air-raid wardens!

Settling down into war life, with all its new constraints, whether done with a bit of humour, serious apprehension or patriotic resolve (or a little of each), was for many the only tangible indication that Britain was at war. Yet, the death and destruction on the Continent and fear of the unknown never seemed to lurk far away. Indeed, this dark edge of fear that crept into people’s minds may have made people resistant to Handley’s comedic interpretation of the official war effort in those early days. Though his programme would become one of the most popular of the 1940s,
it had a rough start in 1939 and the general opinion at first was not warm towards his antics. People tried to reconcile the war and their lives, looking for an equilibrium that allowed them to feel the emotional depth of war and yet also permitted themselves to laugh, love and live as normal; but it was hard to laugh, or indeed, to act normal that September.

Some felt a twinge of guilt for allowing themselves to soak in the peacefully calm and clear September days while on the Continent, as Irene Grant reflected, ‘Lives [were] mutilated and lost, misery to 1000s.’ The irony was palpable; under the same cloudless skies in Europe, women and children endured starvation, terror and death at the hands of war. ‘For what?’ Grant wondered. When the Soviet Union crossed into a mortally wounded Poland on 17 September, Natalie Tanner, a strong supporter of communism and the Soviet Union, was unconcerned; she trusted the Soviet soldiers and believed they would bring a peaceful new order to the Poles.

Alice Bridges’ ‘heart turned sick’ as fear of the unknown gripped her. Europe seemed to be on the edge of a precipice, waiting for the final sinew of sanity to snap and plunge the world into the ultimate battle of good and evil. As she contemplated yet ‘another beautiful sunset’, thoughts of Armageddon raced through her mind. ‘What will it mean … Who will win? Or shall we nearly all be in “Kingdom Come” and not care anyway?’ During those first days of war, Alice battled an illness that left her so frail she was unable to venture outdoors for weeks. Although she had hoped desperately to be involved in the war effort, she could only listen to the wireless and watch the world pass the windows in her home.

Nella Last was delivered a major shock near the end of September, when she learned that her son, Cliff, had been conscripted not into the Royal Engineers, as they had hoped he would be, but rather into the Machine Gun Corps. She was devastated. Her sensitive boy, who liked fresh flowers in his room and had nursed sick animals to health as a child, would have to face another human and kill. Perhaps – she gasped to think of it – Cliff might even have to battle in close combat, plunging the hardened blade of a bayonet into the breast of another young man like himself. After the initial shock subsided, she steeled herself and resolved not to tell her husband of Cliff’s fate. Her husband, Will, was ‘not strong’, and she feared what this shock might do to him. As it was, it had been an uphill battle ‘to keep bright and cheerful so as to “keep him up” since Cliff went’. But the burden of carrying the strain of this knowledge alone and keeping cheerful quickly took its toll.

Lately, Nella had found herself stuttering, and a ‘curious ridge’ had developed on her fingernails. Looking in the mirror one morning, the sunlight caught a ‘dusty’ glint of grey hair. In all her forty-nine years, few specks of grey had ever tainted the thick ‘glossy hatch’ on her head. By Christmas, she thought as she peered in disbelief at the image staring back at her, she would be entirely white. Something had ‘died inside’ when Chamberlain made his speech on 3 September, she realized. As she looked round her empty house or was haunted by memories of her boys’ childhood – a whiff of gingerbread baking in a confectioner’s shop was all that was needed to remind her of times gone by – she felt as if she had built her entire life ‘straw by straw’, ‘like a jackdaw’. Now those straws were blowing away.

Luckily, Nella thought, she had her volunteer work at the WVS to keep her busy. When her sewing machine was ‘whirring’, turning out hospital supplies for the centre, the rhythm enfolded her in a melody of work that had the effect of soothing music on her nerves. Indeed, she found herself so caught up in volunteering that on 30 September she was pleasantly surprised, as she reflected on her busy day, to find she had had no thoughts of Hitler all day. It was, she wrote thankfully in her diary, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. The people of Poland must have thought differently on the Eastern Front, for Poland had been officially conquered and divided by the Germans and Soviets only two days earlier.

It would be quiet at home in Britain throughout the winter of 1939–40. Perhaps hoping that Hitler would be satiated with Poland, Britain and France failed to go on the offensive against Germany. Apart from dropping pamphlets on the German population, the Chamberlain Cabinet refused to engage in bombing missions. Britain was plunged in a morass of hopefulness, apathy and eventual annoyance at the wartime restrictions. People stopped carrying their gas masks everywhere they went, children and mothers who had evacuated to the countryside in the panic of the first weeks of war slowly filtered back to the cities in the hope of spending Christmas at home. Though some may have relaxed a bit during the ‘Bore War’ or ‘Phoney War’, as this lull is popularly known, they still coped with balancing the ordinary and the extraordinary, even if the extraordinary was no more real than a news story or simply a distant, nagging fear gently seeping into their thoughts.

CHAPTER THREE

VERY WELL, ALONE

‘The lovely weather is a mockery,’ Natalie Tanner sighed. Alongside the devastating events in Europe, the warm June weather with its serene, azure skies was indeed a mockery. And yet, that June, as thousands of British and French soldiers perished on the beaches of Dunkirk, and France fell to the Nazis, Natalie Tanner could often be found at the Golden Acre swimming pool near Leeds. After her swim, she went into town for lunch and a movie or theatre production, or made her way home to work in the garden.

In the spring of 1940, war clouds ominously gathered on the Continent as Hitler’s Blitzkrieg sprang into action, sweeping away the false sense of security that pervaded the first quiet months of the Bore War. That spring, German forces struck out across the Western Front and the Scandinavian countries. In quick succession, Finland fell to the Soviets in March, and in April German forces overran Denmark, which capitulated without a fight. Norway refused to surrender to the Nazis, who then staged a dramatic and forceful invasion to secure their northern flank and their supply line to Swedish iron ore. In the face of fierce opposition,
British troops were forced to evacuate from Norway in early May. A little less than a month later, the Nazis received Norway’s surrender from Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the Norwegian National Unification Party, whose name soon filtered into common parlance to become synonymous with ‘traitor’.

On 10 May, after British forces had retreated from Norway, German troops pushed into Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland. On that day, air-raid sirens went off for the first time across cities in northern France. In Westminster, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government was replaced by a coalition run by Winston Churchill. Irene Grant cheered when she heard the news; Chamberlain’s handling of the war so far had convinced her that, ‘The Govt lack
VIM
,’ and that change was necessary if Britain were to emerge victorious. Nella Last told M-O that if she ‘had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Mr Chamberlain’, but, ‘if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked’, she believed Churchill was the right man for the job. A lifelong Brummie, Alice Bridges felt Neville Chamberlain had ‘besmirched the good name’ his father Joseph had built in Birmingham. ‘We have at last proper leadership,’ she wrote in her diary. To her, Churchill was ‘the first nail in Hitler’s coffin’.

Five days later, the German troops poised along the river Meuse broke through French lines at Sedan in northern France and travelled 135 miles in a week to make it to the coast. The situation was grim. Refugees flooded southwards through central France from the Netherlands, Belgium and northern France, impeding troop manoeuvres. Believing Paris to be in peril, the French government gave the order for essential ministries to evacuate. Officials at the French Ministry
of Foreign Affairs in Paris began throwing classified documents out of the windows and burning them on the lawn outside the Foreign Office. French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, soon rescinded the order to evacuate, but the gravity of the situation was not lost on Parisians who witnessed the bonfire of government papers on the banks of the Seine. Paris was in grave danger.

Once the Germans reached the coast just north of the river Somme, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in Belgium and northern France was cut off from the main French forces to the south. The BEF put up a good show against Rommel’s Panzers near Arras on 21 May, but Belgian resistance soon began to crumble. British soldiers were sent to shore up the Belgian army, but Lord Gort, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, knew it was a losing battle; soon, his troops would be surrounded, and he had to get them away. Although Hitler ordered the total ‘annihilation’ of Allied forces, his decision to halt the German advance temporarily on 23 May gave the BEF a chance to escape.

That same day, Natalie Tanner took a young friend to lunch at an upscale hotel in Leeds. Fran angrily discussed the events on the Continent, and Natalie was surprised to learn just how ‘bloodthirsty’ her friend was towards the Germans. Indeed, if Fran had a chance, she told Natalie, she’d kill as many Germans as she could with her bare hands. Natalie thought the threat a bit hollow and not a little humorous when she looked at her friend’s delicate fingers. Since they were enjoying a delightful meal, Tanner decided to refrain from reminding Fran that she might then have to employ those delicate hands to kill Fran’s own grandfather, who was German.

The conversation then veered to examine what had let the Germans loose on the world. Much to Natalie’s astonishment, Fran told her she was convinced that the world’s problems could be laid squarely on the shoulders of reform movements across the globe. ‘She honestly believes’, Natalie told M-O,

Always proud of her education, Natalie retorted to M-O that her rather unenlightened friend had read history at Oxford. ‘Thank God I went to Cambridge,’ she laughed to herself.

On Sunday 26 May, as events on the Continent turned bleak, King George VI called for a national day of prayer for the safety of the troops in Flanders. As thousands bowed their heads, Alice Bridges thought it was scandalous to ask ‘God to put right what our Government has put wrong’. Others in Birmingham and across the country may have complied with the King, but she did not utter a prayer that day: ‘I couldn’t pray to [an] order,’ she told M-O. Two days later, news that Belgian King Leopold had surrendered came across the wireless; Alice called it ‘A BLACK DAY’. Now, she needed no official order to pray for the troops.

Around Leeds, Natalie Tanner found most people virulently indignant at the Belgian King’s ‘betrayal’. The local press, she said, was quite ‘poisonous’ about the affair and called Leopold a ‘Craven King’. Privately,
she thought Leopold’s actions saved his people, ‘If one is charitable one can argue that he did what he did in order to save the lives of his subjects’. ‘After all,’ she reasoned, ‘it
is
debatable whether it is better to exist in a concentration camp than to be blown to bits.’ On the day that Belgium surrendered, 27 May, the BEF began its heroic retreat from Dunkirk.

That day, Irene Grant’s husband, Tom, came home from work blustering about British ineptitude, confident that they’d lost the war. It wouldn’t be long, he said, before they begged the Germans for a peace agreement. Irene tried to ignore her husband’s defeatism, but it was difficult not to worry, for the international situation heightened an already tense situation in the Grant household.

In the calm of the Bore War, Rita Grant’s epilepsy had mysteriously gone silent. She seemed more light-hearted than ever, but the tension was nearly unbearable for Irene, who anxiously counted off the days and weeks that her daughter was episode-free, wondering when or if the seizures might strike again. After weeks without ‘fits’, Rita announced that she wanted to take a job at the local co-op. Though twentyone years old, she had never been gainfully employed because her parents feared for her safety if she suffered an epileptic attack away from home. Despite the recent upswing in Rita’s health, Irene was sceptical, and she urged her to wait a few more weeks before pursuing the job opportunity. After all, only a year earlier, a doctor had informed Irene that Rita ‘would never get better, would only deteriorate’. ‘Poor child!’ Irene lamented upon having to tell her daughter that she could not take the job, ‘Oh! don’t let her have more fits!!’ The night Rita asked permission to work, as the family ‘sat
listening to a Scottish band, knitting, embroidering and reading’, the relative domestic calm was shattered: Rita suffered a ‘bad major’ seizure. The seizures became so severe that Irene worried desperately that if she left her daughter alone at night, she might wake up to find Rita dead.

The newly instituted rationing scheme, introduced four months earlier, in January, also weighed heavily on Irene’s mind: ‘How am I to feed my family?’ she wondered. But each time she felt a complaint rise to her lips, Irene thought of her nephew and the other ‘brave lads’ caught on the beaches at Dunkirk and fought hard to swallow it. No hardship she and her family suffered could come close to what the soldiers were enduring not far from her home on Tyneside, ‘We must do our best to be thankful.’

When Nella Last walked into the common room at the WVS centre in Barrow that day, she looked at the sad and drawn faces of the women. Many had sons in France, she knew, and her heart ached to think of the pain they endured. But she could bring herself to do no more than say a few light-hearted comments, and carefully avoid any mention of the present state of affairs. Any remark about the situation, she thought, would set her ‘howling’. That night, she felt a ‘bogey standing at my shoulder who is trying to say “everything is finished” we are done, the Germans will win.’ But she waved him away and went to bed, knowing a good night’s sleep would reaffirm her confidence.

When she heard the first news reports of the Dunkirk evacuation, Natalie Tanner pledged her part in the People’s War, promising to grow vegetables in her garden and to knit for the forces (though, she said, ‘very infrequently’). ‘Digging for Victory’ had already
proved to be a battle in itself for Tanner. The garden near her cottage had not been used in years, and when she decided in October 1939 to produce her own vegetables, she found it an ‘unholy mess’. Over the course of the winter, she worked hard to clear the area, pulling bindweed, burning rubbish and planting new crops. By May, the bindweed was still a nuisance, but crops were beginning to peek through the top of the soil.

Much to her chagrin, however, the first fruits of her labour were destroyed by what she called ‘fifth columnists’. During the Spanish Civil War, ‘fifth column’ became a popular term for those who were willing to collaborate with the enemy to undermine the war effort from within. One of Franco’s generals claimed to have won Madrid with four columns of troops and a fifth column of sympathetic townspeople. Throughout the early stages of the Blitzkrieg, fifth columnists came forth to help the Nazis in Holland, Norway and Denmark, and most Britons worried that – should an invasion come to Britain – one’s neighbours might turn out to be one’s enemies. For Tanner, however, as she looked at her destroyed cabbage crop, the ‘fifth columnists’ were no more than cattle and sheep that grazed the nearby fields.

As the Dunkirk evacuations continued, Alice Bridges listened intently to the news and wrung her hands with worry over the future. Five days after she heard the first reports, she finally pulled herself together – there were other pressing matters. Jacqueline had recently made friends with two girls whose family had fallen on hard times. Their father, Mr Cooper, was a veteran of the Great War who had had his leg ‘blown off and the other one … terribly wounded’ on Armistice Day in 1918. Recently,
rheumatism had settled into his one good leg and he had begun to exhibit signs of dropsy.

Alice decided that her ‘war work’ would be to help ‘a sufferer from our last war’. When she noticed that the children were clad in ‘poor little ragged coats’, Alice immediately found old ‘castoffs’ and refashioned them to fit them. She also spent weeks sewing dresses for the two girls and often invited their mother up to have tea. Mr Cooper’s health steadily became so grave in June that he was sent to hospital. Pulling herself out of the depression that gripped her during the evacuation, Alice stewed up a pot of cream of chicken soup, raided her personal stores and took cream biscuits and three eggs to her newly ‘adopted family’.

The Dunkirk evacuation would turn out to be the moment when the British snatched victory from the jaws of tragedy. ‘What began as a miserable blunder … a catalogue of misfortunes and mis-calculations’, J.B. Priestley intoned with the full gravity of the occasion in his special Wednesday evening
Postscript
broadcast, ‘ended as an epic in gallantry’.
1
The evacuation at Dunkirk was the opening salvo in the People’s War, and Priestley was one of the first to notice it. In that broadcast, he praised the bravery of the civilians who heeded the Royal Navy’s call to action and helped out the best they could. Thousands of ships – from large naval destroyers and passenger ferries to small, private motor boats – embarked on a titanic effort to rescue troops from the beachheads and harbours around Dunkirk. Those who crossed the Channel navigated tricky shoals and floating mines only to face a scene of carnage: German artillery belching deadly fire from the French coastline and murderous planes buzzing overhead. One Luftwaffe pilot called it ‘unadulterated
killing’.
2
Nonetheless, small watercraft, piloted mainly by civilians, braved the shells and gunfire numerous times as they ferried soldiers from the beaches to the large ships waiting in the deeper water just offshore.

On 3 June, with the evacuations still in progress, Alice Bridges sadly noted in her diary that a friend’s son was missing in the chaotic retreat. Several men had seen him wading through the water towards the transports, but none had heard from him since. ‘One of the boys’ who had seen him came back, Alice reported, ‘all shaky with nerves’; it was the continual aerial bombing, he confessed, that had broken him down. Less than three months later, huddled in an air-raid shelter, Alice herself would soon learn the nerve required to bear the Luftwaffe’s wrath.