Domestic Soldiers (9 page)

Alice then bathed the baby, cleaned the kitchen floor and did some laundry for her friend. Afterwards, Bridges was pleased to see her friend had washed and powdered her face, ‘We all look better for a bit of powder,’ she wrote. Now Jane could provide comfort to her family and face the war once again – if only in appearance.

The Blitz lasted for nine gruelling months, from August 1940 to May 1941. Britain was given a respite from the intense bombings when Hitler’s desire for lands in the east led him to turn his attention on his erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. Invasion forces rolled into the USSR on 22 June 1941. Although bombers still visited Britain afterwards – Birmingham experienced the last of its seventy-seven raids in April 1943 – the intensity and coverage was never what it had been during late 1940 and early 1941. Over 43,000 civilians perished in the Blitz, and thousands more were injured. It would take nearly three years of war before military deaths would surpass the civilian deaths endured in nine months of the Blitz.

CHAPTER FIVE

DOMESTIC SOLDIERS

The wind and rain lashed violently against the window, and the cold and wild October morning seeped into her joints, making movement almost unbearable. Her body wanted to rest; indeed, at any other time, she would have stayed in bed all morning, hoping her husband might notice and bring her a cup of tea. It would not have been unusual, if the pain continued, for her to stay in bed the entire day or for several days. But that was before the war. This morning, 15 October 1942, Nella Last fought the pain, a determined ‘I am a soldier’ echoed through her mind, calling her wearied body to action. She had too much to do, too much to ever allow aching joints, a sour stomach or a splitting headache (one or more of these ailments afflicted her most mornings) to get in the way of her national service.

From the beginning of the war, Nella Last had given her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons over to the WVS, where she knitted sewed supplies for hospitals and the armed services. In September 1941, and for the rest of the war, she sacrificed her Friday afternoons to work at Barrow’s canteen, feeding soldiers, sailors and
workers who passed through looking for a hot meal and a friendly face. By the summer of 1942, she added to her already full schedule of responsibilities volunteering at a local Red Cross shop that raised funds for prisoners of war. She was a central figure in the shop’s inception and in its continuance in wartime, helping secure a storefront, finding and begging items from neighbours and friends to sell, cleaning and mending damaged goods to make them saleable, pricing, and running the shop on Mondays.

This schedule left only Wednesdays and the weekends, and some mornings, to manage her home – also an important wartime service. Though she found this work increasingly difficult as her volunteering expanded, filling in the cracks of her leisure and domestic time, she was nonetheless loath to take the advice of Lady Reading, the head of the WVS, who urged her volunteers to ‘leave the house dirty’ and let their husbands ‘jolly well get on with a piece of bread’ – there was war work to be done.
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Nella’s house remained respectably clean throughout the war, and before she went out to volunteer she always left a hot meal warming by the fire for her husband when he arrived home.

In between cooking and cleaning, making and mending clothes for her family, tending the garden and preparing scraps to feed her chickens, Nella’s sewing machine whirred and her fingers flew across knitting for the WVS and the Red Cross shop. If she permitted herself an indulgence, it was to make ‘dollies’ and stuffed animals for children in hospital or to sell in the shop: rabbits with funny faces, pink ‘piggies’, golliwogs, little ladies and gentlemen lovingly decked out with purses and top hats – whatever her mind could
conjure with her scrap bag of cloth. Rarely did her busy schedule permit an escape into the fictional world of the cinema. Instead, her leisure often consisted of no more than snatching a nap here and there or walking along Walney Island with her husband and gazing out at the Irish Sea.

As she contemplated the sea on those walks, she might have thought how her life had changed because of the war. ‘Not clever, not well-educated’, Nella described herself before the war broke out,

In the mid-1930s, Nella suffered a severe emotional breakdown that left her almost unable to walk. After numerous treatments, her doctor explained that the cause of the breakdown was ‘repression’ in her marriage. ‘What would happen to a kettle’, he asked her husband, ‘if you put a cork in the spout and tied the lid down tight and yet kept it at boiling point?’ The point was lost on her husband, but Nella understood all too well.

Nella had spent most of their marriage giving in to her husband’s moods and whims for the sake of domestic peace, quietly complying with his demands or trying to cheer him when he was depressed, but these efforts only papered over the trouble. Even if she was able to cheer him or draw him into conversation, Will quickly reverted to his quiet, stubborn moods, and with each compromise, she surrendered a little of herself.

When she was younger, Nella told M-O, she had been vivacious, independent and inclined to adventure, but over thirty years of marriage had changed her. Reflecting on their marriage to a young neighbour, even Will noted Nella’s transformation, which he thought for the better: instead of ‘gadding about dancing’ (as he called it) and orchestrating romantic ‘moonlit picnics’, as she had done in her youth, Nella had settled down to marriage and become more like her husband. Will may have been satisfied with a more staid wife, but Nella resented the compromises she made of herself, realizing that ‘peace’ in the home slowly ate away at her own identity. Will was, she told M-O, a petty ‘dictator’ whose unanswerable trump to anything she wished to do was, ‘I feed and clothe you, don’t I? I’ve a right to say what you do.’

Increasingly, after they’d married, she stayed at home and lost touch with friends because Will did not want to go out and therefore, he made clear, neither should she. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Nella said, she constantly felt ‘outside of things’; she had few social contacts and her husband expected to accompany her whenever she went out. If she did insist on going out, he would invariably act so rude or morose that she quickly became embarrassed and abandoned her plans. With her doctor’s help, Nella realized that her ‘weak mindedness and eternal giving in was killing me’. The doctor recommended a colourful hat and several solo trips to whist games, which put her on the road to recovery.

That recovery was fleeting. Bit by bit, as the 1930s came to a close, Nella found herself once again giving in, to avoid conflict in her home. By the start of the war, she had relapsed and suffered yet another breakdown.
To make matters worse, the last bright spots in her existence, her sons, were leaving home. Arthur’s work as a tax accountant took him to Manchester, and Cliff was in the second call-up for the army and would be off soon. ‘I felt all go – I felt so useless to help,’ she confided in her diary. The war offered Nella new opportunities, and she cast around for ways to be helpful, not just on patriotic impulse – although that was certainly a factor – but also to keep her from worrying over her sons, and perhaps, like the colourful hat, in an effort to loosen the ‘cork’ of a repressive marriage that so often plunged her into devastating emotional throes.

Walking the streets of Barrow in the first days of the war, she stopped and stared at a ‘big, brave poster’:
‘
YOUR
COURAGE.
YOUR
CHEERFULNESS.
YOUR
ENDURANCE
.
WILL BRING US VICTORY
’. She let the words seep into memory, silently tumbling them over and over in her mind. People always told her she was cheerful, and anyone can endure, she mused. Taking a deep breath, she cast her eyes to the heavens and prayed to God to give her strength to live up to this civilian call to arms. She thought of Cliff going into the army and at that moment, as men and women rushed past her in the streets of Barrow, she ‘vowed to be a soldier too’.

Little did she know how much her life would be changed by that simple vow; with it, she had enlisted in the People’s War, where everyone had work to do, even if it was just to endure. But Nella went far beyond simply enduring for her country. As we have seen, she volunteered for the ARP and the WVS, and, a day after Britain declared war, she was in her garden laying out a hen house and digging up flowers to make way for cabbages, potatoes, and the other vegetables she would need to feed her family. Like a soldier, she had her hair
cut into a time-saving shorter style, but by no means did this mean that she let herself go.

As a domestic soldier, it was important to uplift morale, and taking time to look ones’ best was a significant part of this duty. Beautifully made-up women were so crucial to the war effort that the government never rationed cosmetics, despite the fact that make-up used valuable wartime materials such as petroleum. Indeed, women’s beauty bolstered male morale, as movie star Gary Cooper informed wartime
Good Housekeeping
readers. He ‘thanked God’ for women’s beauty in times of crisis, for, he thought, it was a tangible indicator of women’s natural ability to create calm and inspire men to greatness.
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Nella agreed, and often had scathing opinions of women who were careless about their appearance, as she felt such attitudes undermined the war effort. She was indignant when she saw slovenly women in long trousers pushing prams along the streets of Barrow in the spring of 1942. ‘Many women’, she complained to M-O, ‘are seizing the excuse of there being a war on to give full rein to the sloppy, lazy streak in their make-up.’ Even on the days when she was overwhelmed with work, fighting a headache or backache, Nella was always careful to keep her hair tidy, her lipstick and rouge cheery and her dress feminine. She could understand and even forgive women becoming a little ‘lazy’ during the hottest times of the Blitz, but it had been a year since Barrow had a major raid. There was certainly no excuse to shirk one’s duty, Nella thought.

Beneath this conviction about one’s appearance lay the idea that a woman’s foremost duty on the home front was to combat defeatism, and amongst the women at the WVS Last was known to raise a smile
in a gloomy room, spreading peace and cheerfulness among her comrades at the centre. It was a skill she had honed not just throughout her marriage, but all her life.

As a child, she had tried to lighten up the unhappy and volatile home in which she grew up, and vowed never to recreate the same contentious domestic situation of her childhood when she married. Instead, she made it a point to fashion a sanctuary out of her home – a peaceful and safe haven for her husband and sons, ‘where’ she hoped, ‘the door will close on all hurting things’ after a hard day’s work, play or school. If her sons ever got into an argument, she shooed them out the door and expected them to work out their differences before they came back inside. In the pursuit of creating such a refuge, however, she buried deep feelings of frustration and a nagging suspicion that she’d lost a sense of self and freedom.

In the First World War, Nella spread laughter among the injured servicemen on visits to the hospital in Southampton. And when Britain found itself in conflict again in 1939, Nella mustered her talents once more for the nation. She knew, as the government poster had stressed, that cheerfulness and endurance would help win the war. Taking the messages in the poster to heart, Nella joked around with shopkeepers on her shopping rounds and uplifted the spirits of the women in the WVS centre with a mixture of silliness and quiet, resolute confidence in the nation’s cause. Indeed, Mrs Waite, the head of hospital supply, told Last that her ‘saucy tongue’ inspired much-needed levity at the centre and soothed her comrades’ nerves when they were on edge.

Joking in the face of adversity and maintaining composure was an essential duty for the domestic soldier. For the sake of morale, it was also important to keep up the appearance that life continued as usual. This was an almost impossible task, given the scarcities of staples such as eggs and milk, and the imposition of rationing.

The availability of rations was ensured by the process of registration: each person or household registered with a retailer, and stocks were refilled according to the number of registrants at each retailer. Rationing was intended to guarantee that everyone got their ‘fair share’ of food at a fair price – a necessity for a country that imported most of its food and animal fodder. Ration books were issued in late-September 1939, but the official rationing scheme did not begin until 8 January 1940. At first, only sugar (12 oz), butter (4 oz), ham and bacon (4 oz) were rationed. Over the course of the war, the weekly allowances per person fluctuated according to availability, and the list of rationed foods grew to include meat, cheese, margarine, cooking fats, preserves and tea.

Edie Rutherford was an avid champion of the rationing scheme, agreeing with the social justice of ‘fair shares’ inherent in the programme. Those who tried to skirt the scheme were particularly loathsome to Edie, and every time she met with one, or was prodded by shopkeepers to take more than her fair share, she was furious. She knew others took advantage of the black market, or stretched the rules and received betterquality items or more than she did. But if butchers winked or shop clerks nodded, Rutherford refused to play the game.

From 1941, the distribution of milk and eggs came under the rationing scheme. One might expect about
an egg a week – more for children or expectant mothers – but the reality was that – unless one kept poultry, as Nella Last did – a shell egg was a rarity. Instead, many made do with the dried eggs that were introduced in the summer of 1942. Other hard-to-find items, such as tinned food or sweets, were put on a points scheme. Points could be used at any retailer on a variety of items. One exercised a degree of choice under the scheme: an entire monthly allocation of points could be spent on a ‘luxury’ item such as a can of first-grade tinned salmon, or one could make the points go further by purchasing several, less exciting, foods over the course of the month. There was no guarantee of availability for any given item; the only guarantee was that people could find something on which to spend their points.