Millions Like Us (10 page)
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Afterwards, the newlywed Eileen returned to her job with Grubert’s furriers. The company had contracted with the Red Cross to make musquash coats to be shipped out by the Merchant Navy to aid Russian children. As the war news worsened, so women sought to contribute to the best of their ability. The qualifications of trained women were at a premium, and nobody now doubted that nurses, first-aiders, volunteers and forces auxiliaries of every kind were going to prove indispensable; but with the fear of invasion growing daily, ordinary females from all backgrounds now added their voices to the patriotic clamour. ‘
Women want to be partners
in the nation’s war effort,’ claimed an article in
Woman’s Magazine
. Mrs ‘NOT TOO OLD AT 46’ pleaded to be allowed to join the anti-parachute corps – ‘I, for one, would gladly offer my services.’
Miss E. de Langlois
of Ewell wrote with a suggestion for wires to be suspended between pylons ‘to prevent parachute troops reaching the ground’, while Mrs Gilroy of Rudwick wrote to the paper calling for a ban on iced cakes – ‘a luxury we could dispense with’. Mrs Hope of Torquay added her voice to the numbers calling for ‘aliens and Pacifists’ to be rounded up and interned. The propagandising tone of the press aimed at women was relentlessly upbeat, stressing the gay willingness of countless women to give of their best. Typically, such journalism was aimed at cheering on factory workers, who, already at this stage in the war, were regarded as key to the anti-German effort:
Hundreds of thousands of women rose early from their beds and rushed to work … with a smile.
There was no grousing at the loss of leisure. Everybody wanted to get on with the job …
‘My boy friend is in France with the B.E.F.’ said one girl working in a fuse factory, ‘so I’ll work 15 hours a day if necessary.’
Probably the morale-boosting, chin-up message helped. Despite the general willingness, there is evidence that at this stage the speed of events left many women bewildered, shocked and subject to mood swings.
Mass Observation took
daily soundings in late May 1940. On the 18th women were much more worried than men, with reactions ranging from terror to incomprehension. On the 21st morale had improved slightly. On the 22nd anxiety and depression among women hit a new low; some had weeping fits. This survey also showed that working-class women were on the whole more bewildered by events and unable to give a name to their emotions, whereas middle- and upper-class women were coherent in expressing their anxiety. A response from a Birmingham housewife must have echoed the reactions of many after Belgium surrendered:
A BLACK DAY.
We need all our prayers now … the 1 o’c news has made me feel sick … I don’t think France will give in, but neither did I think Belgium would. We
must
win – we
must
win, I could not live beneath a brutal power. I said to my husband Sunday, I would die fighting rather than live the life of a slave.
At this time the news on the radio was so dreadful that many just stopped listening to it. The distress in Europe was dreadful to witness, but worse still was the prospect of a German invasion. Fear of the unknown dominated. The average housewife, accustomed to leaving difficult decisions about politics and world affairs to her husband, was simply out of her depth:
So cruel.
I don’t know what’s going to happen now, I really don’t. It seems all up. You don’t know what to do for the best. I don’t know whether to send my children away, or not … I don’t know whether to apply for a shelter or not. I think perhaps I ought to join the ARP; then I think I’ve got my duty to the home first. Oh dear …
A shattered secretary, used by the advertiser to show that only Horlicks can help with war stress.
The writer Naomi Mitchison
was not one to duck problems, intellectually at least. The Mitchisons were well-off and middle-aged, and from 1939 Naomi, who was expecting her seventh child, had been safely ensconced in Kintyre, a fishing village in rural Scotland. As Socialists, she and her husband Dick both hated the war while knowing it had to be fought. Day by day Naomi’s wartime diary grapples with the issues of work, war, love, motherhood and the future. In May 1940 she was sick and experiencing nightmares – ‘almost inevitable’. In the light northerly summer evenings she had leisure to read, and a book about the history of the Scottish kirk set her thinking about ideology and hate. ‘Must there be hate in order to be life?’ As France retreated before the invasion, what did it tell its young men as they prepared to die for their country? The early Scottish martyrs had been certain of heaven. Was courage dependent on superstition? Was the cowardice that she felt a luxury, to be shed if her own family were threatened? Dick and her oldest son were in London at this time,
potentially in danger. She had her unborn child to protect. ‘Would I hate if my immediate family were killed? … I don’t know. But I rather doubt it.’ She and Dick agreed that, as committed left-wing activists, they might have to flee the country if the Germans came. Naomi found herself imagining an Atlantic crossing in a herring boat, wondering how much luggage she could fit in alongside the diesel oil. ‘It seems fantastic …’ Everyone was talking about German agents landing – would they come disguised as clergymen or nuns, as many people thought? Naomi tried to look coolly at the likely outcome of an invasion, and concluded that she would almost certainly be sent to a concentration camp. On 30 May she noticed that she had bitten her nails very badly, ‘a thing I have not done for months’.
Naomi Mitchison’s contemporary,
Frances Partridge, also
took a committed and rational stance to the war at this time. She and her husband, Ralph, were pacifists. They lived in Wiltshire with their small son, Burgo, and for much of the war their home was a refuge for their many London friends who came to Ham Spray House for the intelligent conversation and plentiful food it offered. Throughout, Frances was writing a searchingly honest diary:
May 15th
In no time – days even – we may all be enduring the same horrors as Holland and Belgium. We talked about suicide … R. said we could easily gas ourselves in the car, all three of us. We were still talking of this as we went along to the bath, and of how happy our lives have been, and so has Burgo’s, though there has been so little of it …
My greatest preoccupation is with the question of how to get a supply of lethal pills …
May 19th
The perfection of the weather is getting on all our nerves. It is too phenomenal and everything super-normal is unnerving; also it’s impossible not to remember that it is ideal weather for air-raids. The German advance into France goes on …
We all sank into our private worlds of despair …
These two examples of the reflections of women intellectuals on the 1940 crisis raise fascinating questions about women’s attitudes to war. Frances Partridge and Naomi Mitchison were both deeply
thoughtful, educated individuals, and they were products of their time. Both had benefited from the advanced, emancipated atmosphere of the 1920s, which had brought women the franchise and opened up the world of active politics and other hitherto ‘masculine’ concerns. They saw no reason for ‘womanish’ submission. They rejected war and all it stood for. In Frances’s case, she refused absolutely to play any part in it. Both women could see that the Nazi threat had provoked a military response which was bound to cause terrible loss of life and huge unhappiness. Against this, all their instincts as thinking people, but also as women and mothers, recoiled. They would save themselves and their families, or they would turn on the car and gas themselves. Was this a kind of intellectual paralysis, reserved for the over-educated minority – thinkers not doers – or was it the involuntary reflex of every woman who has ever lived and loved to save, to hide and to protect? Organised violence revolted such women; the expression of hate through force offended against the deep-seated need of their sex to build nests and to nurture. ‘Can we also not love?’ cried Naomi Mitchison. But if the wartime leadership had been female, how would it have responded to Hitler? The despairing reality that now had to be faced as the Nazi armies rolled inexorably across northern France was, simply, how to stop them. Intellectual toughness was no longer enough, and nor was loving. History was now on the side of the doers.
Beached
The British Expeditionary Force was now cornered by advancing German forces. Casualty Clearing Station No. 5 was in their path; the medical staff there were ordered to pack up and move towards the port of Dunkirk.
On 20 May QA Lorna Bradey
and her fellow nurses found themselves in a Red Cross ambulance as part of a troop convoy en route to the coast. That first day they travelled twenty miles to a small town named Frévent, where they spent the night in the château, converted into a hospital. They woke next morning to find their accompanying troops had departed, leaving a note from the Commanding Officer: ‘We have moved forward – you are to turn back.’ Unknown to the nurses, orders had been received that no
women were to proceed to Dunkirk from that point. The CO’s command saved the nurses’ lives.
By the time they could organise their departure going south the countryside was a battle zone. Eventually the ambulance convoy set off, heading for Dieppe, designated a hospital port. A terrifying journey now began, in a vehicle which moved painfully slowly along a road crammed with refugees who clung to its sides; they had been forbidden to open the doors in case the panicked crowds attempted to get in. Every half-hour Stukas sprayed the fleeing civilians with fire. ‘They were remorseless, the Red Cross meant nothing to them.’ Peering out through the small slit windows of the ambulance, Lorna could see carnage. It went against all her instincts and training to abandon wounded civilians, but they had no medical equipment.
Stopping was out of the question. Lorna became desperate to find a toilet. ‘You can’t just do it here,’ they all said. Relief came in the form of a large tin containing peaches, the last one they had left:
Solemnly we opened it and shared the contents; most delicious under the circumstances. One empty tin was now to be used for other purposes! Me first, nothing daunted and with an audience I balanced in that jolting ambulance.
By the time another eight hours had passed all the nurses were glad of that large tin.
The convoy passed through Abbeville; as they left the town was bombarded behind them. The next day they reached Arques-la-Bataille, just outside Dieppe, where they joined a hospital train for Dieppe Harbour, only to find the harbour in flames. As they stood at a loss, the hospital ship the
Maid of Kent
was blown up and sunk in front of their eyes; twenty-eight crew and medical personnel were drowned that day. Fear set in. Nobody knew where to go. Their train crawled through France, loaded with hospital staff and wounded; at night they shunted into a siding near Rouen, where, as darkness fell, the bombing started up again.
The nurses were coping, but near to hysterical. Lorna asked a friend sitting on the top bunk to pass something down to her; as the girl leaned over a bullet struck the panel where seconds before she had been resting her head. ‘We were still laughing, too frightened,
too terrified to cry.’ Another girl lay chalk-faced and wide-eyed on the floor – ‘she couldn’t take any more.’ At dawn they started up again. Orderlies brought the nurses buckets of hot sweet tea – ‘we could have kissed them all’. Slowly the train zig-zagged across France to the southern Brittany coast, making for St Nazaire:
Miraculously no one on that journey south was hit. Midday – hot meat and veg on a tin plate – this was luxury indeed and we had a loo! [The journey] took us all of that day, but the sun was shining, the bombers were behind us and we were alive!
In those grim days, Dunkirk engrossed the nation. Like thousands upon thousands of mothers across the country, Clara Milburn was consumed by anxiety as news of the catastrophe became public. Her son Alan, unlike Lorna Bradey, was in the thick of it.
On Wednesday 29 May
Mrs Milburn heard
on the radio of the Belgian surrender and the withdrawal. On Friday the 31st her hopes for Alan were raised after a neighbour telephoned to say she had heard that the Royal Warwickshire Regiment was safely evacuated, only to be dashed on discovering that the news appeared ill founded. ‘Our spirits went down and down and the day wore slowly on. We worked in the garden.’ Saturday came, and ‘still no news’. Tales came through of the evacuation: the horrors as the men on the beach were bombarded; the nightmare of their escape on the armada of small ships. A local boy, Philip Winser, had been killed. By the following Wednesday Clara broke down on discovering a box of Alan’s sports trophies put away at the beginning of the war. ‘To cry a bit relieved the tension.’ On Friday Mrs Winser called by. They talked about the boys. Philip was dead. And Alan? Nobody knew. ‘I felt how splendidly brave and calm she is.’ Impossible for Clara not to imagine herself in Mrs Winser’s shoes; would she, too, be splendidly brave and calm? A fortnight after the withdrawal of the BEF Mrs Milburn wrote: