Millions Like Us (13 page)

She herself observed that men and women responded differently to battle conditions. Her cool view was that, at the outset, women tended to be braver than men under bombardment, but that demoralisation set in over time. Men, however, tended to panic at the beginning. Their morale emerged more slowly.

In the end, there is little to choose between men and women.

Would war prove a catalyst for some new kind of androgynous being? As Britain braced itself for the Blitz, Mike’s assertion was very soon to be put to the most extreme of tests.

3 Wreckage

The Love of Her Life

Britain now stood isolated. Surviving on this island depended on importing foodstuffs – the role of the Merchant Navy. But from summer 1940 the U-boat threat to naval vessels in the Atlantic began to grow.

From the moment she first met the merchant seaman Harry O’Dwyer,
Helen Forrester was
under no illusions regarding the danger of his occupation. She knew that the submarines were out in the bay, ‘like cats waiting at a mousehole’. Merchant shipping had to be protected by convoys of freighters. But sinkings were frequent, and there was huge loss of life. ‘Allow five weeks, OK?’ Harry had said to her when they parted. During his absence she was consumed with anxiety. Through her job, Helen knew at first hand what it was like for the women mourning their lost menfolk. She also had access to more information than most girls had about their sailor boyfriends. At that time there was a news embargo on British losses at sea, but next of kin were informed. If Harry’s ship had gone to the bottom, Helen would have heard about it when the relatives came to her Bootle office to claim a pension. So when six weeks passed without a word from Harry, Helen became increasingly moody and despondent. Whatever had possessed her to trust a sailor?

And then, at last, he called. ‘We’ve just berthed … wait for me if I’m late.’ Helen took the call in her office, rapidly agreed to meet in Ma Ambleton’s café at 7.30, then rushed downstairs to the cobwebby basement and burst into huge sobs of relief.

At 8 he finally appeared. ‘I was all curled up inside with pure joy. I wanted to hug him.’ Harry was exhausted and hungry. Over ravenous mouthfuls of steak and kidney pie, Harry let her know that his ship had got separated from the escorting convoy – ‘Been chasing all over the bloody Atlantic, if you’ll pardon the language.’ Listening to him, Helen had a horrible premonition:

Suddenly I felt the icy Atlantic waters with its surface mist drifting over struggling men.

‘Do you have to do another voyage? Can’t you stay ashore – do something else?’ …

I was in love.

After Harry had eaten, they walked down to the Mersey and boarded the ferry. Helen tucked herself under the curve of his arm, and they talked, crossing and recrossing the stretch of dark water in the blackout. Harry told her about his family. His mother had never forgiven him for quitting the seminary, and now he never went home. But he had been saving money and had put enough by for a house – would she come and help him look at some small properties in Allerton? ‘My mind leaped ahead with all kinds of wild hopes.’

In her hungry, sad life, Helen had never known such happiness. She met Harry the next day at Norm and Doris’s, and there they waltzed to the old wind-up gramophone. Her steps were as light as her heart, and when the music stopped it seemed far too soon. Harry took her back in his arms, and they swayed in gentle rhythm down the pavement; halfway along the avenue he stopped and kissed her, passionately.

Love, I know this is too quick. But I want to marry you, if you’ll have me – soon as I can get a house ready to put you in safe and sound. Be my girl – I’ll never let you down, I promise.

The Liverpool mist was swirling about them. Helen barely knew him, they were from different classes, different religions too; but even with the short time they had had together, she knew that Harry’s offer meant the chance of something she had never dared hope for: a future. And she loved him. There and then, afloat in gratitude, Helen agreed. ‘I’ll try to be a good wife – I know how to keep house – and, oh, Harry, I want to make you happy.’

*

Love was in the air in 1940, and war often favoured romance in the most unexpected quarters.

Perhaps it was something in the water in Liverpool that year.
Sonia Wilcox,
the twenty-four-year-old daughter of an amiable Merseyside
shipping pilot, might have been doomed to remain at home for all her adult life had it not been for the outbreak of war. Sonia was squashed by her recalcitrant and unloving mother, who stamped on all her ambitions. But in 1939 Mrs Wilcox ran out of excuses. Sonia went to work for an all-female team of censors who examined the documents and papers of travellers who might be suspected of passing information to the enemy – everything from personal correspondence to bibles, maps and recipe books. One morning a set of marine engravings came under Sonia’s scrutiny, the property of a man claiming to be a Jewish refugee travelling to New York. Something about these engravings made Sonia linger over them – surely, between the cross-hatchings, she could detect minute lines of text? She took them up to the intelligence officers and asked for a second opinion. Lieutenant Keates, a handsome, educated-sounding young man, was dismissive. ‘Nothing there. Waste of my time,’ he said. Sonia, however, believed in her hunch and told the lieutenant that she would not go away until he had examined the engravings under an ultra-violet lamp. This time he was away for a considerable time, returning eventually to inform her that the cross-hatchings had, indeed, concealed information, in German, regarding shipping movements in and out of British ports, and that the so-called ‘refugee’ had been detained for questioning. ‘You’re rather a clever girl, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Patronising so-and-so’ was Sonia’s private reaction, before returning to her office. An hour later she found Lieutenant Keates waiting for her outside, with tickets for a performance at the Liverpool Playhouse.

After that Sonia met Basil Keates every night for a week, saying nothing to her parents, who were accustomed to her working long hours and catching the late ferry home across the Mersey. Love blossomed. Basil Keates turned out not only to have a captivating sense of humour, but also beautiful ankles. On the sixth day Basil appeared long-faced and told her that he was about to be posted to Iceland. They passed the evening together and he saw her to the quay. As the ferry gates clanked back and Sonia turned to depart he stopped her: ‘Will you marry me, darling?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered, and stepped aboard. The ferry pulled out into the great river, and suddenly Sonia realised that another vessel was churning up the water beside them, with none other than her father, its pilot, up on the top deck. Perhaps it was the radiance of her expression, or perhaps it was simply
extraordinary fatherly intuition, but William Wilcox immediately guessed that his daughter had met the love of her life.

In February 1940 Basil managed to get leave, and the pair were married.
^*

Shirley Hook’s wedding plans
dominate her Mass Observation diary towards the end of the year. At that time she was working in the office of an engineering works. There was the excitement of showing off her engagement ring to her colleagues, followed by the announcement that she was leaving to get married. It was, however, a low-key wedding, in keeping with the times. On the day, she and Jack Goodhart were married in Leicester, ‘most informally by an agreeable registrar’, then went for a ‘very good’ two-and-sixpenny lunch at the Empire Café. It poured with rain, so they decided not to go away for the weekend. Shirley proudly headed her next diary entry ‘Mrs Goodhart, Housewife, age 25’.

Marriage gave a sense of direction to
Verily Bruce’s otherwise
meandering existence. The Sussex rector’s daughter had always wanted to be a writer, but it would take another twenty years for her name to appear on a published book. Insouciant, funny and loveable, she found herself adrift in her early twenties.

Joining the FANYs in 1938 had helped. ‘Somebody else does your thinking for you in the army, and even your feeling.’ But despite being under orders she didn’t find enough to keep her occupied. A dance band tune popular in spring 1940 seemed to reflect her sense of futility: ‘I’m nothing but a nothing. I’m not a thing at all’. And work in the Corps held few attractions by comparison with the charming and debonair love of her life, writer Donald Anderson, whom she had met playing ping-pong with friends in 1936. More than seventy years later, Verily sighs romantically as she recalls their momentous first encounter:

Ah, God sent him I think.

On that occasion the sight of a large hole in his otherwise smart socks stirred something deep inside her:

I just yearned to mend it. And I knew that we’d fallen in love.

By 1940 Donald was working in London in the Ministry of Information. Verily, now aged twenty-five, was based at a FANY depot in the Midlands. One afternoon that July her sergeant called her to the telephone, telling her to keep it quick. It was Donald, calling to ask her size in wedding rings.

‘I don’t know, darling. Why? Are we going to be married?’

‘That’s what I should like. Can you get leave?’

‘Of course, darling.’

‘What about tomorrow?’

It was time to hang up.

‘All right, darling. Of course.’

Duty called. So much for leave and browsing round ring shops. Verily was promptly detailed to pick up a captain at the depot and drive him to Birmingham. She drove the 30 miles in dreamy silence; once there, she took the first opportunity to park the vehicle outside a jeweller’s. Courteously and quickly the assistant measured her wedding finger. It was P. Verily hastened to the nearest post office and drafted a telegram: ‘P DARLING STOP YOUR ADORING V’.

Back at the depot she requested forty-eight hours’ leave. It was refused, but, noting that Verily’s fluffy blonde hair was infringing the ‘not-below-the-collar’ regulations, the CO granted permission for two hours’ grace to buy a hair-net. Barely pausing, she jumped on a bus to her Aunt Evie’s, who lived near by. Aunt Evie took one look at her niece’s excited, nervous pallor, banned her from returning to spend the night in a camp-bed, and that was the end of her association with the FANYs. Would she be shot at dawn for desertion? Unlikely. Next morning cousin Beryl dropped her at the railway station. She was still in uniform, and here the real difficulties started. A single ticket to London? Didn’t she realise there was a state of emergency? No unauthorised travel was permitted to members of the services. She went to a nearby hotel to think things over. At that moment a young man climbed out of a large sports car and strolled into the bar looking for a cocktail. Verily took a calculated risk – ‘Weren’t you at school with my brother?’ – and pulled it off.
Extraordinarily, it turned out that he had been and soon he had agreed to drive her to London, leaving the next morning. She took a room in the hotel and telephoned Donald. He was prepared, with the ring bought, the licence secured and honeymoon booked.

The next day her suave chauffeur arrived at the agreed hour. The sports car, it turned out, was entirely unreliable. Gasping, exploding and coughing smoke, it needed regular stops to replenish oil and have the engine tinkered with. At 8 o’clock that evening they arrived in Piccadilly in a cloud of blue fumes. ‘ “Hallo, darling,” said Donald, kissing me as though I had just got off a number 9 bus.’

The marriage would take place at two o’clock the following day. At the last minute Verily decided to telephone her parents and invite them. Donald, impoverished and far older than his bride-to-be, was not a popular choice, and the news didn’t go down well with Mrs Bruce, who, having threatened to stop her daughter’s pocket money, banged down the receiver. ‘Yes, this was love all right,’ concluded Verily.

And so, in August 1940, at Christ Church, Mayfair, as the Battle of Britain was getting under way, Verily Bruce became Verily Anderson. It was in every way a consummation:

That was when I looked back. Selfish, frivolous, and unreliable, I vowed to do better now that I had some real aim in life.

Their daughter Marian was to be born exactly nine months and three days later, closely followed by Rachel, Eddie, Janie and Alexandra. Not for a moment did Verily consider that her contribution as a FANY might have had more value to the war effort than cooking shepherd’s pie for a Ministry official and having his babies. The possible penalties of her desertion from the army held no fears for her. Marriage and motherhood made sense of things. And it is reasonable to assume that countless wives would have viewed things in the same light. The Andersons honeymooned at a quaint Sussex inn, unruffled by fighter planes sparring in the blue skies above. Lounging in the pub garden, Verily had no qualms. Everything added up. Being a good wife was more than a subsidiary condition, it was a form of national service in itself. There was no irony in her emphatic defence of the married state:

If I can make you happy, you’ll do your job at the Ministry better. Then we’ll win the war.

As for the FANYs – they didn’t really want her back, but to keep the bureaucrats happy she was required to produce a medical certificate stating that she was unfit for service. This was easily procured through a doctor friend of a friend, and the deed was done. Then as now, it helped to have influential contacts.

The Sad Atlantic

Helen Forrester and Harry O’Dwyer
kept their engagement secret from their families. Harry’s mother had still not forgiven him for abandoning his priestly vocation. And, despite the fact that the Forresters had fallen on hard times and were living in a slum, the class divisions ran deep. They retained their cultured accents. Harry was unquestionably ‘beneath’ Helen; also, he was a Catholic. Helen knew she would never gain her parents’ approval of such a match. The couple decided to marry as soon as possible after she was twenty-one, once the little house Harry had bought was ready, and when their consent would no longer be required. Throughout spring 1940 they lived for their reunions. Harry’s short spells on shore were times of joy and intimacy, as Harry coaxed and reassured his fearful young fiancée that she really was his girl, his one and only. For her part, she loved him with all her being.