Millions Like Us (29 page)

I just find it quite unbelievable that governments think anything can be solved by war. There has
got
to be another way. But I’ve never been able to find out what that other way is.

Around her in 1941 and ’42, other young women were ‘enlisting like mad’:

I thought at the time: I’m not going to do anything about it, so I didn’t register, and I thought – when they get to me I’ll make my stand, go to prison if need be! But by the time they tracked me down I was heavily pregnant.

Not all female conscientious objectors
got off so lightly. Two hundred and fifty-seven such women were imprisoned during the Second World War. The first of these was a parlour maid from Newcastle-on-Tyne named Constance Bolam. As an ‘absolutionist’, she refused to undertake any kind of work that might release someone for active service. Her submission was treated with extraordinary contempt: ‘You must recognise that we on the Tribunal have some commonsense, and you have none,’ she was told. ‘It is no good talking rubbish to us like that.’ She was sentenced by the Newcastle magistrates to a month in Durham jail. The same chairman was quite public in his view that the women COs were bogus, that they were no better than deserters and had far less credibility than their male equivalents. There was abuse and scepticism about their claims. One woman was told she was a humbug. Another young woman – a hairdresser – must have doubted the seriousness of the cross-examining panel. Questioning her about her objection to taking life in any form, the panel pressed her: ‘Cannot you take insect life?’ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘And you a hairdresser!’ was the startling response.

Other women were mercilessly harried by the authorities. Alice Stubbings, a Staffordshire woman, was directed to work as a hospital cleaner but objected on grounds of conscience. The police pursued her, imposing fines which, when they were not paid, were commuted to
three months in prison. A nineteen-year-old Quaker, Mary Cockroft, made a conscientious objection to working in industry as it would aid the killing. She was fined £10 and directed to do war work. When she refused to go, the fine was increased to £20, plus a two-month prison sentence.

It could reasonably be argued that, as pacifists, women are in no way distinct from men; certainly far more men were registered as COs, so it might appear that their consciences were more engaged than those of the women. But men had a great deal more to fear from active participation in the war, as well as a great deal more to object to. Thus, in a sense, the statement that a woman makes when she embraces pacifism is a stronger one than that of a man. The man who rejects war rejects the taking of human life, because he is personally implicated: in war he is expected to kill. But a woman has been exempted from the killing from the outset; society already regards her as fundamentally ‘pacific’. So her rejection of war may well be something more profound, in that she challenges the entire framework of violence constructed by men around her. Her conscientious objection goes beyond the objection to taking life and enters a realm of dissension from all violence and hostility perpetrated on her behalf. Her very passivity and impotence against the killing rouses her to declare: ‘Don’t fight for me. Don’t die for me. Don’t treat me as a victim.’

Although only 1,072 women had appeared before tribunals by the end of the war, that figure bore little relation to the actual numbers of women COs. The Tribunals only saw women who had refused to work in a civil capacity; they didn’t see the large numbers of others who objected to conscription in the forces but reluctantly caved in and agreed to work on the land, industry or civil defence. As with the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, started forty years later by thirty-six protesters and a few children, radicals prepared to stand up and be counted are always less numerous than inarticulate sympathisers. It took boldness to make a stand, and on the whole women were not used to behaving defiantly in public;
the artist Mary Fedden
felt herself to be a coward for not sticking her neck out. ‘If I’d had the courage I think I’d have been a conscientious objector. But I was rather young … I went to court for several of my men friends and spoke up for them as conscientious objectors.’

Greenham Common’s slogan was ‘Not In Our Name’ – again, a
direct challenge to the idea that men go off to fight on behalf of the women and children they leave behind, who owe them gratitude. Sheila Hails would certainly have agreed with the debunking of the gallant hero myth, just as Frances Partridge saw no reason to acquiesce with militarism just because it was the official line.

Frances’s deeply held posture towards the war – and that of the many who held her views – still begs many questions. Her diary does not offer an alternative view of how the Nazis could be held at bay, nations protected, nor how militaristic governments could otherwise be discouraged than through armed resistance.

*

By 1943 the war had begun to seem interminable. From the time the Americans entered the war Churchill was never in doubt of an Allied victory. The Germans’ disastrous campaign in Russia and the Allies’ success at El Alamein and in East Africa increased this confidence; nevertheless the longed-for Second Front, designed to attack Hitler’s Atlantic Wall on the north coast of France, still seemed impossibly distant. Day by day, it was still hard to endure the prolonged absence and heartache occasioned by the war. ‘
Cliff seems
so far away,’ wrote Nella Last in March, ‘sometimes a sadness beyond tears wraps me round.’ ‘
Three years today
since Alan was made a prisoner of war – but it’s no use moaning,’ wrote Mrs Milburn sadly on 28 May.

Anne Popham’s lover
Graham had, despite her misgivings, joined the RAF as a trainee pilot. They corresponded with eager frequency, with Anne’s letters full of heartening news and gossip about her London friends and her new day job on the picture desk at the Ministry of Information. At this time she dared to hope that, once his divorce came through, she and Graham might make a life together. In her fantasies they were gardener and housekeeper to the owners of some wealthy estate. ‘I just wanted us to live together, somewhere.’ Then in June 1942 the letters from Graham dried up. Concerns about their future as a couple had been replaced, for Anne, by concern for his safety. The ensuing months passed in a state of miserable uncertainty as to his whereabouts; all she knew was that he had been posted abroad for training – but where? Her plight, in those days before easy international communications, was all too common. Across the nation, women were living for letters:

22nd July

I am sitting by the gas fire … after the inevitable disappointment of homecoming. As I come in the gate I try to prevent myself thinking of the possibility of there being a letter, but I can never suppress a glimmer of excitement and hope which always turns to dullness as I open the door. But it can’t be long now.

Please keep safe my sweetheart and remember you are the dearest thing in my world – I love you very much.

August 26th

Darling I still haven’t had a word from you …

September 17th

I am all at sea – at this rate I don’t know whether I should send you my love for your birthday or wish you a happy Christmas … I think of you and love you more and more.

In late September Anne finally got the news that Graham was safe in South Africa at an air school in the Cape. Early in ’43 he was back in England. Graham’s RAF pay now enabled him to employ a solicitor to start divorce proceedings with his estranged wife, naming Anne as co-respondent. All would soon be in place for them to marry. Over the next six months the letters track Anne’s fluctuating hopes as he was posted from Yorkshire, to north Wales, to Nottinghamshire.

22nd April

Darling I suppose some sort of move is due again in your life. I only hope it will be southwards this time.

17th May

Is there any chance of you getting off …? Please let me know.

16th July

I think I will drop into my lonely bed now … I will get Saturday & Monday off & could add another day of my own & go up on Thursday night … Good night my dearest darling.

And then the letters stopped.

On the morning of 10 August she was in her office when the Ministry doorman called her and said, ‘Somebody wants to see you.’ It
was Ruth, her flatmate, and she had a telegram. Graham’s Wellington bomber had crash-landed at RAF Ossington in Nottinghamshire, killing the entire crew.

More than sixty-five years after that dreadful day, Anne tried to recapture what it felt like to be twenty-seven and to lose the dearest thing in her world:

It’s very odd what one remembers and doesn’t remember. I’ve blotted out the misery of it. It was too painful. I thought that’s the end of everything I hoped for, the end of the world really. I remember thinking, I’m a widow …

But you had to face it I suppose. When someone dies, you have to look after yourself. And somehow, I don’t know how, I really can’t tell, but one just
had
to survive.

6 The Girl That Makes the Thing-ummy Bob

The Kitchen Front

Three years in, the war machine had become dictatorial. It commandeered everything that came its way, ruling, processing, shaping people’s lives. Every day the newspaper headlines updated the campaign news with the latest from Japan, RAF sorties, new naval targets in the Atlantic, fighting in Russia, in the Philippines, in Burma and in North Africa. But the inner pages allowed no let-up. Advice alternated with directives, opinions with commands. March 1942:
250,000 20–21-year-olds
will be directed to the ATS … clothing coupons will be cut … fines will be imposed on paper-wasters … soap flakes will go further if used to wash woollies in rain-water … the buffet at Euston station will cease to serve rolls with butter … Put your pennies in war savings, sow your peas now, recycle rubber, rear rabbits for food …

Rationing was no longer a novelty, it was a way of life. From onions to sanitary towels, toothpaste to toilet paper, there was no escaping from the urgent need to economise. Coffee, pepper, eggs, marmalade, mixing bowls, knitting needles, hats, hairgrips, shoes, elastic and a myriad of foods and commodities dependent on petrol, scarce raw materials, imports and labour were all now in short supply and getting scarcer, as were contraceptives, ping-pong balls and alcohol. Wedding rings were becoming hard to obtain. New mums hoarded nappies and safety pins.
A convocation of
women’s magazine editresses was assembled to put the ‘tragic’ case of the large women in need of elastic corsets who had written to them in despair; sadly, the rubber shortage made their case hopeless. Goods were of poor quality: needles broke and saucepans dented. Anyone lucky enough to come by a bottle of sherry cherished it and laid it by for Christmas. Bananas, toffees, oranges and chocolate were becoming a distant memory for many children. And to a very large extent the
burden of coping with these shortages fell on women. Everyone agreed that women needed to join the services and the wartime workforce; nevertheless, the assumption continued unquestioned that it was a woman’s job to feed everyone, to look after children and to care for the home.

Coping in the kitchen: literally, a battle.

Getting her family clothed, her housework and shopping done and meals on the table in the time left over from other duties drew on a high level of resourcefulness and ingenuity. Of these, meals took priority.

How laborious life was. Shopping for food had become a thankless chore requiring patience and stamina.
Rage stirred
in the heart of the housewife as she waited in the bus queues for the vehicles that would convey her to market, for to have the pick of the stalls she must push to be first on the bus. Each carried her shopping bag on her arm, for paper bags were wasteful and had been outlawed.
But in Barrow-in-Furness,
where once the countrywomen had set up their stalls of new-laid eggs and home-produced honey in the market square, Nella Last now lamented the sad change; the joyous scene of old was reduced to baskets of muddy cockles and a few warped beets, for
which ‘grim-faced women’ queued and pushed.
Vere Hodgson
, a brisk middle-aged spinster living in Notting Hill Gate, recorded her pursuit of an onion: ‘such a struggle’. When she finally got hold of one it was ‘a victory indeed!’ A great deal of agonising was expended on the question of how to get the best out of your ration book. Did you spread your custom round several shops to improve your chances of obtaining the sought-after lemons or eggs that you craved, or did you patronise one shopkeeper in the hope that he would put you first in line for two ounces of coffee or a quarter of sultanas when they came in?

Choice, where it existed, became ever more limited. Before the war you could have taken your pick from 350 varieties of biscuit, from Garibaldis to chocolate wafers. This had come down to twenty, most of them plain Maries. And in spring 1942 the white loaf disappeared.