Millions Like Us (40 page)

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Fears of invasion had receded. Despite continuing air raids, the full-on Blitz seemed like history. Churchill had promised that – though the end was not in sight – it was, inexorably, coming. Slowly but surely the phrase ‘after the war’ began to be used with cautious optimism. ‘
People talk
about the end of the war as though it were a perfectly matter-of-fact objective on the horizon and not just a nice pipe dream,’ wrote Mollie Panter-Downes at this time.

Hopes for the future were surfacing, irrepressibly, breaking through the gloom of everyday life.

Up in Kintyre,
Naomi Mitchison took
a robust attitude to present hardships and directed her powers to improving the lot of local women. Briskly, she set off to talk to the Scottish Education Department about getting adult women back into college after the war. ‘I am full of ideas about it.’ Intelligent women were going to waste; their unexpended energies could be harnessed for the good of the community. Naomi herself was endlessly active on committees and in meetings, working tirelessly to promote causes allied to post-war reconstruction, such as a scheme for Scottish hydro-electricity.

But more usually, imagining a world beyond wartime involved finding ways to make up for all the deprivations.
Land girl Kay Mellis’s
dreams revolved around new clothes:

If you really wanted a dress, and you didn’t have the coupons … well, I used to think, you know, when the war’s finished I’m going to buy material and I’m going to make myself a new dress.

That was what we saw the future as being. A free life, being able to go into the shops and buy materials and make things, or buy a couple of pairs of shoes.

And my friend Connie – she was a great knitter. She was going to knit for Scotland, and I was going to sew for Scotland.

When they thought about their own role, most women focused on the fulfilment of domestic aspirations.
Lovely breakfasts
were what Clara Milburn missed: coffee, butter and marmalade, though above all she looked forward to her son Alan’s return. After three years in the FANYs Patience Chadwyck-Healey, exhausted by the lack of privacy, yearned for a rural retreat. ‘
I just wanted
to grow roses in a little cottage miles away on top of a hill somewhere – utter peace and flowers and relaxation – that was what I thought would be absolutely gorgeous.’

Thus, for most, the principal preoccupations were the traditionally feminine concerns of home and hearth.
In 1944 the author
Margaret Goldsmith set out to inquire on women’s wartime state of mind. Many wives, she reported, ‘are so homesick for their pre-war way of life that they seem to have created in their imagination a glowing fantasy of what this life was like. All the small yet grinding irritations of domesticity are forgotten.’

But what would the reality be in that longed-for home, in that imagined dream-time ‘after the war’? The millions of women who had taken on war work or been conscripted knew that the world they’d grown up in would never be the same again. They would still be mothers, housewives, feeders, healers, carers and educators. But after so much sacrifice, they wanted to believe that life after the war would be better than what had gone before.

So when, on 2 December 1942, the liberal social reformer Sir William Beveridge published a report which promised a ‘comprehensive policy of social progress’, the women of Britain turned eagerly to its pages to discover what plans their leaders had to improve their lot. Was it possible that the government was starting to recognise that half the population of Britain lived lives of unaided struggle, and that there existed a genuine political will to assist and support their efforts?

That evening,
Nella Last listened
to Sir William broadcasting to the nation as he laid out a utopian vision. In the new, post-war world
Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness would be regarded as the evils of a past age. He explained with care the workings of a contributory scheme which would supply a comprehensive safety net covering all eventualities, for the entire population. There would be Family Allowances, a National Health Service and National Assistance for the unemployed. The pioneering scheme offered everything from maternity grants to funeral grants, ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

‘Never since I first listened to a speaker on the air have I felt as interested as I was tonight by Sir William Beveridge,’ reported Nella. His broadcast left her feeling profoundly hopeful about the future. The scheme would surely make a huge difference to women: ‘It is they who bear the real burden of unemployment, sickness, child-bearing and rearing – and the ones who, up to now, have come off worst. There
should
be some all-in scheme.’ As she wrote up her diary that night, Nella was struck by how Beveridge’s proposals seemed in so many ways to chime with her own deepest aspirations. She recalled pre-war days when she would discuss social issues with her sons and their friends. Back then her proto-feminism had not gone down well: ‘[They] thought I was a visionary when I spoke of a scheme whereby women would perhaps get the consideration they deserved from the State.’ But could this be her vision coming true?

Yes, war
could
change things for the better. Nella Last had no regrets about the pre-war days; she knew all about want, disease and squalor. There was dreadful poverty in Barrow during the Depression. Wages were so low that children in the town went barefoot; and they all had toothache, because their parents were too poor to send them to have their teeth pulled. Impetigo was rife – the kids were scabbed and raw from it. The husbands were tyrannical when it came to money. They spent their wages on cheap beer, yet held their wives to account for every penny.

It now dawned on Nella how selfish Will, her husband, could be, how he had never made provision for his dependants in the event of his death, or paid for insurance, or given her decent housekeeping money. And now here he was complaining that, under the new scheme, he would have to work till he dropped. Nella felt angry. She didn’t want to be ‘cared for’ by her husband; she wanted to be appreciated and she wanted some understanding of how housewives like her were always on the sharp end when things got difficult. Will Last
was simply unaware of what narrow margins his hard-worked wife survived on. Her husband’s tight-fistedness left her having to subsidise the children’s welfare with what she could save from the housekeeping. When sickness struck, or an operation had to be paid for, life became tough indeed. If implemented, Beveridge’s proposals would sweep away all this hardship. From now on, something started to change in this fifty-two-year-old housewife from Barrow-in-Furness. Nella’s Mass Observation diaries track a growing contempt for her husband, a rage at his dismissive attitude towards her and a gathering sense of her own value and talents. ‘I’m beginning to see I’m a really clever woman in my own line, and not the “odd” or “uneducated” woman that I’ve had dinned into me,’ she wrote.

The Beveridge Report sold over 600,000 copies. Mollie Panter-Downes reported to her New York readers that Londoners had queued up to buy the doorstop manual for two shillings, ‘as though it were unrationed manna dropped from some heaven where the old bogey of financial want didn’t exist’. These avid purchasers had read it with new optimism:

The plain British people, whose lives it will remodel, seem to feel that it is the most encouraging glimpse to date of a Britain that is worth fighting for.

For Nella Last, and for many others, the Report read as a manifesto for women, a true attempt to offer them a better future.

Though the Beveridge report continued to be kicked around parliament like a football for the remainder of the war, its huge popularity ensured that no government could now duck out of the post-war creation of a welfare state. Family allowances would become a reality; there would be a National Health Service. Hopes soared that scrimping and saving, drunk tyrannical husbands and scabby barefoot children with rotten teeth would all become distant memories. The bitter sacrifices of housewives across the nation had, it seemed, gained some official recognition at last.

8 Over There

A Song and a Cheer

By the fifth Christmas of the war, there was a depressing shortage of festive fare. ‘
No chance of chicken,
turkey or goose,’ wrote diarist Vere Hodgson. ‘If we can get a little mutton that is the best we can hope for.’ Coal was ‘a worry’. But the embargo on bell-ringing was lifted, and Christmas Day passed without reports of enemy activity over Britain.

In Scotland
Naomi Mitchison hung
up garlands gathered from the woods and rejoiced in her ersatz Christmas pudding and tinned pears. There were even stockings for the children. In the afternoon Naomi organised a round of rampageous games, from ‘The Farmer’s in his Den’ to ‘In and Out the Dusty Bluebells’. But there weren’t enough crackers to go round.

Wren Maureen Bolster,
based at Southampton, wrote to her fiancé, Eric Wells, describing the revels at the sailors’ mess: ‘I must say I’ve had one of the best Christmases I’ve ever known.’ On Christmas Eve the Wrens stumbled round with a torch being Father Christmas, distributing parcels. There were real eggs for breakfast, followed by carols at the mission. Dancing, drinking, community singing and egg-and-spoon races went on till three in the morning.
In Inverness, Joan Wyndham
and her fellow WAAFs spent Christmas night downing quantities of port and dancing with fighter pilots.

Nella Last wished
her husband a happy Christmas. ‘He scowled and muttered.’ The sweet coupons were tight in his pocket, and it was clear that not so much as a sugar mouse was coming her way this festive season. Nevertheless she stuffed and roasted a corner of pork, found a dash of rum to liven up the sauce for her plum pudding and managed to rejoice at the sight of four late-blooming roses on her Christmas dinner table.

In Croydon, Elsie Whiteman
was unwell, and her friend and flatmate Kathleen Church-Bliss enjoyed a holiday from her work in
Morrisons No 1. Factory. In common with much of the nation, Elsie and Kathleen spent much of the day listening to the wireless, pausing especially for the King’s broadcast to the nation at three o’clock.
Clara Milburn went
to church – it was packed – and later enjoyed a hoarded bottle of 1926 Graves. ‘Grand!’ Then she too sat down to hear His Majesty’s message:

Some of you may
hear me in your aircraft, on board your ships, or as you wait for battle in the jungles of the Pacific islands or on the Italian peaks. Some of you may listen to me as you rest from your work, or as you lie sick or wounded in hospital. To many of you, my words will come as you sit in the quiet of your homes. But, wherever you may be, to-day of all days in the year, your thoughts will be in distant places and your hearts with those you love. I hope that my words, spoken to them and to you, may be the bond that joins us all in company for a few moments on this Christmas Day.

As the notes of the National Anthem crackled across the airwaves, Mrs Milburn needed no reminding of absent loved ones:

All day long we think of Alan and long to have him here. Every hour of the day one wonders what he is doing. And will he be here next Christmas? May we all be here together.

Watching, waiting and praying were predominantly female activities; but in many cases women themselves were far from home.
Mike Morris of the ‘Y’
Service, now based at Allied Supreme Headquarters in Algiers, had hoped to go home for Christmas after two years abroad. But the Italian invasion meant that her vital interception skills could not be spared. She was disappointed, but the festivities were infused with hope for the future. General Eisenhower was convinced that 1944 would see an Allied victory; ‘his optimism was infectious’. And on Christmas Day 1943 there was work to do. Mike and her colleagues were frantically busy with preparations for Operation ‘Shingle’, the amphibious landings at Anzio, now planned for less than a month away.

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Irrepressible, unprompted, hope for an end to the war was flickering into life. The enemy was being rolled back by a series of military successes. A huge boost to British morale came on Boxing Day, when
the German warship
Scharnhorst
was sunk with the loss of 1,900 lives. Early in 1944 the news from the Eastern front continued to be encouraging to the Allies as the Red Army drove German troops backward across the Dnieper and towards the Polish border. German civilians suffered, too, from the successive assaults of the RAF throughout 1943 and 1944. Firestorms consumed German cities, and thousands died. The Italian campaign was hard-fought; on 22 January 37,000 US and British troops landed at Anzio, and the British press celebrated the lack of German opposition (prematurely, as it turned out). In the Pacific, American warships were making headway against Japan’s expansion, though that nation’s ferocious tenacity was to prove intractable over the coming year; meanwhile intrepid Indian, Gurkha and British forces in Burma were holding out in a terrible war of attrition. The tide would eventually turn against the Japanese, exhausted by disease and defenceless against British tanks. And though its exact location was a closely guarded secret, the entire British nation understood that a Second Front was in preparation. ‘
Some people think
it will start in the Balkans, some favour Norway and few think we shall try through France,’ wrote one anxious Mass Observation diarist. Many like her were restless and impatient, awaiting the onslaught that would, surely, mean the start of the endgame.

In this atmosphere of expectation and suspense, it was vital to keep morale high among the soldiers, some of whom had, by this time, been away from home for years. Many men who had embarked on troopships with a song and a cheer back in 1941 were, by 1944, battle-weary, despondent and desperately homesick. They missed domestic comforts, they missed female companionship, they missed their children, they missed the little
finesses
of everyday life that their wives, mothers and girlfriends could provide, and they missed their physical presence. Typically, soldier Peter Jackson wrote to his fiancée, Joan Tamlin: