Millions Like Us (42 page)

Vera Lynn, the voice of the war.

People in Britain were spending more money than ever before on pleasure; by 1944, 120 per cent more than in 1938. And where ENSA concerts were lacking, people flocked to the cinema, went dancing or made their own entertainment. Community singing flourished; pubs and air-raid shelters rang to the chorus of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ or the endlessly popular ditty: ‘Hitler has only got one ball. / The other is in the Albert Hall’.
Theatre director Nancy Hewins
took her all-women acting company on the road throughout the Second World War, putting on no fewer than 1,534 performances of thirty-three plays, of which half were by Shakespeare. The petrol shortage reduced the company to travel by horse and cart. They slept in barns or on floors.

When
twenty-two-year-old Isa Barker
was a land girl in rural East Lothian she discovered that her hostel was a mine of talent:

We found out that we had a couple of beautiful singers; and there was one girl who was very adept with poetry recitations, and could make people laugh. And I had been in a tap-dancing troupe for five or six years when I was younger.

Isa and her friends were persuaded by the Land Army rep to devise a show; for the next six months they staged the ‘Revue by the Landgirls’ weekly on Friday nights, in village halls round the district, with audiences from the local community. Their signature tune was:

We’re in the Land Army

We think we’ll all go barmy

If this goes on for years and years and years …

With a ticket price of sixpence a head, plus raffle prizes donated by the local farmers – fresh eggs, butter and even a sucking pig – the event soon raised £300 for the Land Army Benevolent Fund. Today, the concerts remain the high spot of Isa’s war:

We didn’t get to bed till about two in the morning because of people enjoying themselves. And on Saturday mornings you’d get up and think ‘Och, we’ve got to lift manure.’ Well, we could hardly lift the fork, never mind the fork with the manure on it!

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles from the Scottish glens, London buzzed with life. Throughout the war the 400 Club and the Gargoyle did good business. The Ritz and the Berkeley were a whirl of fun, packed with couples in uniform and evening dress.
ATS recruit Vera Roberts
would catch a train from her Home Counties base to go dancing to Joe Loss and his orchestra at the Hammersmith Palais; it cost only sixpence if you were in uniform. ‘We got up to quite a few tricks. I used to roll my hair up – then when I got to the dance I’d let it down. Once we were going to this dance in Croydon; I had this gold dress – so what I did was I put an elastic round my waist, and pulled it all up under my greatcoat. And when we got to the dance you let your dress down, took your coat off, and you were a civilian!’ As another young woman remembered, ‘If this is war, why am I enjoying it so much?’

For Helen Forrester
in Liverpool, dancing helped to anaesthetise the pain of loss. Her fiancé, Harry O’Dwyer, had been killed in the Atlantic
in August 1940. The ensuing emptiness in her heart continued to gnaw: ‘As I lay in bed, I would still occasionally burst into tears.’ But there was nobody she could tell.

All through the war, late at night, I danced. I danced with men from every nation in Europe, and they had one attitude in common; they never talked about what they would do after the war. Perhaps they accepted, what I feared, that they would be killed.

Defended though she was, new relationships slowly entered Helen’s life. Through her job at the Liverpool Petroleum Board she met a onetime oil company employee, Eddie Parry, who was visiting his colleagues while on leave from Commando training. Eddie – tall, tough, fair and lean – had a reputation as a tearaway, a womaniser who went on pub crawls, swore and got drunk. But with Helen he was different: respectful and gallant. He walked her home one rainy night, and Helen realised she was struggling to conquer feelings that had lain dormant since Harry’s death. After Eddie returned to his unit they corresponded. Helen was deeply attracted to him, and she also discovered that they had much in common: secret vulnerabilities, a capacity for endurance and a defiance of what life could throw at them. But she pulled back from making any gesture of commitment. Their letters kept her going, and, though they met whenever he had leave, she was clear-eyed about his shortcomings. Eddie was not husband material; moreover, as one of Churchill’s crack raiders, he would inevitably be in the greatest danger once the Second Front got under way. He himself recognised that he was training to kill, or be killed.

So Helen did not feel she was betraying him when she made friends with Derek Hampson, a wounded bomber pilot whom she found weeping one evening on the rocky beach near Moreton. Tear-sodden though he was, Helen couldn’t help noticing this young man’s film-star good looks. He was blond, ‘easily the most handsome man I had ever met … like … some beautiful gift of nature, a perfect Arab pony, for example.’ They got talking; his voice, as it steadied, betraying his public-school education. It turned out that Derek had crash-landed his Lancaster, broken his thigh and was being nursed in a convalescent home for airmen in nearby Hoylake. The ordeal had shot his nerves to pieces, the last straw being the news that his best
friend in the squadron had been posted abroad. Helen agreed to go to the cinema with him.

Once Derek’s thigh healed, she discovered that he was also a wonderful dancing partner. Helen told him how she supplemented her meagre clerical income with dress-making, and he in turn revealed that before the war he had been in the rag trade. ‘I sell clothes – ladies’ dresses, mostly … [But] you absolutely must not tell anybody, particularly the RAF types. I would be ribbed to death, if they knew.’ Even Helen’s spiteful mother found Derek’s good looks and educated manner irresistible.

By contrast with the electricity between her and Eddie, Helen felt no ‘jump of desire’ for this handsome, fashion-conscious young man. And gradually it dawned on her why. ‘He was truly and faithfully in love with a man he had known since boyhood.’ Homosexuality was illegal and punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, and Derek was terrified of exposure and blackmail; but Helen’s sufferings had made her tolerant, and she felt pity for his vulnerability in the macho world of the squadron. Over time she persuaded him that he could trust her with the knowledge of this secret relationship, and in return she confided in him about her own sorrows and disappointments. And so, as they sat one sunny day on the sea wall at Moreton, looking out over the barbed wire at the blue ocean beyond, he turned to her and, with unconcealed embarrassment, suggested that they marry. Helen reacted more with surprise than shock – ‘Derek!’

‘Helen, it would offer some protection to my friend and me – having a woman in the house … Listen to what I have in mind. I would take you into the business with me, as an equal partner … you’re good with clothes, and it’s an interesting thing for a woman to be in …

Think about it … You’ll have a good house, I promise you. And we’d never question your comings and goings – I mean, if you found, well – a lover.’

It was not out of anger or pique that Helen checked his flow:

‘I couldn’t, Derek. I just could not do it. I am a normal woman with a normal set of desires and hopes. I am just very, very tired at present; yet, sometime, I hope to marry.’

His face had fallen … I felt very sorry for him …

‘Believe me, I understand your predicament. But I could not live such a lie. I just couldn’t.’

In time, Derek returned to his squadron. Once a month he wrote to Helen, and she replied. As a bomber pilot it was his job to deliver heavy explosives to military targets. But they often missed, killing German civilians, and his sensitive nature rebelled against being the cause of so much suffering. Then the letters stopped. Eventually, an envelope addressed to her in unknown handwriting arrived from Yorkshire. It was Derek’s mother, who had discovered Helen’s letters in her son’s belongings, returned to her after his death. He had been killed in action. For the bereaved lady it must have been some consolation to find that he had a girlfriend; but who would write to Derek’s real lover? Meanwhile, to Helen, it seemed that whoever she allowed to get close to her was singled out for untimely death. ‘I grieved … for the slaughter of my generation.’

The Secret Army

Helen Forrester was learning to live her life provisionally. There would be time enough – when the war ended, as it surely soon would – to determine what to be, who to marry. ‘Like many other women I was waiting it out.’

Monica Littleboy
was one of these. In the brief period in 1939 that she had known her boyfriend, George Symington, their romance had seemed to offer everything her young and passionate heart had ever dreamt of. But by 1944 she had not seen George for four and a half years. ‘[He] had gone to the Far East, for how long I did not know.’ Monica had a spell in the WAAFs before opting to become an ambulance driver with the FANYs, attached to the Red Cross, where she was trained to drive and maintain a heavy vehicle, and to lift and carry stretchers. Posted to Dorset under Southern Command, she threw herself into her work and found temporary happiness with a gentle older officer who talked to her of marriage. ‘He was posted elsewhere … We both knew that things were not to be.’ When news finally reached her that George had been taken prisoner by the Japanese it intensified her memories of their love. ‘I have realised that
George Symington is the only person I could really marry and be happy with,’ she confided to her diary.

But he was so far away. At this time Monica’s job gave meaning to her life. Her ambulance, her friendships in the FANY, above all the patients – from dysentery cases to plane crash survivors – were the here and now of her existence. ‘I learnt more about human nature there than anywhere else.’

And now the time was approaching when the commitment of women like Monica would be put to the test. It is tempting to compare the slow accomplishment of the Allied invasion to a gestation; for women, a time of gathering readiness and anticipation in the hatching of a long-awaited outcome. Nature has fashioned our sex for patience; we know, too, that a long-prayed-for event may bring death, blood and a mother’s tears. Mystery and fear, love and faith in the future: with victory at stake these preparations were, for many women in Britain, burdened with more hopes than any military campaign before or since.

Rumours were abroad from early spring that the Second Front was due.
On 2 April a friend
of Frances Partridge told her he had it on good authority that the invasion would be launched that very night. Frances lay sleepless for hours, listening to every aeroplane. By May the tension was palpable; everyone knew it was about to happen, but nobody knew when.
Up in Scotland,
Naomi Mitchison was consumed with anxiety: ‘[There is] this awful ache about the Second Front, the thing one wants and fears so terribly, that is at the back of one’s thought all the time, like a wave, a tidal wave coming in from the horizon blotting out everything.’ Trippers were banned from the coastal zone from East Anglia to Cornwall; its roads were clogged with an endless stream of military traffic. Sherman tanks were to be seen noisily negotiating the cobbled streets of medieval towns, and convoys of despatch riders roared on motorbikes from village to village.
Verily Anderson,
who had retreated to the country with her small children, confined them to the garden. The lanes were perilous, with tanks crunching indiscriminately into gateposts and gable ends. Two of the little ones nearly got pulverised in their pushchair when a convoy of armoured vehicles swept away the protecting wall beside them.
When Vera Brittain
went to her Hampshire cottage that spring she
ran into ammunition dumps and transports concealed in leafy glades, where they could not be spotted by German reconnaissance aircraft. American soldiers were everywhere in the banned zone – ‘
a nuisance to anyone
walking alone,’ wrote Mass Observation diarist Shirley Goodhart, who worked in Salisbury.

Behind the scenes, women played their part in the preparation for this most audacious of campaigns.
The routine
of Doris Scorer’s life in the Wolverton aircraft factory was disturbed when she and her workmates were unexpectedly taken off repairs and transferred to the woodwork shop. Rumours began to circulate that they were going to work on making gliders. ‘We didn’t have a clue what a glider was.’ Doris and the girls weren’t told, but the light aircraft they were making would be used to carry invading troops over the Channel to France. It was an exacting job, sawing the lengths of wood forming the wing struts to precise lengths, gluing them into the frame and securing them with tiny brass nails. The pace of work was fast and urgent. From Autumn 1943 the WVS were kept busy day and night providing food and hot tea for builders and engineers working on the construction of concrete caissons in the Thames estuary and at other significant ports. From 5 April 1944 a travel ban was imposed on everyone working at Bletchley Park. The women there worked flat out translating intercepts to locate the position of mines laid in the English Channel and decrypting German signals which confirmed that the enemy was being successfully misinformed about the intended landings. As an ULTRA code-breaker,
Mavis Lever was able
to reassure her superiors that German spies and reconnaissance had failed to spot the construction of the Mulberry harbours: ‘They never once asked what was going on at Southampton or Portsmouth. We were much comforted to know that they
didn’t
know about them. In a way, the questions the Germans didn’t ask were as important as the things that they were asking. And we knew that they were keeping two Panzer divisions down at Calais, which was a great help.’