Millions Like Us (44 page)

That Tuesday Verily, Sheila and many thousands of others had to be content with newspapers, wireless broadcasts and prayers to compensate for the feelings of hope and helplessness that dominated everyone’s waking hours. Yet again, it was woman’s lot to be the one who watched, waited and prayed. Orderly queues formed to buy the evening editions, while others waited in line to give blood. The King addressed the nation.
Mollie Panter-Downes
tried to describe D-day to her New York readers. She sensed a mood of grim revenge among Londoners watching the fleets of aircraft roaring
coastwards: ‘Now they’ll know how our boys felt on the beaches at Dunkirk.’ But she also sensed a lack of connection between the heroism and suffering taking place ‘over there’ and the everyday mundanities she observed on the street: ‘men and women going to the office, queuing up for fish, getting haircuts, and scrambling for lunch’. With her customary eye for minutiae, she noted the typists in their summer dresses going into Westminster Abbey to pray by the tomb of the Unknown Soldier – were
their
sweethearts sharing his fate? – the flower-sellers peddling patriotic buttonholes and the curious hush which descended on the city, ‘[like] a wet Sunday afternoon’.

For London-based Frenchwoman
Madeleine Henrey the anxiety was unusually heightened. Might the invasion finally mean a reunion with her beloved mother? St Malo in 1940 had seen the little family wrenched apart from each other. Abandoned on the quayside, Madame Gal had been close to despair, convinced that the steamer on which Madeleine and her grandchild had sailed away had met with disaster until, eventually, a letter from Madeleine got through. Four years had passed, during which Madame Gal scraped a living with her needle, finding lodging with a humane widow based in Versailles and living for the day when they would all be together again in Normandy. But what had become of Madeleine’s fairy-tale farmhouse, her little patch of heaven at Villers-sur-Mer? Situated just twenty miles to the east of Sword beach, it lay full in the path of the invasion. If it hadn’t already been pillaged by the Germans, Madeleine was left to imagine how the Allies might vandalise what was left.

*

All around us
the great armada was on the move …

wrote Wren stoker Rozelle Raynes, who was based at Southampton with her friend Maureen Bolster. For them, the thrill of being close to the action left them with indelible memories. Rozelle would have given anything to be setting out with those men. As it was, she had to be content with a smaller adventure. Three Wren stokers, including her, were summoned in the early hours to help rescue three landing craft that had broken down near the Needles. Being aboard her tug
steaming towards the Isle of Wight was the nearest she got to experiencing the invasion:

There were all the ships we knew so well … armed merchant cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, corvettes, trawlers and ocean tugs, every one of them moving towards Normandy and a fate unknown.

At last the great day had come; the tension was broken, and the soldiers and sailors laughed and cheered as our little tug kept pace with them, clouds of rainbow-tinted spray breaking over her stubborn black bows. One man leaned over the stern of his landing craft as it gathered way and called out to us: ‘You’re the last bit of Old England we’ll see for a while, girls, and you sure look worth fighting for!’

From the Isle of Wight,
Monica Littleboy had a grandstand view of the immense fleet:

All day [the ships] went by, with never a stop and not more than 100 yards between each vessel … We knew this was no exercise … our hearts were with these men. The cold grey choppy sea and the strong wind that was blowing almost seemed as if it would tear the little barrage balloons away. There were tugs and tankers, masses of them, landing craft of every kind, all towing one another and bouncing about like peas on a drum. Thousand upon thousand. We could see the boats loaded with tanks and trucks and low in the water. Then came the troop ships, dwarfing everything else, solid, full, we knew of Canadians etc, men who had been to parties in this very house – personal friends. And we waved and cheered and knew that the great moment had come.

We climbed back to Tennyson’s Monument again and there we saw them round the Needles. As far as the eye could see were ships, ships, ships, the horizon black with them whichever way you looked. A great armada that thrilled your very soul. And still that night after dark the lights on the ships were steadily going past … I slept fitfully and dreamed the whole night of only one thing, the invasion, and I knew before any radio announced it that we had our feet in France.

From then on, Monica had ‘no time to think’. Within twenty-four hours casualties started to arrive on the island. Red Cross boats were ferrying patients day and night, with urgent cases dropped off at Yarmouth. Monica raced up and down to the quay, unloaded patients, reloaded them on to hospital ships and carried donors to give blood
to those who vitally needed it. The sights were pitiful: burns, fractured skulls, shot-away faces. Some of the victims were mere boys, dazed with suffering.

At 8.30 p.m. on 6 June, the first, solitary patient appeared, covered in wet sand,
in Nancy O’Sullivan’s
empty Surrey hospital. ‘We devoured him.’ And when she came back on duty next morning the wards were unrecognisable. Every bed and every corridor was filled with casualties: ‘It was the real thing.’ From then on she was working flat out to patch up the wounded as they arrived.

In Portsmouth,
teenager Naina Cox was working in a big dry-cleaning firm that dealt with service uniforms; she had just completed a Red Cross course that spring. At 2 p.m. on D-day she was summoned by her commandant to come up to Queen Alexandra’s Hospital and help with casualties. Quickly, she ran home to tell her mum, scrambled into her uniform and headed up the hill to the hospital. There she found the wards had run out of space; the corridors were lined with stretchers. As an inexperienced junior, Naina was given the job of cleaning up the patients. Many were bloody and grimy, but fear had also struck at their bowels, resulting in fouled bodies and garments. For several days Naina washed the excrement from hundreds of traumatised soldiers. ‘[They] were so completely exhausted they didn’t care one jot what happened to them … As I worked … I was thinking, “How long will it go on? If I come tomorrow and the next day, will I still be doing this?” ’ But she barely hesitated when the sister asked her to perform the same task on the German prisoners’ ward. In a stinking Nissen hut, the terrifying enemy lay festering and utterly demoralised: dirty, unwholesome and glazed with defeat. ‘Some of them were only kids, they weren’t really much older than me. One of the rules of the Red Cross is that you are there to help everybody. I’m glad I didn’t refuse to help those men.’

During that terrible first week as the Allies battled to gain their foothold in France and German forces retaliated, planes were crashing on the Isle of Wight, and bodies were washed up on its pebbly shores. Sometimes
Monica Littleboy accompanied
stretcher cases across to the mainland hospital. ‘I saw sights [there] which I hope I may, please God, never see again. They were burned so badly as to be unrecognisable, only the burning eyes could one see, and as we loaded our stretchers I could feel those eyes following me round the ward. I
tried to smile at them; my smile was stiff and I felt sick and though I was so full of sorrow for them something inside me just seemed horror struck.’

Maureen Bolster was
equally appalled when she met a shell-shocked lad just back from the fighting. He was trembling and could barely speak. ‘Poor kid, all he could say was, “Make me forget it, please make me forget it. I’ve just got to.” I felt quite sick with pity … What that kid had seen was beyond telling. For one thing he had seen his special pals blown to pieces.’

A soldier who must face fear and horror deals with it in a number of ways. Above all, he has been trained to obey orders, to kill or be killed. If he feels pity, tenderness or sensitivity to his fellow man, he must learn to suppress it in the interests of winning the war. He cultivates a veneer of brutality; he develops black humour, bravado, cynicism, impassivity. He forces himself to forget. Instilled from boyhood, such qualities are all part of growing up to be a man. By contrast, the reactions of Maureen Bolster, Monica Littleboy, Naina Cox and many other women show the vulnerability of women exposed to war’s horrors. Pity, compassion and distress at the pointlessness of human suffering are the emotions of an entire sex unhardened to inhumanity; more than that, a sex as indoctrinated with susceptibility as men have been with their stiff upper lips.

It is impossible to say whether women are by nature more humane and tender-hearted than men. Probably they are not, but it is safe to say that mid-twentieth-century society assumed passivity in its women, just as it expected vigorous action of its men. Built into the 1941 National Service Act was the precondition that women would not make use of lethal weapons, would not kill. Aggression and heroism were left to men. But for many of those soldiers, D-day proved traumatic; seasick and terrified troops floundered up those beaches past the bodies of their drowned and dying comrades. And the wounded survivors of that bitter fight returned to have the unheroic shit swabbed off them by meek teenagers like Naina Cox.

*

That June, Helen Forrester
was laid low by a bad bout of influenza, followed by the onset of rheumatism in her legs. For over a month she stayed in bed, sustained by letters from Eddie, who had survived
the invasion. Written in haste from the battlefield, these were jokey and loving, soldierly and plainspoken. ‘We’ll get married next leave. Be ready.’ With anguish he described how one of his oldest friends, hit by a sniper’s bullet, had died in his arms. Slowly convalescing, Helen read the letters, waited and hoped, and – together with most of the population – listened to the BBC’s nightly broadcasts. By mid-July, British and Canadian troops were attempting to strike to the east of Caen with a massed tank assault. But Operation Goodwood was a flawed campaign. Concealment had failed; the RAF had tried to bomb German defences to oblivion, but had aimed inaccurately. And commanders had not predicted the chaos that would ensue as too many troops attempted to cross too few bridges across the river Orne. Over two days the British and Canadians suffered 5,537 casualties.

By the third week of July Helen was recovering, though still weak. One rainy evening her father brought her the
Liverpool Echo
to read in bed. At the back of the paper she came to the public announcements. There was a more than usually long list of deaths.

Almost without thinking I ran my finger down the names.

And there it was.

‘No,’ I whispered. ‘No! Not him!’

Had a malign fate selected her, vulnerable and demoralised as she already was, to be robbed of everyone she ever loved? What kind of punishment was this?

I could not speak, could not cry. I just wanted to die myself.

Compelled by an instinct stronger than her own wellbeing, Helen staggered into her clothes and lurched out into the rain. A strange momentum propelled her forward as, soaked to the skin, she strode insanely along the blacked-out lanes, through Meols, Hoylake, West Kirby, Caldy. ‘ “Eddie,” I cried, to the slashing, unheeding rain, “Eddie, darling.” ’ Helpless grief tore at her. Somehow, she found the energy to stumble the 3 miles to the western vantage point of Caldy Hill. There she gasped and stopped, straining into the dark obscurity of the Atlantic Ocean. In its depths lay Harry O’Dwyer’s bones. In the blackness above, somewhere, Derek Hampson had met his fate. And in distant France, the war had killed
another love. Now, among the shattered remains of all her hopes, Helen was left with just one: that for Eddie Parry it had been a quick death.

Mud and Warpaint

As the invading forces moved southwards and eastwards across France, the army relied on the kind of back-up that women were expected to give. Once the beachheads were established, it was possible for the FANYs to bring ambulances over to Normandy by landing craft.
Wrens like Ena Howes,
who had supervised the telephone exchange at Fort Southwick, had a role to play setting up communications. She and two others were shipped across to Arromanches and driven along bomb-cratered roads to their base in western Normandy, where they holed up in an empty medieval house and slept on the floor with their gas-masks as pillows. ATS girls were sent out to Normandy to run mobile army canteens. And WAAF nursing orderlies were put on board Dakotas and flown out to France to escort the wounded back to Britain, frequently under fire. For nurses were, as ever, vital.

Iris Ogilvie,
a Welsh nursing sister with the RAF, aged twenty-nine, was among the first British women to land on the invasion beaches, just five days after D-day. Many years later Iris wrote a detailed account of her work setting up mobile field hospitals and helping to evacuate the injured. She had offered her services after her husband, Donald, a bomber pilot, had been killed over Holland in June 1943. ‘I was devastated. He had died for his country and I didn’t care what happened to me. I knew I wanted to make some contribution myself.’ Initially, Iris was not made welcome. When the medical orderlies heard that she was to become one of their number, they reacted with unconcealed hostility: ‘We don’t want any b--- women in this outfit.’ And the commanding officer of the unit was disbelieving. ‘They’re not going over, are they?’ he asked as she and her friend Mollie set off for Normandy. He raised objections, telling them: ‘We can’t cater for you to have toilet facilities on your own.’ Iris was not worried by such trivia.

On 8 June the nurses were briefed and handed their emergency
packs: twenty-four hours’ worth of rations, including chocolate, biscuits, compressed and ready-sweetened tea cubes, chewing-gum, a compass, four cigarettes and four sheets of toilet paper. Iris also brought with her a small waterproof bag for her Elizabeth Arden make-up. Like Vera Lynn, she was reluctant to be seen without her warpaint. ‘I wasn’t going to land in Normandy looking a sight! Bright red lipstick did wonders to pull one’s face together.’ On 12 June they stepped ashore on Juno beach. The beach-master gaped at the sight of the diminutive, fair-curled Iris appearing off the landing craft and said, ‘Good God.’ He escorted the sisters into the nearest underground shelter, and there the troops raised a welcoming cheer: ‘Watch out, Adolf, you’ve had it now!’ called out one.