Millions Like Us (57 page)

She also interviewed Mrs Price, a happy young woman who had nested in the block and showed Panter-Downes round her new home with pride ‘ “This is my airing-cupboard!” she cried, flinging open a door. “Isn’t it lovely and handy? And this is my larder.” ’

Mrs Price had put a mattress on a trunk and covered it with a blue tablecloth to make a sofa.

We sat down on it to talk … ‘We’ve been living with my mother-in-law, and it was such a squash I couldn’t keep Baby with me. Oh I was miserable … I can’t believe we’re here, with a place of our own at last …

‘I don’t care what anybody says about the Communists, they do know how to get things done.’

Twelve days later the local authorities disconnected the services, and the squatters were evicted. The Communist ringleaders were found guilty but treated with leniency; everyone agreed that the circumstances that had driven them to break the law were extremely provocative.

*

Nella Last was open-eyed
about the problems Britain now faced – the housing shortage, unemployment, trade deficits, debt, the black market: ‘will we ever get straightened out?’

I’m war weary and a bit debilitated. Certainly things have rather got me down lately, try as I may … Little things annoy me. My worries go to bed with me, sleep lightly, wake at a touch and are ready when I rise to keep pace with me all day. In spite of all my gay chatter and nonsense, I have no one with whom to talk things over.

Will Last had never been much of a communicator. After tea Nella would take her sewing on her lap, but the long evenings passed with barely a grunt, or just an indifferent ‘Oh’ from his armchair. If he did speak, it was to grumble and mutter till Nella felt she could scream with rage. These days, she no longer tolerated his querulous, dominating behaviour. ‘I’m not the sweet woman I used to be.’ Now everywhere Nella looked she saw disappointment: demobilisation was so slow, adjusting to
the new world was hard
for everybody, and winter loomed. At fifty-four, she found it hard to mask the feeling that she had been robbed of six years which would never come back.

‘The new world was hard on the older woman,’ recalled Ursula Bloom, who was also fifty-four. Compared to Nella, Ursula Bloom was among the privileged. She found it difficult coming to terms with the manifestations of socialism: industrial disputes and the fact that live-in maids had gone with the wind. Quite apart from the burdens of housework that that imposed, the middle-class’s servant shortage had encouraged a wave of burglaries, according to Mollie Panter-Downes.
All too often,
the hapless householder returned from a trip to the cinema to find her unguarded home turned upside down, with not only her valuables stolen, but also all her irreplaceable essentials: clothes, bath towels, lipstick, gin and the closely hoarded contents of her pantry – tinned sardines, packets of tea and pots of marmalade.

Ursula Bloom also felt alienated by new trends. Young people were dancing a strange dance called ‘Boogie-Woogie’: ‘I don’t understand it, and often ask myself, is it mad or isn’t it? … I did not understand the modern dancing and the music.’
The writer Angela du Maurier
was another middle-aged woman who was finding it hard to adjust. She had just passed forty in 1945, but her infrequent visits to London prompted lamentations at the passing of the world of her youth. With the threat of bombing gone, the city’s appearance of gallantry had been replaced with shabbiness and ‘gone-to-seediness’. The sight of terraces of dilapidated houses depressed her terribly, but more than that she deplored the shift towards slipshod, permissive behaviour. ‘It is not the face of London that has changed, it is its
manner.’ An avid ballet-goer, Angela donned her best evening frock for the 1946 first night of
The Sleeping Beauty
, only to find that the rest of the audience hadn’t bothered to ‘dress’. There were women in mackintoshes, woolly jumpers and hats, carrying shopping bags which they hid under their seats. They had arrived – horrors – by tube. ‘I disapprove of the laxity with which post-war men and women take their pleasures.’

But Nella Last, Ursula Bloom and Angela du Maurier would have made common cause over the continuing shortages. Rationing was as stringent as ever; day after day, the majority of women’s lives were dragged down by the persistent quest for hard-to-find foodstuffs and commodities. At the beginning of 1946 the fat ration was cut, dried eggs – so horrid yet so necessary – were removed from the national menu, and the threat of bread rationing loomed like an impending disaster.

The diarist Maggie Joy Blunt
measured out her life by the meals she cooked, the cosmetics she could obtain, above all (for like many she was a heavy smoker) by the cigarette shortage. Thoughts of meat and menus troubled her sleep. With just ‘2 small bones’ left from her weekend joint, she ‘lay awake a long time last night, wondering what I could do with bone stock – still don’t know.’ Swansdown powder puffs, so painfully rare back in 1939, had, greatly to her relief, reappeared at Harrods, but her hairdresser was preoccupied by the shortage of wholesale supplies, in particular rubber tubing needed for sprays. Occasional bananas and oranges were to be seen in the shops – no sooner spotted than pounced upon – but it was impossible to get Sylko sewing thread. With what she had left, Maggie spent an entire weekend repairing those worn-out sheets whose condition had so vexed her on the eve of VE-day.

In January 1946 the
Daily Herald
asked its female readers what their chief domestic concerns were. Food came an easy top, followed by household goods, chiefly bed-linen, table linen and towels. Clothes came last – ‘the other things were more vital’.

Nevertheless, Mary Manton
wrote a description in a newspaper of an experience familiar to thousands, entitled ‘This Desperate Business of Hunting for Shoes’. She set out in the early morning in search of plain black walking shoes. Seven shops and five hours later she returned home empty-handed.

Sylvia Duncan was another
‘housewife’ who early in 1946 gave her
side of the story to a daily paper. The hardship had finally got to the vast numbers of women like her, she said. Housewives still outnumbered full-time female workers in industry, the armed forces and civil defence combined by a million and a half (8,770,000, compared to 7,250,000). ‘We have lost the love of our job,’ wrote Mrs Duncan. ‘There is no pleasure in it any more.’ She told of self-denial and sacrifice. ‘Very few of us feel really fit these days … We take a back seat, and our wants are neglected … We are the poor donkeys who can always carry an extra burden.’ ‘
E’, writing to the
Daily Mail
, felt utterly exhausted: ‘I have no patience with the children, I don’t enjoy anything, don’t laugh at anything – in general, life is all wrong.’

Nella Last tried to identify
what it was that had robbed her own life of meaning. The ‘fun and laughter’ which had sustained her even in the darkest days of the war had gone. And with them had gone the hope. Like the younger servicewomen, Nella’s wartime activities with the WVS had given her a sense of purpose. Working for a common cause and looking ahead to peacetime had motivated everybody. ‘I want to feel I am helping, in however small a way. I want the laughter and fellowship of the war years.’ She was still young enough for the years ahead to yawn like a void. But what work was there for a housewife in her mid-fifties?

*

During wartime the numbers of women working had peaked at nearly 8 million; within a year of VE-day, that number had fallen by 2 million. Demobilised men were entitled to request a return to their old job, whether on the production line or on the buses. For the women who had plugged the gap, that meant a hasty retreat. ‘
There is not room
for them all, especially the women,’ the
Daily Mail
told its readers.

But the ‘ghastly scramble’ that diarist Maggie Joy Blunt had predicted back in 1944 was not as bad as its equivalent in 1919. Indeed, shortages in the post-war labour force impelled the government to launch a desperate recruitment drive aimed at luring women back into the workplace. A glance at some of the individual cases underlying the statistics does give a sense that women had a measure of choice when it came to their post-war careers.
Helen Forrester put her devastated
love-life behind her and sat down in front of the
Liverpool Echo
classifieds. ‘Firms that had closed for the duration or who had gone
over to war work, now re-opened, like crocuses in the sun,’ she wrote. On the evening of VJ-day Helen answered every single advertisement that offered a secretarial post and accepted a well-paid job working for an electrical engineer. It was the first step on her ladder to freedom from the grind and grief of her war years, the first step to an entirely different life.

Ex-servicewomen found the adjustment harder than their home-based sisters. Going back into the workaday civilian world felt both unsettling and banal. Flo
Mahony was demobilised
in 1946; she was twenty-four and decided to return to her job in the offices of the Wandsworth Gas Company, where she’d worked before the war. It was mortifying:

In the air force you’d been a part of Something; you felt you were Somebody. And then there you were – just a clerk going to the office – back in a slot. That was quite difficult to cope with. I remember finding myself swearing at one of the typewriters, saying ‘The bloody thing’s U/S!’
^*
In the Service you could get away with that sort of language, but in an office it just wasn’t expected of you. You had to adjust, go back to being the person you’d been before … I think I lost a lot of the assurance I’d had in the Service. And I felt quite a resentment at some of the other women in the office who hadn’t gone away – I found them quite irritating and smug.

I worked till I got married. I think we almost slotted back into our mothers’ shoes when we came out of the Service. We took it for granted that women don’t go to work when they’re married.

VAD Helen Vlasto
was due to be released from her duties with the Royal Navy in April 1946. As the date grew closer, it dawned on her how well she had been looked after for five years. Since 1940 she had been fed and housed. A vast bureaucracy had smoothed her way with ration cards and travel warrants. She had been carried on ships across the world, protected and privileged. Now, at the age of twenty-six, she was about to be at the mercy of ‘the cruel world outside’. Before the war, Helen’s experience of that ‘cruel world’ had been limited to the ballrooms and nightclubs frequented by her wealthy, socialite contemporaries. War had broken out when she was nineteen, too young in her case to have embarked on a career.
Helen felt an unspecified determination to ‘get going and strike out on my own’. But doing what? ‘I now knew for certain that I could never happily return to the leisured social life of pre-war days – but this was probably a thing of the past in any case.’ When the last day came she felt frightened and tearful.

Back with her family, and all too aware of her limited qualifications, she resorted to scanning the Situations Vacant columns in
The Times
.

As soon as she saw the notice advertising traineeships for air hostesses, Helen knew that this was the job for her. In February 1946 civilian flights to Europe were just starting to resume, flying out of RAF Northolt and Croydon aerodromes under the banner of British European Airways. The airline industry was in its infancy, still intensely glamorous; most passengers were politicians, wealthy celebrities or royalty. Being an air hostess meant being the envy of your friends: ‘It was thought to be the next best thing to being a film star or a model.’ Helen applied at once and was invited for interview along with a crowd of stunningly attractive other hopefuls. And now her pretty face, her grooming and above all her dim, distant debutante training came to her aid, as she remembered the proper way to enter a room, closing the door behind her without turning her back on the row of waiting interlocutors, and discreetly flattering these important gentlemen with demure upward glances and a demonstration of her excellent French. Half an hour later the traineeship was hers:

I left the room feeling myself already not only figuratively, but literally in the clouds.

By a combination of luck, looks and class clout, Helen Vlasto now found herself pursuing a career that made sense not only of her time as a nurse, but also of her privileged background. Undoubtedly, being very pretty was an important qualification. She was now trained in the glories of being a high-flying waitress: ‘how to serve portions of food delicately … whilst at the same time proffering the platter reverently to the left-hand side and slightly forward of the customer’. Soon she and her fellow trainees were being sent out on ‘hops’ to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, and longer flights to Madrid, Oslo and Berlin. There were passengers to usher to their places, polite announcements to make, drinks to serve, babies to cuddle, flowers to
arrange, and always the importance of appearing neat and smiling in her ex-naval uniform (with the service stripes unpicked). In the gaps, she raced up and down to the West End for romantic rendezvous with Aidan Long, newly back from the East and now hunting for a medical post in London. No job could have been more fitted to a young woman whose pre-war life had designed her to be a social ornament. The days in Alexandria – the stench and the sand, the burned flesh and the blistered bodies – were fading. The war seemed to have happened in a time-warp; her new, peacetime world a revamped version of the old one.