Millions Like Us (63 page)

But the Brimsons’ early married life was difficult. The agonies and ecstasies of Pip’s days in Bomber Command were behind her now: those fearful nights waiting for a mission to return, the heady wonder of flight, the all-too-brief lives and loves. The RAF wouldn’t release Brim, permitting him only short leaves for his wedding and the birth of his son. Pip stayed with her parents above their shop in Buckingham, hauling the pram up and down stairs. The baby cried ceaselessly, and she was permanently exhausted. Brim wasn’t there for her. ‘My mother’s post-war life was an anti-climax,’ their son Peter remembers. ‘For many years my father squashed her and treated her contemptuously.’ Brim, a clever but unimaginative man, failed to appreciate his wife’s love of poetry or take seriously her secret passion for writing. ‘She was under his thumb. With her it was always, “Brim says …” or “Brim thinks …” ’

After Cora Johnston’s husband
was torpedoed on his ship she got a life-saving posting in the Wrens. Struggling to salvage a future from the ruins, Cora fell under the spell of John Williams, her handsome office chief. He took her out, flattered her, and when he was posted to North Africa with the navy they corresponded. But even that wasn’t enough to ward off the nervous breakdown which caught up with her at the end of the war. She was still only twenty-three. ‘I didn’t really know him all that well … I think the fact that I was deeply depressed and needed somebody may have had something to do with it.’ In November 1945 they married – ‘at that point I didn’t know what a monster he was’. But over time the ‘real’ John emerged. He was caught fiddling naval accounts, became alcoholic and used physical threats to control Cora. Later there were repeated infidelities. Cora
kept her head down, brought up two children and finally left him – in 1989.

In the summer following her return from Germany,
Joy Taverner married
Sergeant Ron Trindles. During her first year as his wife, Joy also began to find out what the man she had married was really like. And he was not, as it soon emerged, someone with whom she could share the trauma of her time in Belsen. The newly wed Trindles, like Pip Brimson, moved in upstairs above her family’s tobacconist shop in west London. Joy now realised, in that confined space, that she and Ron were incompatible. Their whirlwind romance in Belgium in the early months of 1945 seemed impossibly distant. His charm and well-bred allure seemed all to have been a front. Joy – articulate, capable and imaginative – had married a man who appeared to have no interest in her, nor any initiative when it came to forging a career. In addition, his family from Northamptonshire turned out to be homespun and unsophisticated. Joy took on work to support him, but then she became pregnant. Their first child, Sue, was born in November 1946, by which time Joy was at the end of her tether. She told her mother she wanted to leave her husband. But there was to be no chink of support from that quarter. ‘You’ve made your bed,’ said Mrs Taverner, ‘and you lie on it. There’s never been a divorce in our family. That’s not what this family does.’ Joy caved in to circumstances. Ron got a passable, but badly paid job in an insurance company. She looked after her baby, cooked, and – in Sue’s words – ‘tried to do the wifely thing’, but, defying convention, went back to work as a nurse as soon as she could. For Joy, marriage never delivered; her animals meant more to her. She had witnessed what men were capable of, and it is perhaps unsurprising that she remained sceptical of their worth. ‘Men are what women marry,’ she wrote once, in an angry diatribe entitled ‘Useless Creation Man’: ‘they have two feet, two hands, and sometimes two women, but never more than one shilling or one idea at the same time … Making a husband out of a man … requires science, common sense, hope, and charity – mostly charity.’

In the end it was Ron who left. Unhappy but stoical, still haunted by the ghosts of Belsen, Joy shared her life with his for the best part of thirty years.

In the autumn of 1945,
when Monica Littleboy encountered
George Symington after his return from Japan, her heart bled for the wreck that he had become: ‘Misshapen, pitted, scarred … This was not the young man I had known.’ But trauma and hardship had not changed George’s feelings for her. These had kept him going and given him hope during his imprisonment; he persisted in seeking to revive their relationship. Gradually, compassion for his plight, and the rekindled flame of their old love displaced Monica’s initial shock and disbelief. And she soon found that those emotions shackled her to him as securely as if they had never been apart. Becoming wife to a man whose health and mental wellbeing had been eroded by war was not how Monica had once envisaged her future, but their past passion now exerted an inescapable pull. Did she feel a pang at the loss of her new boyfriend, her job at the BBC? Would she regret agreeing to marry him? When the time came she realised that they were bound together not only by love, but by George’s need, and her capacity to help him.

Here was the challenge given to me for peace time. Could I meet it … ? Could I keep this man alive and help him get back into his life again … ? The toughness I had acquired would be all his, the humanity he had so lacked in the war I had in full measure … I had not seen and done all that I had for nothing.

She laid her misgivings aside, said ‘yes’, and two months later they were married.

Almost immediately Monica realised how inadequate she was to her self-imposed task. George Symington had been offered a job with British Petroleum; she, as the conventional wife, would keep house, and they were lucky to find a one-room flatlet in central London. But George’s ordeal as a prisoner-of-war had left him physically and mentally depleted. He had been starved and could not eat properly; was dizzy and uncoordinated. His emotions were chaotic and he would sometimes break down in tears impulsively. He suffered from intermittent but severe bouts of malaria, and when BP posted him to Iran for six months his health took a frightening dive. Left behind in England, Monica both feared for him, and missed him more than she could possibly have imagined. On his return she needed to draw on all her inner resources to care for him. There were times in those early days when she could not help
contemplating what life might have been if George had been a well man:

My mind kept returning to my handsome, healthy boyfriends whom I had left behind. I was miserable [but] the warmth of my husband shone through from underneath and gave me courage to continue.

Time, and Monica’s patient and practical approach gradually helped George to heal. Many years later Monica described herself as ‘a very ordinary woman whose life was radically changed by the war’. In 1939 she had been ‘Miss Average’: middle-class, under-educated, lacking drive and looking no further than a qualification as a beautician. War had transformed her, giving her strength, confidence, patience, endurance and an overriding humanity.

Monica Symington was a woman who – like so many of her generation – expected little more from life than marriage and its natural by-products: a house, and a family. But Monica’s marriage presented her with an unusually daunting challenge. Peace had no grand project to offer her, other than this: ‘Could I keep this man alive and help him get back into his life again … ?’ Returning him to normality was the goal to which she targeted her energies, and the achievement of George’s renewal, through her dedication to him, was to give her own life happiness and meaning. Her story demonstrates the reconstructive power of love and compassion. And her rewards were their daughter, born in 1951, George’s gratitude and steadily improving health, and the crowning success of his career as consultant to the House of Lords on energy, which were to bring his wife consolations and undreamt-of status and security.

Out of Uniform

Phyllis Noble was blessed
with a string of handsome, healthy boyfriends. But marriage was not on her agenda in 1946. All her life Phyllis had wanted to travel; this desire had come before marriage, career, love or intellectual fulfilment. As a humble clerical employee, back in 1940, she had been struck with panic at the prospect – common to working-class girls like her – of a future confined to this island: ‘Suppose I
do
just stick in England all my life? Suppose I do
develop into yet another suburban matron …! What a bloody, damnable, awful, awful, awful thought!’

Though the war had failed her in this respect, as a WAAF she had at least got away from home. She felt she had come of age. But Phyllis’s autonomy at this time had been bought at a high price. She had reached the end of the line with an assortment of experimental boyfriends, while Andrew, to whom she had lost her virginity, and whom she had always assumed would be there for her, called time on the relationship. With her love life lying broken in pieces around her, she sank into a profound depression. In the spring of 1946 Phyllis suffered a sudden and frightening physical collapse and was rushed into hospital with aggressive peritonitis. The doctors told her mother she was unlikely to survive. Six months later she was released, several stone lighter, but glad to be alive. Something told her that she would never be the same again. Was this the end of her youth? Had the war, which had given her so many varied and highly charged experiences, also robbed her of her own springtime?

In December 1946 Phyllis took her own first, shaky steps on the road to personal reinvention by undertaking her demobilisation formalities. There could be no new start until she was released from the WAAF. During her lengthy sick leave, she had been notionally ‘posted’ to a new station. She had to travel there and spend a miserable forty-eight hours unpicking her service identity: handing in kit, form-filling and reporting to the RAF medical officer. Then she was on the train back to London:

I had shed being a WAAF, along with the uniform, like an old skin I no longer needed. Whatever lay ahead, I felt that at last I was closer to a new beginning …

I had made up my mind that I was not going back to the kind of boring office life I had formerly known.

In 1941, Phyllis had been a bank clerk at the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate. Now, with social reformers around her seeking to reconstruct society from the war’s ashes, it seemed to Phyllis Noble – and probably to innumerable twenty-four-year-olds like her – that her future was inextricably linked to the improvement of the post-war world. And after six months of hospitalisation, she also felt that she had a debt to repay. Secretly, she had begun to dream of
becoming a doctor, which would mean another six years of study. Thus it was that early in January 1947 Phyllis set off, in a spirit of gratitude and civic idealism, to a government post-war advice centre in Tavistock Square.

The youngish adviser was kind and courteous. But, pressed to specify what kind of a future she had in mind, Phyllis’s nerve failed her. The goal seemed impossibly distant and unrealistic. ‘ “Well,” I said cautiously, “I’m not really sure, but I don’t want to work in an office, and I’d like to do something really worthwhile.” “You mean like social work?” the youngish man asked. I grasped at the straw: “Yes. Well, that sort of thing.” ’ Promptly, she was given forms to fill in and instructed to attend for interview in a fortnight’s time, at the end of January.

And thus the map was laid down for a career path that, despite some deviations, would eventually bring her to authorship and academic recognition in the field of social sciences. The working-class girl from south London was to achieve social mobility in a way that, before the war, she could barely have imagined.

*

In 1946 more than twice as many passports were issued in the United Kingdom as ten years earlier: nearly 430,000. ‘
My generation was
very much freer,’ remembered pacifist Sheila Hails:

Very soon after the war [my husband and I] stayed on the Costa Brava, in a little pub, right on the beach. It was empty, almost desolate. There was a rough road to get there – you sent up clouds of dust. Today it’s one of these seething holiday towns. But then there were only two other people there, and the people came out from the village and they danced on the beach! It was a wonderful place.

Frances Partridge was another
pacifist who, as soon as possible after the war, opted to travel to a country untouched by conflict. In summer 1946 she and Ralph went with friends to Switzerland, where they found themselves welcomed with such forgotten luxuries as coupon-free bananas and croissants spread with lashings of butter and cherry jam, washed down with aromatic coffee. Learning more about the wartime work of the Red Cross, the Partridges delighted in the Swiss qualities of non-belligerence, humanity and civilisation,
proof to Frances that the world could be a happy, benign place. ‘How clean everything was!’ she marvelled. ‘Three weeks’ bliss’.

Vera Lynn also
had the opportunity to travel in Europe shortly after the war; she toured northern Europe and Scandinavia, performing live to audiences who during the war had secretly – on penalty of death – listened to her BBC broadcasts on radio sets hidden in cellars and hayricks. Vera was astonished not only by the warm welcome she received but also at how well the occupied countries were surviving:

The food! I remember my husband, my pianist and I, were in the hotel in Denmark, and they said ‘Would you like some duck?’ So we said ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ Well, two ducks came on a platter! I said, ‘Is that just for us, there’s only three of us?’ We couldn’t believe our eyes! I thought – an occupied country can manage this! It was wonderful.

Such pleasures and material comforts made ‘abroad’ a tempting alternative to home and austerity.

WAAF Mike Morris
was in Cairo when the war ended, still fancy-free and enjoying, more or less, an extended holiday. She was in no hurry to return to Berkshire, and – as her letters home and her 1946 diary chronicle – spent the next year making the most of the relaxations and privileges afforded to colonial expatriates in that seductive city. Mike’s days were taken up with dress fittings, having her hair done at Georges’ salon, shopping, sunbathing, playing tennis and enjoying the opera and theatre. As a high-ranking officer she frequented the Imperiale, the Medusa Bar, the Nile Club, the Gezira, and the Auberge des Pyramides and seems to have consumed copious rounds of drinks in all of them. In March she fitted in a short break in Italy to see Max, a boyfriend based in Positano, also making time for a shopping excursion to Rome for hats, jewellery and a fur coat. Romantically, she had no ties, nobody to answer to except herself. She conducted an enjoyable if risky balancing act between Max, James and the American Harald, all of whom were courting her, while she toyed, undecided as to which, if any, of them to marry.