Millions Like Us (67 page)

But over the summer and autumn of 1947, as skirts crept inexorably longer, alarm mounted. Should we refuse to manufacture the New Look on the grounds that it was a shameful waste of fabric and against the national interest, as President of the Board of Trade Sir Stafford Cripps advocated, or would that –
as Anne Scott-James,
editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
insisted – be export suicide? That October, clothing coupons were cut to four a month. ‘
Much as the average woman
in this country may want to follow present-day fashions, it is quite impossible for her to do so,’ wrote one lady to
The Times
.

Feeling like top dog in Dior’s New Look.
Punch
, 1948.

Whether or not women
could
adopt the look, the question remained as to whether they
should
. For feminists, the New Look seemed to be a visible intent to turn the clock back on emancipation. The war had offered women so many freedoms; wearing uniform had given them pride and independence. So what did Monsieur Dior think he was doing by padding out their bosoms, strangling their waists and sending
them tottering out into the streets hampered by such oceans of surging fabric that they could barely walk, let alone run for a bus or climb aboard a train? He was out of touch with the modern world, claimed MP Mabel Ridealgh: ‘
Women today are taking
a larger part in the happenings of the world and the New Look is too reminiscent of a caged bird’s attitude.’

Mrs Ridealgh had a point. Dior was in love with
La Belle Epoque
, and there is an argument that the ‘New’ Look was, in reality, unashamedly nostalgic and backward-looking; of a piece, in fact, with the submissive,
Brief Encounter
mentality which so gripped British womanhood at that time.
^*
For thousands of harassed, dowdy women who had spent blacked-out evenings reading the popular romances of Georgette Heyer, the New Look spoke of a more gracious time: a bygone age when waists were tiny and frocks were floaty, when men helped tender damsels in and out of carriages. ‘
Oh yes, I’d have liked
to have been born in the age when they wore crinolines … so lovely,’ sighs Thelma Rendle (née Ryder). The 1940s were discovering a ‘New’, ‘Old’ Look: one which had nothing to do with square-bashing or esprit de corps, and everything to do with romanticism and femininity. It was unequivocally gorgeous – and Britain’s women loved it.

Shirley Goodhart was one.
Jack had found work in Leeds; to her joy she had become pregnant in the spring of 1947 and gave birth to a baby girl in January 1948. As soon as she was up and about, and relieved to be finally out of smocks, she wheeled the pram down into Leeds city centre to look for ‘new-style clothes’. She was disappointed to find the fuller-skirted models weren’t yet available – ‘most shops still selling off old styles’. But, undaunted, she bought fabric and a cheap paper pattern inspired by Dior and got out her scissors.

February 2nd 1948

Helen is 4 weeks old today. Found time to continue making my new dress, and put it all together ready for trying on. I thought that it was supposed to be ‘new length’ but I find that I shall have to put a false hem in order to make it long enough.

With her figure back in trim, Shirley was in the forefront when the New Look hit the Leeds shops in April:

April 23rd

I’ve bought a new suit; the third ‘new style’ item in my wardrobe. There is an increasing minority of ‘new style’ among the women in Leeds.

The controversy surrounding the New Look was a miniature version of the greater debate, which would not die down, around the place of women in post-war Britain. Fashion, or freedom? Wives, or career women? Flowers, or feminists? But the New Look’s brief sway was, for those who wore it and loved it, an uplifting interlude. It was a love affair with hope, and a covenant from the Great God Fashion that, though food and fuel were short, and though ice and floods might engulf the nation, a full feminine skirt promised that all might still be well with the world.

A Love Match

The hot summer of 1947, followed by an equally glorious (for some) royal wedding, made the belt-tightening and gloom of that year a little more bearable. Attlee’s government needed all the help it could get that August, when – owing to an export–import gap now estimated at £600 million – it was forced to announce that the country was back to a wartime economy, that tea and meat rations were to be cut, pleasure motoring would be abolished, and foreign travel suspended. The Empire, too, was falling victim to financial retrenchments. On 15 August 1947 the independence of India – the ‘jewel in the crown’ – was made effective. International anxieties resurfaced as the sinister terminology of the Cold War gained currency. Britain was weak and poor, its ancient might overshadowed by new powers.

Anything that helped boost morale was welcome: a wonderful
exhibition of French tapestries at the Victoria and Albert Museum was a highlight of the year for art-lovers. Ealing Studios started production of a run of heart-warming comedies, beginning with
Hue and Cry
, filmed on location in bomb-scarred London. Cambridge won the Boat Race and finally admitted women to full membership of the University. The shops were starting to stock expensive luxury goods again: artificial flowers, handbags and cosmetics.

But sometimes it was hard to endure the de-energising diet. Shirley Goodhart found herself seized by longings for ‘large helpings of meat’, while poor
Maggie Joy Blunt wrote
a frenzied, mouth-watering paean to her favourite dishes of hallowed memory:

Oh, those pre-war days! … Foie gras with whipped cream & hard-boiled egg set in aspic with green peas – Pineapple cream made with real fruit – strawberry meringue pudding … Veal cutlets rolled in beaten egg & grated cheese & grilled … Asparagus … I’m dribbling now.

In September you could still bathe in the sea, and October saw a beautiful Indian summer – which perhaps compensated for the burdensome cut in the bacon ration, the railway ticket price rise, the selling of Government gold reserves to ease the debt and the worrying news that India and Pakistan were now at war.

20 November 1947 was overcast and damp.
The romantic novelist
Miss Florence Speed was glad, however, that it didn’t rain. She and her sister Mabel listened on the wireless to the wedding ceremony of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten and, along with millions of listeners worldwide, heard the pair make their vows before the altar of Westminster Abbey.

The whole thing was very moving. Mabel said ‘Why do these things always bring tears to our eyes?’

Why? But it did …

At dinner we had a little sherry to drink the health of bride & groom.

On that grey day, Britain’s royal nuptials were a pageant of colour and hope, and a reminder that wars might come and go, but the magnificent traditions that made Britain great hadn’t changed. Dabbing their eyes, the two spinsters Florence and Mabel Speed felt uplifted and moved beyond expression. Princess Elizabeth’s big day locked down a prototype of aspirational post-war womanhood: follow my
example, the occasion seemed to say, and catch your Prince.

But average, imperfect
young women like Doffy Brewer
were simply outclassed. For five years Doffy had done her bit training gunners in the ATS, playing her part in the important defences against the V1 and V2 rockets. After demob in 1945 it was back to the family home at Romford, and teaching. She was twenty-seven.

I was very ordinary, not particularly pretty, terribly shy – particularly with boys – and not grown-up enough. I remember reading a letter in a magazine – this girl was upset because she couldn’t get a boyfriend, and the agony aunt’s reply was: ‘Girls are like cherries: some ripen in June, some in July, some don’t ripen till October. Be patient with yourself.’ And I thought, ‘That’s me.’

But Doffy’s philosophy had to compete with her mother’s tireless attempts to get her hitched.

My mother had three men that she’d lined up for me. Oh yes, she was no slouch, my mother!

The first was Ken. Poor old Ken. He took me out to dinner in the West End, and I ordered a salad, thinking I would appear dainty. But he was famished, so he ordered a meat pudding. And this marvellous vast salad arrived, alongside this minuscule meat pudding. Well, I wanted to laugh, but Ken was very solemn. He didn’t laugh about it at all. So I never went out with him again.

That was one off my mother’s list.

And then there was a chap who was on our staff at school. He was a bit creepy and pompous. He always seemed to have ‘wise’ words. I went into his classroom one day and found his ten-year-olds doing an old-fashioned writing lesson. He had them all copying these lines from the blackboard: ‘Something Attempted – Something Done – Has Earned A Night’s Repose.’ Oh dear! Well, I couldn’t marry a man like that, could I?

And unfortunately the other one was married already, and I would never have married a divorced man, I just couldn’t do it. I really couldn’t.

Doffy’s scruples, patience, and sense of the ridiculous were to keep her single for another twelve years. John Kerr – ‘the nicest man I’ve ever met’ – did not come into her life until 1959.

*

After losing two fiancés
in the war, Helen Forrester had also resigned
herself to a single future. Soon after the war ended, she got a job with the Metal Box Company. The packaging industry gave her career prospects, reasonable pay and a responsible, confidence-boosting position: it was ‘a fascinating world for a woman to be in’. But with no expectation of marriage she felt an underlying hopelessness.

However, in 1948 Helen met the man who would become her husband: an Indian theoretical physicist named Avadh Bhatia. She did not write a memoir about this life-changing event. But in 1959 she published a novel entitled
Thursday’s Child
, which opens with the heroine, Peggie, breaking down in tears on hearing that her fiancé, Barney, has been killed:

I was stupefied … It was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés …

‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I shouted in my agony.

Helen’s son, Robert Bhatia, offers a caution about his mother’s first novel. ‘She always swore that it was not autobiographical.’ Nevertheless, he notes that she clearly drew on her relationship with Avadh Bhatia and his home country in writing
Thursday’s Child
.

‘Peggie’ meets ‘Ajit Singh’ at a Liverpool club set up to help the city’s numerous immigrants integrate with the locals. They drink tea together:

I took a good look at him. He was dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy, grey trousers; his white shirt made his skin look very dark but his features were clear cut and delicate; both in expression and outline his face reminded me of a Saint in an old Italian painting.

Ajit (like Avadh) is in Liverpool to study. Avadh, who came from a high-caste, privileged, traditional Indian background, had already received an advanced degree from the University of Allahabad and was now in England writing a thesis for his doctorate. In the novel their relationship develops slowly. Ajit invites Peggie to meet other members of the Indian community; in return he is asked back to the family home, though her broken heart is not yet mended. But the more time they spend together, the more Peggie grows to like and respect him. As a Hindu, he teaches her about Shiva, the destroyer, and Brahma, who creates. ‘So life is born anew and nothing is wasted.’ One winter’s day
they walk out of the city by the sea wall, and eat sandwiches together in a sheltered hollow of the dunes. Gradually she confides in him and tells him of her past griefs. Ajit listens, then takes her hand:

‘Let me marry you. Let me show you what life and love can really be.’

I started up as if to run away, but he would not let go of my hand.

‘Don’t go away. Hear me to the end.’

I looked down at him and was astonished at the beauty which flooded his face; it was transfigured … I knew I was seeing something rare …

‘I have loved you from the first day I saw you …’

Helen Forrester’s marriage to Avadh Bhatia was a deliverance. After the war the savour had gone out of Liverpool and all it stood for. As a choice of mate Avadh couldn’t have been more unconventional, nor represented more of an escape from the sorrowful stranglehold of her past.

Soon after their marriage in Britain, the couple started a new life in Ahmadabad, the largest city in Gujarat, on the edge of the desert. In
Thursday’s Child
Helen Forrester evokes the shock of arrival amid the deafening bustle of streets, thronged with children and beggars, tongas, bicycles, camels and cars. Temple bells clanged and radios blared. In India she learned to bargain for everything, she learned to distinguish the rank smell of a jackal, to wear a sari and to give orders to the servants. She tells of the culture shock entailed in adapting to her new in-laws, and how she felt ‘pummelled by new experiences’. There was the vice-like heat to acclimatise to, and a landscape of cactus and sand. Monkeys lived in the mango trees, and an incessant creak came from the tethered ox whose exertions drew water from the well. She became accustomed to the sight of snakes, scorpions and locusts, and she caught dysentery. ‘Although I hardly realised it at the time, I was slowly becoming part of India. Each friend I made, each custom I learned to understand and tolerate, was a thread which bound me closer to her and made me part of her multicoloured pattern.’ Helen’s lifelong marriage to Avadh remained loving and supportive, based on profound communication. ‘How much I owe him for making my life anew,’ she wrote. ‘My cup runneth over.’ But, humbled after so many years of unhappiness, she never questioned Avadh’s precedence. ‘They always lived where his work took him,’ says their son. Eventually they moved to Canada; at the high
point of his career Dr Bhatia was director of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Alberta. ‘My mother was a devoted faculty wife. And when she began to write, she did so in the last half-hour of the day, when other duties were done.’