Millions Like Us (68 page)

Today, Robert Bhatia remains proud of Helen’s capacity to transcend the misery and hardships of her early life:

She got away from her terrible previous environment completely. But emotionally she never completely left it. She never truly got over losing two fiancés. Was she happy? How can I answer that? There was always a twinge of sadness and bitterness for much of her life. I think she was angry at the cards life had dealt her, and after all that she had experienced she sometimes had trouble relating to people who had not been through the war.

Life had beaten her down, but she turned herself around. Her secret was her courage, and her maturity. She was talented, and yes, truly, she was a competent, strong, and successful person.
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The idea of marriage,
whether within or outside her social tribe, was still problematical for Phyllis Noble. Again and again she had been caught up by her passions, but her greatest fear was that passion was a trap. She would end up like her mother, whose life – cumbered with shopping, washing and meals – had hit a cul-de-sac. But could she envisage a future without motherhood? In the autumn of 1947, when she embarked on her course of study to become an almoner – or hospital social worker – she was twenty-five years old. Her father had begun to mutter that she would soon be on the shelf. But Phyllis knew that there was time enough.

Hospital social work was a small profession, but Phyllis had found herself on the end of a government-backed recruitment drive. Dwindling numbers of almoners needed to be made good, and many patients wounded in the war were in dire need of social rehabilitation. Once the new National Health Service came into being – scheduled
for summer 1948 – the need would be all the greater. Phyllis was in at the beginning of a Labour-initiated sea-change in social services. The post-war world would see the obsolescence of the WVS-style Lady Bountiful, with her easy authority and ‘duchess touch’, to be replaced by full-scale professionalisation of the sector. Phyllis would be attending an ‘emergency’ course lasting just one year.

For Phyllis 1947–8 was a year of profound intellectual release; of reading, self-examination and mental discovery:

Sleep considerably delayed last night [she wrote in October 1947] by mental excitement consequent on Prof. Marshall’s lecture on ‘Social Structure’.

Psychology lectures awoke unprecedented questions in her brain. She explored the agnostic writings of Winwood Reade
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and read
My Apprenticeship
by Beatrice Webb. The Webbs’ extraordinary partnership – intellectual, ascetic, though childless – inspired her. Marriage could surely be something higher and better than slavery dressed up as sexual attraction. Sidney Webb was unprepossessing, but he was brilliant. ‘It is only the head that I am marrying,’ Beatrice had written. Together, they were guided by their socialist mission and their avowed aim to reduce the sum of human suffering; there was no hint of servitude or dependency in the Webbs’ relationship, which proved that there could be such a thing as a marriage of minds:

[They] made me realise that there could be perhaps a form of marriage which was a beginning and not, as I had always feared, the end of life.

Sometimes, Phyllis’s head was so busy she needed time to process her thoughts and find a perspective. She walked one November evening across London Bridge and crossed the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral. Six years earlier the same cityscape would have resounded to the detonations of high explosive and the ear-splitting rattle of anti-aircraft fire. The sky would have been alight with apocalyptic flames and criss-crossed with searchlights, with the Thames warehouses a blinding furnace, presenting a scene of terror as people scurried for shelter. Now the serene vision of a lofty plane tree silhouetted against
the evening sky caused Phyllis to catch her breath – ‘[making] me gasp for the dear dead spirit’. Inside the cathedral an organist practised, the echoing chords enhancing the tranquillity:

I could be calmed by the reflection of man’s transiency as an individual; yet power as a stream – represented, perhaps, by this imposing, strong, building. The sound of trains rumbled outside & pressed in. It was inevitably to minimise one’s own petty affairs, by reflecting how the scenery around those walls must have changed, & changed again, before reaching the present confused, noisy & dirty pass.

Life, it still seemed to Phyllis, was a mess.

As far as her own petty affairs were concerned, confusion prevailed; her new-found philosophy had not yet taken root. At a New Year’s gathering at the Strand Palace Hotel she was partnered with a charming married man who – it was explained – was on his own because his wife was expecting a child. In the early hours he burst into Phyllis’s bedroom, where, after some kerfuffle, she gave in to his energetic persuasion. Escaping from the hotel the next morning was potentially deeply shaming – ‘in the late 1940s adultery (or, in my case, fornication) in a hotel room was not taken lightly’ – but her seducer managed things with the utmost aplomb. It was clear he was a practised cheat.

Dirt and poverty were also now part of Phyllis’s everyday experience. In January 1948 she was despatched to Deptford to do field-work with the Family Welfare Association. On the 13th she recorded her first home visit to an Irish slum family in her journal. ‘To think,’ she wrote, ‘[that] such squalor can still exist!’

Surely I can never forget that smoke-filled room: the mouldy cabbage in the corner, the bowl with its dirty water, the toddler with transparent shirt and no shoes on the bare boards. And it will be some while, certainly, before I forget the shock of horror on hearing – ‘There’s another behind you’ – turning to see on the springs of the bed amongst the rags, that tiny 1 month old mite …

We are still suffering from the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Equally true that two major wars have aggravated a vast problem …

At present, I feel only the scratching against a stone!

The next two months were to bring her up against a Dickensian London
she had barely imagined, of hunger and ignorance, hostels and down-and-outs. The experience would shape her political convictions and her life’s work. In March, she made an investigative visit to a homeless men’s hostel in Kennington. One of the supervisors, a good-humoured, enthusiastic and studious young man, showed her around, and they got into conversation about society and its problems. He was impressively eloquent, well read and well informed. That evening she wrote in her diary:

Peter Willmott was extremely interesting. A person I should very much like to know!

Peter, it turned out, was as attracted to Phyllis as she was to him.

That spring of 1948, things moved very fast. Phyllis agrees now that it was unlike any of her previous relationships. From their first meeting she felt instinctively that this was someone she could be happy with. ‘It was a
coup de foudre
.’ That same day Peter Willmott had confided to a friend, ‘I have met the girl I want to marry.’ Their relationship progressed at breakneck tempo, and inevitably there were stumbles. Peter talked Phyllis into attending Mass at Brompton Oratory, though they were both staunch agnostics; it would be a cultural experience, he explained. But when she turned up in green slacks he expressed disapproval. Another time he objected because she licked her knife. Just how progressive was he, she wondered furiously. Was this middle-class young man, despite his professed impartiality and freedom from prejudice, just as class-bound and sexist as the rest of them? ‘But the magnetic spell between us quickly drew us together again. Being apart was too painful.’

Phyllis’s family were soon pestering to see ‘the latest’, but for as long as possible she delayed taking Peter back to Lee for a Sunday roast dinner to meet them. What would her lover make of their unintellectual conversation, their ramshackle working-class home, the steamy little kitchen festooned with drying underwear? Her mum would be sweating over the range, piling everyone’s plates high with mashed potatoes and greens (inevitably followed by a boiled suet pudding). Her dad would be a bit too blustery after a few pints in the local. For despite Phyllis’s declared lack of class bias, there was still shame attached to her proletarian origins. Her worries were soon allayed by Peter’s affectionate reaction. ‘I really like the way you are
with your family. And they are obviously so fond of you.’

Every spare hour outside work Phyllis now spent with Peter Willmott. His shabby flat over the hostel in Kennington was a romantic refuge from petit-bourgeois domesticity. They would eat bread and cheese sitting on the worn rug in front of the spluttering gas fire, then make love in Peter’s institutional metal bed. He rarely changed the sheets, but to her eyes it was all ‘admirably carefree and Bohemian’. But Phyllis was still in a minority in feeling entitled to a sex life before marriage; the prevalent British view, as revealed in a survey made by Mass Observation in 1949, was still small-c conservative; few people thought moral standards were improving at this time, extra-marital relationships were frowned upon, and a majority were against pre-marital sex.

In May Phyllis went to St Thomas’s Hospital to finish her training as a student almoner in Casualty. Here her job was to discuss her patients’ worries. Did they need referrals? Did they have domestic, financial, nutritional or mental problems? She was also expected to explain to each patient that the hospital depended on voluntary contributions, reinforcing the point by rattling the little tin box on her desk and asking for a donation to hospital funds. ‘I seldom managed this part of the interview without embarrassment on my side, and too often on that of the patients, whose worn clothes and worried faces showed clearly enough how little they could afford.’

On 5 July 1948 all that ended. As the date approached for the birth of the National Health Service, there was great joy and excitement in Casualty. Shortly before the appointed day, Phyllis and her colleagues threw out the little tin boxes. ‘It was the symbolic new beginning of a health service that was intended to be free for all.’

Modern Times

For many who had worked and campaigned for a better post-war Britain, the National Health Service represented the fulfilment of all that they had dreamed of, the dawning of ‘a new world, a new day.’

On Day One a Leeds woman
went straight out to the pub to celebrate with her friends. Her mother, as she recollected, was at the
dentist’s surgery on that momentous morning, waiting to have her teeth pulled and replaced with dentures; one of her sisters was first in line at the optician’s for new NHS spectacles, while the other, who had been made to pay a midwife 12s 6d to have her first baby – (‘it was rather bad … no gas and air’) – rejoiced to have her second, easy delivery for nothing: ‘She thought it was absolutely wonderful, because besides having a free midwife, she had a nurse came in every day … bathed the baby, showed her how to look after it … ’. In Manchester another woman shopped her way round the services, starting out with a doctor’s prescription, then on for an eye test, followed by a visit to the chiropodist and back to the doctor’s again for a hearing test, before suggesting that she might as well call in on the undertaker’s on her way home …

Women had always been on the sharp end when it came to dealing with everything from coughs and sneezes, to births, deaths, toothache and chickenpox, and the National Health Service had an immediate impact on them. For years their own ailments had been neglected as too expensive to treat. A female doctor working in general practice in a poor district was overwhelmed by the difference she was able to make in the first six months of the new service, as women flooded in with chronic conditions like hyperthyroidism or varicose ulcers. They had lived all their lives stoically accepting that ‘you never go to a doctor because it’s always far too expensive’. Now they could, and did. ‘Suddenly they could be treated.’ Other health professionals, like nurses, were uplifted beyond measure by the overnight availability of elementary supplies: ‘Suddenly you’d got it all, this gorgeous soft cotton wool, beautiful clean bandages … we talked about it for weeks afterwards.’ Patients were delighted by the contrast.
Domestic servant Margaret Powell
had first been hospitalised in 1944 and then again in 1948; her first experience, with a gastric ulcer, had been nasty, scary and humiliating. The food and amenities were ‘deplorable’, the lack of privacy – with public bedpan sessions, and one toilet roll between four – was distressing. When she returned after July 1948 with breast cancer, ‘what a change I found’:

You were treated as though you mattered. Even the waiting room was different. No dark green paint, whitewash and wooden benches. There were separate chairs with modern magazines.

For a week she was on the ward:

And again what a difference I saw … The bed that I’d had before was like lying on the pebbles on Brighton beach … But now I had a rubber mattress. I felt as though I could have lain there forever.

And the food was beautiful.

Margaret felt she was in a luxury hotel. Each bed had its own curtains, the meals were many and various, served on brightly coloured trays. There were even fish knives.

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Welfare for women was, at last, becoming a reality. Family Allowances took effect from 1946. By 1948 the Family Planning Association had sixty-five clinics, and by the following year new ones were opening at a rate of five weekly. National Maternity Services accompanied the inauguration of the NHS. Recommendations for day nurseries, baby-sitting facilities and home helps were in the pipeline. There would be community centres, communal laundries and restaurants. The Labour government took every opportunity to congratulate itself on the rosy cheeks and improved height and weight of thousands of post-war boom babies; in these respects the good intentions of ministers and social reformers to improve the lot of women seemed to be bearing fruit: the harvest of peace was delivering undreamed-of progress and benefits, especially to poor working-class women.