Millions Like Us (8 page)

Harry O’Dwyer wasn’t a regular at Norm and Doris’s dancing class, and Helen nearly tripped over him one blacked-out Saturday evening as she made her way up the steps to the makeshift ballroom in a working-class area of the city. Harry was ten years older than her, strong and lively, his face ruddy and battered, but etched with laughter lines. From the outset he made a beeline for her. They waltzed, sat one out and talked. He put his arm round her – ‘It was exceedingly comforting, quite the snuggest feeling I had ever experienced.’ Harry was a sailor – an engineer. On Thursday he would sail … but the next dancing night was Tuesday.

On Tuesday evening Helen worked late, but her mind was not on her job. ‘I ached with impatience … Would he be there?’

He was. They danced, and Harry was quiet. ‘Couldn’t we go somewhere and get a cup of tea – and talk a while?’ Over buns in a steamy café they shared confidences. Harry’s Catholic family had
destined him for the priesthood; he had lacked the vocation and pulled out. Then he joined the Merchant Navy. Unusually for a sailor, he didn’t go in for dissipations – the seminary years had dampened the desire to drink or womanise. Reading, dancing, a game of billiards or a show were more in his line. As they walked home Harry placed his arm round Helen’s waist; in the dark it was easier to talk, and she told him shyly about the distress her family had fallen into, and its dire consequences for her. At the top of the road he carefully kissed her on the cheek. ‘You poor kid,’ he said. ‘I was trembling in his confining arms, with a scarifying, overwhelmingly strange feeling within me.’ It was eleven o’clock; she had to be home. Harry told her that his ship would be at sea for at least five weeks; he couldn’t tell exactly when he would be back. Then he took her office phone number, and they parted.

For her many loyal Liverpudlian readers, Helen Forrester’s war memories hold a special place in their hearts.
Twopence to Cross the Mersey
,
By the Waters of Liverpool
and
Lime Street at Two
still carry a powerful hit of youthful anguish. It’s not hard to identify with Helen’s painful insecurities, her brittle family relationships and her young love. Helen was the heroine of her own story, which is not one of martial valour or courage in the face of the enemy, but tells of a primary battle to transcend her circumstances. Downtrodden and poverty-stricken as she was, the war and its consequences should surely have pulverised her. Instead, she lived to tell a tale of struggle and loneliness, of love and partings, of loss and self-reliance, which has echoes among multitudes of her contemporaries.

It has echoes in the life of the young
trainee beautician Monica Littleboy
, who had met her boyfriend, George Symington, in London in the spring of 1939. Their blissful summer together ended on 3 September – a day of ‘dark, dead shock’. George was patriotic. He promptly left for Scotland to join the Black Watch and was soon after commissioned into his grandfather’s regiment, the Gordon Highlanders. ‘It was as if one more light had gone out of my life. London now seemed empty.’ In the face of the reality of war, a career doing manicures and facial treatments for rich ladies seemed meaningless. Monica packed it in and returned to her family in Norwich. ‘I offered my services to the Land Army.’

It has echoes too in
the story of Anne Popham
, whose married
lover, Graham, decided early in the war to train to be a pilot. ‘I didn’t like it at all; I tried to dissuade him. He thought it was important the war should be won as soon as possible.’ After he left Anne decided to stay in London. And at least the vexed question of where their relationship was going could be temporarily shelved. From the beginning of the war Anne did air-raid warden duties three nights a week.

Young Pip Beck
was not even eighteen when she waved goodbye to her boyfriend, Norman, a Territorial. He was sent off for training in Aylesbury – less than 20 miles away, but almost beyond her reach. Pip cajoled her mother into letting her spend an hour and a half with him, before he was posted abroad with the British Expeditionary Force. Mrs Beck didn’t like the thought of her pretty daughter spending time on an army camp, which she feared was full of ‘licentious soldiery’. ‘I said it wouldn’t be like that at all, and Norman would be with me, and I might never see him again.’ They walked around together, but there was no privacy. He kissed her in the bus shelter before she left. ‘Where would we meet again … would we ever? Tears flowed down my cheeks.’

Countless young women were confronting the removal of all they held dear – like
Frances Campbell-Preston
(née Grenfell), who had married her sweetheart, a young officer in the Black Watch, after a whirlwind romance at the end of 1938. A year later she was pregnant while Patrick, her husband, prepared for the inevitable. Patrick left for France with the British Expeditionary Force late in 1939:

It was the end of our idyllic time …

At the end of the week the Battalion marched through Aldershot and I found myself lining the street to wave goodbye, just like the women pictured in all wars …

I was homeless …

Awaiting her baby, Frances went to stay first with her mother-in-law in Argyllshire, then to her married sister in Somerset – ‘the nearest thing to a maternity home’. At this point in the war changes of address were bewilderingly frequent as a frightened population packed and unpacked, scattered and relocated.

*

For fifteen-year-old Pat Bawland,
travelling daily from Streatham to her job as invoice typist for a firm in Tower Bridge that made brassières and sanitary products, life as yet held no prospect of any more ambitious journeys. Pat had loved school. She wanted to learn, and her ability with figures had always earned her top marks in class. But the Bawlands, like the Forresters, lived hand to mouth. Their horizons were narrow, and there was never any question of Pat being able to pursue her education. ‘We were very poor. I grew up in an extended family with my Irish granny and granddad – he used to get drunk and knock her about at weekends. There was fourteen of us in the house. My mother loved us, but she didn’t know how to make a penny stretch. I knew more about pawn tickets and bailiffs and moonlight flits than most fifteen-year-olds.’ The family needed every shilling Pat could earn. ‘My dad took me to work the first day. I cried all the way on the bus.’ But within a few months of working at the Tower Bridge firm her ability showed itself, and Pat graduated from sorting the piles of orders – brassières for Birmingham, bias bindings for Liverpool – to invoice clerk. And because the company produced such essentials as sanitary towels and baby clothes, Pat soon found that she was regarded as being in a reserved occupation. In 1939 it was looking as if, whatever the war held in store for others, for her it would be spent nine to five in front of a typewriter.

Pat was unquestioning. There was nothing new about money worries. In 1938 there were 2 million families in Britain living, as
Kay Mellis in Edinburgh
remembered, ‘from Friday to Friday’, crushed and undernourished, with no margin and no savings; but until the Second World War even the Mellises, the Bawlands and the Forresters had certain fundamental securities. They could turn on the tap, fill the kettle, boil it on the gas, buy a packet of cigarettes or an ounce of Murray Mints. To the best of their ability the men of such families would provide, the mums would keep house, and the daughters would bring home whatever earnings they could until they married. As with many women of similar background in this country, the outbreak of war was seen as adding worrying burdens to an already hard life. The British have always grumbled, but now they grumbled more.

In his Christmas broadcast,
the King spoke to the nation,
quoting a favourite poem: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the
unknown …’ Though many children were restored to their parents for the festivities, celebrations were muted. As 1939 drew to a close the Second World War was, for people on these shores, still more menacing than life-threatening. But with the Nazis now in occupation in Poland, the Russians attacking Finland, and battles in the Atlantic threatening to increase in ferocity, the future seemed full of fear.

2 All Our Prayers

Behind the Maginot

Madeleine Henrey felt
that her life was full of promise. Madeleine was French; as a child she had emigrated with her mother to London and in the 1920s had found work as a manicurist at the Savoy Hotel. It was there that she met the handsome Robert Henrey, a gossip columnist, whom she married in 1928. They were madly in love, and Madeleine was entranced by his world of smoky night clubs, fashion and expensive jewellery.

But there was another side to Madeleine, and she yearned to revisit her French roots. In 1937, together with Madame Gal, her adored mother, the Henreys had set out from London and travelled to Normandy, where they bought a picturesque farm just outside Villers-sur-Mer on the coast near Le Havre. ‘It was the house of a fairy-tale.’ Here Madeleine kept chickens and cultivated cider-apple trees, transforming the farmhouse with her own dainty taste, relishing the skills of the local craftsmen, from joiners to mattress-makers. ‘It was a little jewel, sparkling in new paint.’ To cap her joy, she became pregnant and, in the summer of 1939, with her mother at her side, Madeleine gave birth to a son, Bobby.

The baby’s eyes opened to a world at war. The Henreys spent the early months of his life hunkering down in Villers; they stocked the house with coffee and sugar, and watched with dismay as peasants and tenant farmers alike were called up and sent off to man the Maginot line, leaving the village populated largely by women, small children and dogs. They spent Christmas 1939 in their Normandy farm, doing their best to keep warm. Outside the fields were wintry, the orchard branches laden with snow.

*

The early months of 1940 were bitterly cold. Two hundred miles away near the Belgian border,
Lorna Bradey, aged twenty-four,
found herself with the British Expeditionary Force, in the process of converting a small school into a hospital. Lorna, the intelligent, intrepid daughter of a colonial official, had been looking for a challenge. In 1936 she had trained as a nurse; now, with her colleagues from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, she was billeted with the army in France. Her accommodation was in an unheated house. That January her face flannel froze to the basin every night. After work the weary, chilled British nurses stoked up with hot food at the local bistro, where Madame would regale them with omelettes and shots of Pernod.

At this stage in the phoney war, Lorna didn’t have serious casualties to deal with; she was kept as busy as in a normal hospital. But in France that winter Lorna finally felt, having got through four gruelling years of training, that she was fulfilling her ambition. ‘The world was at my feet, or so I thought. I would travel, see everything and have plenty of fun … I felt that no one could possibly win the war without me!’

Lorna was as innocent as any other well brought-up middle-class girl; and yet there was a spirited sexiness about her, a broad-mindedness and vitality that got her noticed by men. Her pre-war posting with the QAs at the Millbank military hospital had given her her first contacts with the British Tommy, and even though she didn’t always understand their language, it was hard to ignore how attractive some of them found her. She was busy sterilising instruments when one young soldier commented to his pal, ‘She’s a good bit of cunt that one – I wouldn’t mind having a go at her.’ Lorna had no idea what the word meant, but was deeply embarrassed. The incident – a one-off – didn’t change her deep-seated understanding of her role as a nurse:

In the main they never swore or were familiar with us, and it was born then, my admiration of the British Soldier. I was to spend many years trying to save his life, comfort him and make his dying more bearable. There were to be some terrible years ahead.

But in France, in early 1940, the champagne was flowing. ‘We girls were in great demand …’

The nurse in wartime carried an unusual load of projected urges – from lust to homesickness, physical and emotional dependence, to what Lorna called ‘unhappy married man syndrome’. Visually, the
QAs were already elevated above the common herd of womankind by their angelic, but subtly thrilling, appearance. It was an elegant look, full of suggestiveness. The sober grey dresses were immaculate, the white collar, cuffs and aprons spotlessly starched. Floating white veils gave a hint of the convent, while racy red capes imparted, perhaps, less virginal messages. ‘We were generally a very attractive bunch of women,’ recalled Lorna. Detached from any kind of normality, the nurses were to find themselves on the receiving end of every male nineteen-year-old’s fantasy life for the next five years. Soldiers and male medics alike hugely outnumbered them. At this point, before danger added its own special charge of eroticism, many of these young men behaved as if they were on paid holiday – away from home for the first time. They appeared brave and glamorous; their wives, if they had them, were far away, ‘and we were ready victims’

At twenty-four one is very vulnerable, when the tall handsome surgeon you assist is the man you fall in love with … We spent every moment of our spare time together. I got the whole story – unhappy marriage, unwanted son. Would I wait and on return live with him until he got his divorce? I agreed to everything …

Suddenly he was recalled … to Scotland. I thought my heart would break, but promises, promises, never to be fulfilled …

By early April, much to Lorna’s relief, she was moved to Casualty Clearing Station No. 5 just outside Arras. Here her unit was outside the supposedly inviolable safety zone created by the Maginot line, but Lorna was pleased to be ‘going into action’; it would distract her from her broken-up love affair. So far the German army had not penetrated the Netherlands, but as the threat intensified more British troops were arriving in France by the day. Lorna’s field hospital was the nearest to the front line in her area, and it promised to be busy. Five sisters, five medical officers, fourteen orderlies and a surgeon now readied themselves for a bloody defence.