Millions Like Us

By the same author

Among the Bohemians

Singled Out

Millions Like Us

Women’s Lives in the Second World War

VIRGINIA NICHOLSON

PENGUIN BOOKS

For my mother, Anne Olivier Bell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and grew up in Yorkshire and Sussex. She studied at Cambridge University and lived abroad in France and ltaly, then worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television. Her books include the acclaimed social history
Among the Bohemians: Experinents in Living 1900–1939, and Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War
, published by Penguin in 2002 and 2007. She is married to a writer, has three children and lives in Sussex.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Author’s Note

Prelude

  
1   We’re at War

Ready for the Fray

Heaven Help Us

The Children

The Darkness

Uncharted Territory

  
2   All Our Prayers

Behind the Maginot

It Couldn’t Happen to Us

In the Face of Danger

Beached

So Naked, So Alone

  
3   Wreckage

The Love of Her Life

The Sad Atlantic

Battleground

Taking It

Nights of Fire

  
4   ‘Ready to Win the War’

White Alert

Red Alert

A Man’s Job

Cheap Wine, Pink Gin

Stocking Wars, Sex Wars

  
5   ‘Your Country Welcomes Your Services’

Women in Uniform

The Lowest Form of Life

Officers and Ladies

Women Must Weep

Don’t Die for Me

  
6   The Girl That Makes the Thing-ummy Bob

The Kitchen Front

Clocking On

‘She’s Most Important – in Her Way’

Yanks

Heat and Sand

  
7   Sunny Intervals

No Tears Left

Out of Bounds

The Wages of Sin

Under the Volcano

Worth Fighting For

  
8   Over There

A Song and a Cheer

Dancing the Night Away

The Secret Army

The Smell of Death

Mud and Warpaint

  
9   No Real Victory

Dim-out

The National Effort

Back-room Girls

Until Belsen

This Incredible Moment

10   A Brave New World

A Brief Period of Rejoicing

The Right Telegram

Tomorrow’s Clear Blue Skies

Little Boy and Fat Man

Haunted

11   Picking Up the Threads

Demob

Running on Empty

A Pearl of a Wife

Divided We Fall

A la Recherche

12   A Bitter Time

‘A Fine Type of British Girl’

Our Mothers’ Shoes

The Wifely Thing

Out of Uniform

Vanquished

13   There’ll Be Bluebirds

Flower Women

A Love Match

Modern Times

The Pram in the Hall

Millions Like Them

Appendix

Notes on Sources

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Inset Illustrations

  
1.
Two young women from the Worthing ‘Blackout Corps’ paint their local hospital windows. (Fox Photos)

  
2.
Spirit of the Blitz: a West End hairdressing salon picks up where it left off – in an air-raid shelter. (Popperfoto)

  
3.
Cross-section of a life: the bombs exposed and revealed women’s interior-based existence as never before. (Getty Images)

  
4.
A cosy, if cramped, scene at Holborn station, September 1940. (London Transport Executive)

  
5.
As the threat to Britain intensified, every mother had to choose between her children’s safety and her maternal instincts. (Getty Images)

  
6.
Volunteers like Joan Wyndham helped trained nurses to staff the first aid posts established across the city. (From
Love in Blue
)

  
7.
Teenager Phyllis Noble, photographed at the time of Dunkirk, 1940. (From
Coming of Age in Wartime
)

  
8.
First aid post, Notting Hill Gate, London. (Imperial War Museum)

  
9.
For women, joining up often meant carrying out domestic tasks in a military context. (Imperial War Museum A23966)

10.
A London Labour Exchange, 1941. (Imperial War Museum HU90889)

11.
The Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, or NAAFI, which ran canteens and shops for the forces, was ‘a forgotten army’. (Getty Images)

12.
Dorothy (‘Doffy’) Brewer went for training with the ATS in autumn 1941. (From
The Girls behind the Guns
)

13.
Barbara Cartland with her ATS hat on, plus lipstick. (From
The Years of Opportunity
)

14.
Unsuspecting ATS recruits arriving at Aldershot in 1941. (Fox Photos)

15.
Wartime diarist Nella Last and her son Cliff. (From
Nella Last’s War)

16.
Clara Milburn and her son Alan. (From
Mrs Milburn’s Diaries
)

17.
Women’s Institute members bottling jams and jellies. (Imperial War Museum)

18.
In the Y-service WAAF Aileen (‘Mike’) Morris became expert at eavesdropping on enemy transmissions. (From
The Enemy is Listening
)

19.
Code-breaker Mavis Lever was sworn to secrecy about her work. (Mavis Batey)

20.
The Decoding Room at Bletchley Park, nerve centre of wartime decryption. (Bletchley Park)

21.
Dressed for the job, women shipyard workers manoeuvre a steel girder into position. (Imperial War Museum HU36242)

22.
‘I felt that no one could possibly win the war without me!’ In 1940 QA Lorna Bradey believed the world was at her feet. (Ralph Kite)

23.
For Pip Beck, her job as an R/T operator at Bomber Command seemed the fulfilment of all her romantic dreams. (Peter Brimson)

24.
ATS kit inspection in a typical services dormitory. (Imperial War Museum)

25.
Jean McFadyen, who joined the Timber Corps. (Jean Park)

26.
6,000 members of the Timber Corps worked in the forests year-round cutting timber for everything from pit props to coffins. (Imperial War Museum)

27.
Land girl Kay Mellis from Edinburgh. (Kay Wight)

28.
Thinning turnips in the Lake District. (Imperial War Museum HU63799)

29.
A queue of hopeful housewives has formed in front of a fish stall. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

30.
Kerbside recycling, 1940s-style. (Getty Images)

31.
Many housewives transformed their front gardens into vegetable plots. (Imperial War Museum)

32.
Rag-and-bone women from a London branch of the WVS, collecting aluminium. (Getty Images)

33.
On VJ-day Helen Forrester joined friends to celebrate. (Helen Forrester)

34.
Doris Scorer and her friends at the Works were bent on keeping up appearances. (From
D for Doris, V for Victory
)

35.
‘Utility’ styles skimped on details, eliminating cuffs, frills and fullness to save fabric. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

36.
As skirt lengths rose, legs became more visible, and the stocking shortage became ever more problematic. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

37.
Christian Oldham chose to enlist in the Wrens because of the hat and the ‘nice straight uniform’ designed by Molyneux. (From
I Only Joined for the Hat
)

38.
British girls were swept off their feet by the arrival of the sexy GIs. (Imperial War Museum)

39.
Verily Anderson with Marian and Rachel, 1945. (Eddie Anderson)

40.
Nightclubs and dance halls were humming throughout the war. (Getty Images)

41.
Anne Popham and Graham Bell in his RAF uniform. (Anne Olivier Bell)

42.
Schoolgirl Nina Mabey grew up to become Nina Bawden, well-known author of
Carrie’s War
. (From
In My Own Time
)

43.
SOE coder Margaret Herbertson both experienced and contributed to the Allied victory in Italy in 1945. (From
In Obedience to Instructions
)

44.
Women welders were beset with danger from flying slag, burns and ‘arc eye’, partly because they often chose style over safety. (Getty Images)

45.
How to stay in fashion while fitting the caterpillar track to a tank. (Getty Images)

46.
‘Mummy’s girl’ Thelma Ryder worked twelve hours a day making piston rings for aircraft. (Thelma Rendle)

47.
Joyce Grenfell and her accompanist, Viola Tunnard, arriving in Baghdad, 1944. (From
The Time of My Life /
Estate of Joyce Grenfell)

48.
Vera Lynn in the Far East, 1944. ‘I was an ordinary working-class girl. I was singing to my own kind.’ (From
Goodnight Sweetheart
)

49.
Backstage at ENSA HQ. (Corbis/Hulton Deutsch Collection)

50.
A QA tending a wounded soldier in an Italian field hospital. (The Trustees of Army Medical Services Museum)

51.
QA Iris Ogilvie and a fellow nurse staging an upbeat publicity shot taken in front of a Bayeux hat shop, shortly after the Normandy landings. (Imperial War Museum)

52.
QA Joy Taverner never questioned her early faith – ‘until Belsen’. (Sue Green)

53.
The war is over. A WAAF returns home. (Getty Images)

54.
Celebrating VJ-day in Aberdeen. (From
The Day Peace Broke Out
)

55.
Christmas 1946: GI brides and their babies await passage to their new homes. (Associated Newspapers Ltd)

56.
Happy holidays in the long, hot, post-war summer of 1947. (Topham)