Millions Like Us (17 page)

Common as such gory sights became, they were not universal. But few were spared the brutal sight of homes, hearths, personal belongings, clothes, treasures and souvenirs indiscriminately wrecked and exposed by the bombs.
Elizabeth Bowen emerged
from an air-raid shelter to the sight of a gashed-open apartment block: ‘Up there the sun strikes a mirror over a mantelpiece; shreds of a carpet sag out over the void.’ One might see the cross-section of a bathroom, with a towel laid out ready on the tub waiting for its occupant, an assortment of stockings draped in a tree-top, remnants of dresses hooked over broken rafters, twisted light fittings at the bottom of the garden. Wedding presents, kitchen equipment, books lay scattered among the wreckage and matchwood.

Here, a woman might feel her very identity dismembered, as loved and cherished objects, things long desired and ill afforded, things hoarded, collected and enshrined were hurled from their alcoves, blasted from their cabinets and smashed to smithereens. Pre-war woman was equated and identified with the home. Part of her perceived task in life had been to embellish it, to beautify it.
Hilde Marchant, a journalist
who wrote an account of the Blitz in 1941, witnessed dispossessed and injured women in a hospital after their homes had been bombed:

They wanted to get back home, though their homes were damaged and broken … Though they were scarred, there was still that vivid picture of peace in their own kitchen. It is more than a sense of possession. It is more than just the female desire to protect the working husband. Home was something regular and real, home was the shape they had grown.

‘When I saw my house with the roof off and the windows blown inside out, it drew me out by the roots,’ said one of the women.

Keeping calm and carrying on – an illustration from the
Fire Party Handbook
showing how to put out incendiaries.

From chintz curtains to quilts, tables to teacups, every eau-de-nil interior in the land was a temple to that revered household deity, the British wife. And now her ritual objects lay scattered, exposed, broken. Could she ever be the same again?

Resilience kicked in. When Hilde Marchant’s own flat was bombed, she was able to reflect ruefully on the fate of her possessions. She had many books, but she had read them all. Her clothes had gone, but by good fortune she had gone out wearing her fur coat, so that at least was saved. Her cupboard full of clippings, photographs and souvenirs was to be regretted – ‘but all that had been important was remembered’. She was able to retrieve only a sponge bag, a dressing gown, stockings, a blouse and a pair of shoes. As she packed them, she had an insight: ‘Really, the essentials of living were very few.’ Divested of all she held dear, all that had once contributed to her composite female identity, wartime woman was having to learn a new kind of survival.

As the bombs smashed up the fabric of everyday life, so notions of property morphed and at times dissolved altogether. The scattering of belongings could seem like a gift from the gods.
A woman working as a driver
in London regarded perishable and damaged goods as fair game. She was called to help out at a bomb site which had once been the premises of a beautician; among all the muck and muddle and smashed beams, the demolition men salvaged some 200 boxes of high-quality face powder, ‘in good shades too’. They dug out the boxes with great eagerness, and it would have seemed churlish to refuse such largesse, just because the labels were stained.

Social distinctions seemed equally irrelevant under the falling masonry and shrapnel.
Sheila Hails was coming home
from a dinner party when a raid began. ‘I took shelter under a porch, only to find there was already a man in this particular doorway; however we just crouched down and threw our arms around each other. At the time it just seemed ordinary … we sort of smiled at each other. He was a milkman I think.’

What did it feel like to be faced with extinction?
A nurse who survived
being buried alive recalled how she began, slowly, to suffocate. Realising her end was near, she put her trust in Christ. ‘I was perfectly peaceful as I thought about death … [and] confident that
very soon I would be in the presence of God.’ When rescuers arrived, she felt they had cheated her of her heavenly salvation.

There are accounts, too, of a kind of euphoria experienced during air raids; it drew, perhaps, from that realisation noted by Hilde Marchant, that one could find happiness and meaning without the accretions of cutlery and furniture, and that just being alive was enough.
Mass Observation interviewed
a woman whose block was hit, with her underneath. Miraculously, this woman was almost unhurt, though the ceiling was collapsing above her. Streaked with plaster dust, she emerged into the street:

‘I’ve been
bombed
!’ I kept saying to myself … ‘I’ve been
bombed
!
I’ve
been bombed –
me
!’

It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people must have been killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I experienced such
pure and flawless happiness
.

Some bomb victims managed to draw from even deeper within themselves, finding wells of self-belief that transcended the fear of death.
As Barbara Cartland said,
war could bring moments of wonder, even glory. She cited the example of a friend of hers who was buried under the ruins of her house for five hours, trapped by her legs. At first she felt terror, and desperation to get free. Time passed, and rescue didn’t arrive.

Suddenly my brain seemed to clear, and I knew that it was all unimportant. It didn’t matter – the shattered house, my imprisoned body – I was still there. I myself and alive, with a new sort of inward aliveness I can’t explain. It seems ridiculous to say it, but I was happy – happier than I’ve ever been in my life before.

This woman seemed to be discovering autonomy for the first time. As they smashed up her home, was this sense of release, of ‘inward aliveness’, the truest kind of emancipation the bombs could bring?

Nights of Fire

Transcendent moments aside, there were few compensations for the danger and anxiety that were now an inevitable part of war on the home front. Everyday life for the majority of women was now
becoming a question of endurance, of simply coping. As the Blitz became ‘normal’, the sense of shock abated, leaving them bored, passive, sickened, above all deeply tired.

Throughout autumn 1940
twenty-four-year-old Anne Popham
was writing to her artist lover, Graham Bell, who was training with the RAF in Blackpool. Graham, alienated and lonely among his new colleagues, was hungry for details of their ‘old’ life, but that life had changed; destruction had visited.

In September Anne and her flatmate, Ruth, were bombed out of their Brunswick Square flat. They moved in with Anne’s brother in Islington; meanwhile, Ruth’s father was killed in a raid which destroyed the government office where he worked. Anne was an educated, aware young woman, but her letters aren’t about the progress of the war, the fight against Nazism, or even her hopes for the future. They dwell instead on the minutiae of how, one at a time, she got through the difficult, dreary days, with an immediacy which helps to show what life must have been like for thousands of independent women at that time:

14th October 1940.

Darling – I must say I am having a terrible time. Bombs have been raining down ever since I got home at about quarter to eight. It is only 9 now, but it has been whizz whizz whizz all the time. Even I feel quite alarmed & unhappy for several moments at a time as I am all alone … I suppose there has been nothing very near, as the house has rattled only twice, but there must have been over 15 whistles, and there are several fires, the guns going whang all the time making the shutters shake.

23rd October.

My dearest darling Graham … I dismantled our little home with the aid of the boys … I managed to get everything out but the jam jars, one pot of my marrow jam without a lid, some shredded wheat, & the bookcases … I spent the rest of Sunday as you can imagine. Sweeping. Putting down carpets. Lifting heavy weights, arranging rooms etc etc … trudge off in the miserable rain with a dusty headache to the bank and to re-direct letters at the Post Office. Raiders overhead, shut … Rang Ruth … Her father’s body hadn’t yet been found, as more debris had fallen …

Ordered ½ ton of coke for the boiler 30/- down. Spent
hours
waiting in the Town Hall to register change of address &c … Came home & pushed furniture about again. Did a week’s washing up … Lay down
utterly exhausted
to rest my aching back, meaning to write to you any minute. Tris [her brother] had to wake me up to get me to go to bed.

Darling I suppose you have made one of your vows not to write till you hear from me. I do hope you haven’t. I depend on your being better than me & I’m sure your life is easier …

Very much love sweetheart.

The everyday misery of war came home to many that autumn. A year in, the gnawing fear and apprehension that had accompanied the prospect of invasion had receded, to be replaced by the sheer weary difficulty of putting up with things. In 1940 women’s entire way of life was under aggressive assault. In the face of this, the average woman demonstrated the qualities of endurance and submission that had been bred into her sex over centuries. She was used to being a second-class citizen, used to being patient and passive. Seventy years ago most women felt that world events were something out of their control. War, and bombs, were foisted on them by men; they had no choice but to accept what they couldn’t challenge. Conversations with women who lived through the Second World War run to a refrain of stoical acceptance:

‘
We all had miserable days
… but we weren’t allowed to be miserable. It was a case of ‘Get on with it. You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’

‘
We were much more accepting
in those days. We didn’t fight life like they do today.’

‘
You just got on with your life,
like … You had to live through it, and if you survived, well, good luck to you.’

Living in Britain in 1940 meant enduring a barrage of hardships ranging from death, injury, bereavement, homelessness and poverty to lesser annoyances such as exhaustion, electricity cuts, high food prices, queues, shortages of eggs, kippers and Cutex nail varnish.

‘
You just grin and bear it
– that’s all you can do.’

But such passivity was being put to the test as never before. This last comment came from a woman who survived one of the most
horrifying nights of the war, 14 November 1940, the date of the Coventry Blitz. The catastrophe visited upon this small city was the pattern for the subsequent bombings of other compact town centres – Southampton, Birmingham, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Leicester, Bristol, Clydeside – all of which had the heart knocked out of their close-knit communities. The German strategy was to set fire to the city centre with incendiaries. Thirty thousand of these were dropped on Coventry that night. Guided by the blaze, whose light could be seen from the south of England, heavy bombers then gutted what was left at a rate of at least one bomb every minute for over ten hours, pulverising the medieval centre, including Coventry’s beautiful cathedral.

It is now estimated that up to a thousand people may have lost their lives that night; more than 1,200 were seriously wounded.
In Coventry and Warwickshire
hospital matron Joyce Burton and sister Emma Horne drew on all their reserves of courage and training to maintain morale and care not only for their existing patients but also for the numerous wounded and dying citizens brought in by ambulance during the course of that terrifying night. The sick were in danger from fire, flying glass and debris; the nurses had to move these people out of harm’s way, placing them on mattresses under the beds and protecting them from flying fragments with bowls placed over their heads. They reassured and comforted them. Casualties were arriving every few minutes; often, they were firemen injured and burned by incendiaries, many with scalding shrapnel buried in their flesh. For the dying, morphia was administered. By a miracle, the nurses’ home had just been completely evacuated, minutes before a high-explosive bomb reduced it to ruins. Bombs shattered the water mains, and nothing could be sterilised with boiling water; in the middle of the night the emergency generator failed, and doctors had to operate by battery lights. Smashed windows let in the chill winter air, and the dead lay among the dying. Without exception, everyone in that hospital worked through till the all-clear, and – that November night – every member of staff survived.