Millions Like Us (5 page)

Another woman recollected
the final days before the declaration of war as being a time of heightened impressions, when to ‘look your last on all things lovely’ was an imperative of the greatest urgency. With the awful conviction that everything beloved and ordinary was under threat, the familiar became beautiful. Images were indelibly printed on people’s minds with the clarity of a photograph: the sun
shining on a pane of glass, swans on the Thames, barrage balloons glittering in the evening sunlight. ‘We believed that everything we had known was going to be wiped out.’

All that Saturday the BBC Home Service interrupted its schedule of gramophone records with gloomy announcements.
Helen Vlasto, on holiday with her family
on the Essex coast, recalled that the bulletins served only to undermine morale, already low. It was a day ‘full of foreboding’. That evening a terrific storm hit areas of northern England. Rain came down in sheets, and continuous thunder crashed overhead; in Derby lightning struck five barrage balloons, which burst dramatically into flame and came down over the town. ‘
Nature is providing
the finishing touches to these poignant, horrible days,’ wrote another young woman, unable to sleep as the elements raged above her. ‘This storm makes one feel that perhaps God is wishful of reminding us that our little wars are as nothing compared with His awful power.’

Sunday morning dawned crystal clear. Shortly before 11 o’clock Helen Vlasto dropped by the kitchen to check that her grandmother’s servants were going to be listening in at 11.15 to the expected broadcast from Number 10 Downing Street. The staff looked grim and white-faced, though Ella, the family cook, continued to prepare vegetables for dinner. ‘Oh, Miss Helen dear, what is to become of us?’ As the maids awaited the news below stairs, she made her way to the drawing room. There, the family were gathered in front of the wireless to listen to the Prime Minister:

This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

As she listened to Chamberlain’s announcement, Helen Vlasto told herself: ‘This is the most poignant moment of your life to date, and you will never forget it.’ The time and place remained engraved on her memory – the sun streaming through the latticed panes, dappling the swathes of lavender left out to dry on the broad window-seats, the scent of Turkish tobacco and rose petals in great bowls. There was silence.

But out in the garden nothing had changed. The September sun still shone thoughtlessly down, unmindful of the new and monstrous turn of events. The bees continued to bumble amongst the roses, and the butterflies to weave their erratic and inconsequential course towards the early Michaelmas daisies and the Buddleias.

My tiny erect grandmother watched grimly as her family made its urgent plans to scatter, and prayed that we might all be spared to meet again. How were we to find our way, and how should we come to know how best to use this emergency constructively and fruitfully?

*

Eighty years ago Sunday was a day when all the bustle of the week came to a stop. Shops closed, workers and traders downed tools for a lie-in. There was church, roast lunch, a day’s dozing in the parlour over cups of tea. The country was suspended, hushed and stilled. The impact of Chamberlain’s declaration would penetrate every home in the land.

Sixteen-year-old Pip Beck
was exhilarated: ‘ “Well, at least we know where we stand now!” I said.’ But her parents were silent.
Phyllis Noble was ‘very scared
… I’m afraid I’m not of the stuff that heroes are made of.’ Some wept. ‘
I get emotional remembering it
. Old age I suppose,’ says Mary Davis (née Angove). Mary was a trainee nursing assistant. ‘It was a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. I went out on the verandah of our lodging, and I just stood there, trying to make my mind think: “War – we’re at War.” It was unreal.’

Deeply stirred, feminine hearts beat faster at the thought of our brave soldiers setting off to fight for king and country;
one sixteen-year-old
promptly got dressed in her Sunday navy-blue and white best and set off down Hereford High Street to wave goodbye to all the gallant lads. ‘Nothing happened.’ Where were the brass bands, the stirring processions she had seen in the movies? She cried all the way home. ‘The glamour of war wasn’t true and someone had lied.’
Another – in the middle
of cutting her toenails – stopped to listen to the broadcast with terror and bated breath, before reapplying herself to her task.

That same weekend
Marguerite Eave had just moved
into a small flat in Bradford. Aged twenty-two that summer, Marguerite was due to start on Monday with a brand-new job as a senior home
economist, demonstrating appliances for the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Electric Power Company. For Marguerite, that Sunday remains unforgettable:

It was an extraordinary day – one of those September days when you really feel, God’s in His Heaven and all’s well with the world. Well, I bumped into the girl who lived across the landing, and she introduced herself. She was the manageress of a Jaeger shop. ‘Would you like to come and listen to the broadcast and share a cup of coffee?’ she said.

Well, listening, it was the most terrifying thing one could possibly imagine. I felt, ‘We are alone. Heaven help us’ – a terrible fear and loneliness. And indeed we had everything to fear. And yet in a very short time – I was still with my neighbour listening to the radio – came the messages from Canada, Australia, South Africa: and they all said: ‘We are with you. You are not alone.’ And the feeling that they were with us was simply amazing … we knew that the whole Empire was behind us.

Within minutes of the announcement the Sabbath hush was broken by the eerie wailing of sirens, unmistakably sounding the alert.
Frances Faviell, who
, together with a group of friends in her studio and in common with the entire nation, had just finished listening to Chamberlain’s broadcast, suddenly woke up to the fact that this time it wasn’t play-acting. The party scattered, Frances to her landlord’s reinforced shelter in the rear courtyard of her building at 33 Cheyne Place. As a trained first-aider, should she go to her post? By the time she’d made up her mind to set out, the all-clear was sounding its warbling note. The Cheyne Place community gathered in the street to compare notes – ‘I saw neighbours who never spoke to one another chatting excitedly’ – and it was soon revealed that the alarm had been false, triggered by the sighting of a lone plane, ‘one of ours’. Later, Frances walked in Battersea Park with a friend. They gazed in bemused wonder at the massive silver barrage balloons bobbing above them, iridescent in the sky ‘like drunken fish’. She counted eighty of them from her vantage point on Battersea Bridge. ‘The scene was so peaceful … It was impossible to realise that these silver roach in the sky were there because we were at war. War seemed too remote and archaic a word to contemplate.’

In Streatham, Pat Bawland
, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an itinerant confectionery salesman, and her young brother were at
Sunday church. Pat’s feckless mother had insisted that her children attend regularly – it was one way of ensuring they got enough to eat, as the deaconess could be relied upon to give food handouts to the poorer families. ‘My brother was in the choir. Mum and Dad had told us that if the warning went we were to come home immediately – and while we were there on that Sunday morning the siren went; it sounded in the middle of the service. So I got up and grabbed my brother out of the choir stalls and took him out of the church and ran all the way home.’

Meanwhile, in Barrow-in-Furness, the
forty-nine-year-old housewife Nella Last
reacted to the declaration of war with the realisation that she could not share her feelings with Will, her husband. ‘Sunday, 3 September, 1939. Bedtime … Today I’ve longed for a close woman friend – for the first time in my life.’ An image came vividly to Nella’s mind. It was ‘July, before the last crisis’ – 1938. The Lasts had been visiting Portsmouth, and hundreds of young sailors, ratings, had arrived with the fleet from Weymouth in response to the military build-up. Nella saw the look on their faces – ‘a slightly brooding, faraway look. They all had it … and I felt I wanted to rush up and ask them what they could see that I could not. And now I know … All I can see are those boys with their look of “beyond”.’

Nella’s moment of intuition serves to locate a point of no return. The onward march of history was carrying the men beyond our shores, beyond family, home and all its comforts, to an uncertain destiny – to a place where the nation’s women could not follow them.

The next day Nella Last had a bad headache: ‘Monday, 4 September, 1939 … a cap of pain has settled down firmly and defies aspirin.’ Nella had two sons. Cliff, the younger, was twenty-one. He would be joining the Army as a PT instructor. Her diary shows a woman trying to keep a domestic lid on the mounting fear of losing all she held dear. There was the cleaning to do; the tidying and the washing. More urgently, Nella felt the need to contribute, so she sat down to sew cot blankets for the evacuees out of remnants. A plan now took shape in her aching head. The garden would have to go. She would keep hens on half the lawn and grow vegetables on the other half.

Domesticity seemed to Nella Last and thousands more like her to be under fundamental threat. Her life up to now had consisted of creating a home for her family and preparing their meals, of knitting,
needlework and cosy evenings around the hearth. War struck fiercely at all these things. More than any ideology or notion of sovereignty, the preservation of her own world in Barrow-in-Furness was of paramount importance to Nella. Only when she felt sure that the semi in Ilkley Road and all it represented was safe could she contribute to the greater work of winning the war for Britain, and this she would do in the way she knew best: using her skills as a mother and housewife.

Patience Chadwyck-Healey
was short on such skills. Nobody had ever taught her to boil an egg or sweep a hearth. She could dance, and she could ride a horse to hounds. Best of all she could drive a car, and in 1938 this had qualified her to join the FANYs. The approaching conflict filled her with mounting excitement. The FANY authorities had promised to keep Patience informed about her mobilisation, and the thought of it set her pulse racing: ‘Hurrah, I’m already organised to be in the FANYs, and I can drive, and I’m going to be called up!’ Now, at last, Patience had something real to do, but
when
would it start? For the first time in what had been a mainly ornamental life, she could envisage serving a greater purpose. ‘The first two weeks after Chamberlain’s declaration were the longest I’ve ever spent. The days passed so slowly. I kept thinking, “Hurry up, for goodness’ sake, the war’ll be
over
before I get called up!” Anyway, finally, on my birthday which is in mid-September, I got a telegram to say “Please report to Bovington Camp by noon tomorrow.” And I said to my parents, “I have no idea what to expect, but this is something I’ve
got
to do …” And by the 20th September there I was, in khaki, and for me that was the beginning of the war.’

The Children

The evacuation of Britain’s children was an undertaking that had been long anticipated. Arrangements had been made, surplus accommodation identified, camps built. Many city families didn’t wait for the declaration of war to start sending their children to safety. The exodus had started in June. By September a figure approaching 3.75 million people (children, their mothers and their teachers, and expectant mums) had moved from areas of the country regarded as unsafe to areas regarded as safe. At the end of August
Frances Faviell watched carloads
of children jamming the Chelsea arteries – ‘toys, perambulators, dogs, cats, and birds all piled in with them or balanced on top of them’. But some of the pugs and canaries had to be left behind. There were queues at vets’ surgeries for pets that couldn’t accompany their owners to be put down.

Goodmayes, near Ilford, the home of
fourteen-year-old Nina Mabey
, was uncomfortably close to the docks. For Nina, the evacuation of her school to Suffolk couldn’t come too soon, but not because she feared for her own safety. From an early age Nina had been a storyteller, a creator of invented lives; her appetite for books served only to increase her discontent with suburbia, and her vivid imagination conjured up a ‘dazzling future’ in some aristocratic country mansion where people fell in love over candlelit dinners. The reality of her arrival in Ipswich a few days before war was declared was, inevitably, a disappointment. ‘I was billeted on a family who lived in a council house and were definitely “common”.’ Nina’s experience was standard; the reluctance of the well-to-do to house evacuees is well documented. A fellow pupil was billeted with her in this inferior house; they shared a bed, and the last night of peace was made extra memorable by the unfortunate girl having her first period. There was blood all over the sheet, and Nina, who knew about these things, had difficulty persuading the totally uninformed teenager that she was not dying. The girls did their best, creeping secretly to the bathroom, to wash the sheet out, but it remained stained. Next day they sat in the garden drinking fizzy lemonade, listening to the Prime Minister’s announcement and worrying about the sheet. Not long after this the school relocated to Wales and new billets, which years later were to provide a setting for the wartime story
Carrie’s War
(1973), which would bring Nina fame under her married name of Bawden.

In Liverpool, as the Germans rolled into Poland,
the Forrester family were visited
by the local schoolmistress, a tweedy spinster with false teeth, who explained that the younger children of the family would be safer away from the city. Little Brian, Tony, Avril and Edward stared as she explained that they could choose between being sent off with their class or staying with relatives in the country. The government would provide an allowance for the evacuees’ board. Two maiden aunts in nearby Hoylake agreed to take Tony and Edward, while Avril would be accommodated by a nearby friend of the aunts. Small suitcases were
packed, goodbyes said. ‘I will never forget their tight, white little faces,’ recalled Helen. Poor Brian was packed off with the school to Wales, where he was billeted with a postman.