Millions Like Us (71 page)

Ham Spray House:
at the foot of the Wiltshire downs, Frances and Ralph Partridge continue to lead quietly civilised lives, in which books and the company of friends predominate. Their son, Burgo, now fourteen, is entering a difficult adolescence. The summer of 1949 is sultry; the only cool time is the early morning, and Frances walks barefoot on her dew-laden lawn before breakfast. Later in the day, a circle of deckchairs under the beech tree is a shady refuge for drinks and conversation. On 6 August Frances rereads her wartime diaries and reflects on how life has changed since the days when her interest was exclusively, hectically engaged by public horrors:

Now we have lived through three years of total peace; we still have rationing but don’t fear it getting worse (as we did then); there have been political crises and alarms for us to read and talk about ad lib. The chief change is that today our minds are much more often full of the books we are reading, the work we are doing, and above all the vicissitudes in the lives of Burgo and many friends whose troubles are very much our concern.

Her pacifist convictions remain unaltered.

Oundle, Northamptonshire:
another wedding picture. Lorna is smiling for the camera, after trading her maiden name, Bradey, for Kite. Ralph, her husband, is a career soldier with the British Army of Occupation in Germany, a onetime patient of hers. In Hanover in 1948 they renewed their romance, and he proposed after a night at the opera. Lorna’s marriage to Ralph Kite means automatic resignation from Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. She has a child now, she works in the army thrift shop, dutifully attends coffee mornings, hosts curry lunches and tries to avoid becoming too like the other ‘kitten’ wives on the base at Sölingen near Düsseldorf. But there is nothing to do, and it is, in many ways, a mind-numbing existence. Lorna, high-spirited, sociable and sexy, is too uncompromising to fit neatly into the ‘devoted military wife’ slot. She has always lived life to the full, always loved to party, and the role of flirt comes more naturally to her than that of docile housewife. And, though their marriage is strong and loving, any spare energy is expended on stormy rows with her husband.

A r
ailway station in Sussex:
Anne Popham, back from Germany since 1947, has found a job as an exhibitions organiser for the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain, work which has brought her back into contact with the world of contemporary artists. One of these, a tall, talented man with red hair, asks her out. He seems kind, clever and impressively well informed about politics and current affairs and yet he also seems deeply unsure of himself. An invitation follows to his parents’ Sussex home, where Anne sits to him for her portrait. The family welcomes her; she feels admired, appreciated. He sculpts a head of clay, caressing the terracotta cheekbones, moulding her lips with sensitive, spatula-like fingers. She feels beautiful. When he takes her to catch her train she reaches up and briefly kisses him. They look at each other with new eyes.

Ontario, Canada:
Mavis Lever, married name Mavis Batey, has travelled to Ottawa, where her husband Keith has accepted a position on the staff of the High Commission. After five years of fever-pitch work at Bletchley, Mavis is relieved not to have to keep up the pace. ‘We could never have slogged the way we did without the excitement of the war. Mercifully, I decided to have a baby.’ So she has packed her Harris tweed suit and boarded a liner for the
other side of the world. She also takes with her her secret life of codes and intercepts, but for another twenty-five years she will not reveal a word about her wartime occupation. In Canada a second baby is born. Far from home in a land of plenty, Mavis enjoys the heaven of disposable nappies; also chocolate, and steak. Inexperienced as a cook, one of our foremost code-breakers is almost floored by the expectation that she will whip up a three-course diplomatic dinner for her husband’s colleagues – ‘How do you feed an Ambassador when your repertoire doesn’t extend beyond corned beef and bread-and-butter pudding?’ The Bateys return to England in 1950: with her family growing up, Mavis discovers a surprising new outlet for her forensic talents and love of literature, becoming the secretary and later president of the Garden History Society.

Edinburgh: Jean Park
(née McFadyen), has ‘landed on her feet’. After months of frustration living with the in-laws in Edinburgh, she has the luck to find a flat in the church manse. Brenda, the minister’s wife, is pregnant and has advertised the accommodation in return for help in the house. A happy time follows: ‘We got on great. I only worked for her up until lunchtime, and my time was my own after that.’ Brenda and she share out the washing, the baking, and – when the time comes – baby tips. Jean’s own daughter is born in 1948. How far has she come from her lonely teenage days, skivvying in the great landowner’s remote castle in the glens? In her view, cleaning for Brenda at the manse was a world away. ‘My life had changed completely. It definitely gave me confidence. I would never have done all these things if it hadn’t been for the war.’ Her relationship with her employer and landlady is one of mutual respect and firm friendship.

Blackheath, London:
an envelope drops through Miss Mary Cornish’s letterbox, from nineteen-year-old Fred Steels. It contains greetings, and reminiscences about the days they spent together after Lifeboat Number 12 was cast adrift on the Atlantic ocean. ‘It is just over 4 years since we wrote to each other,’ he tells her,

but I do know that it is just over 8 years since we shared our nightmare experience, and I want you to know that I for one will never forget what you did for us during that experience.

Miss Cornish reads it and adds it to a growing bundle of correspondence from the boys – Paul Shearing, Ken Sparks and Billy Short –
who still write to her, addressing her as ‘Auntie Mary’. She is fifty now and has returned to her life as a music teacher. If anything, her ordeal has sharpened her appetite for life: for music, gardens, books, travel and friendships. The fortitude and mental grip that helped Mary Cornish survive shipwreck and despair now propel her forward; she possesses, as her niece says, ‘a fiery spirit’.

Leamington Spa, Warwickshire:
the wedding of Alan Milburn to Judy Pickard is taking place, just over a year after his return from Oflag VIIB. To his mother’s relief, Alan spends the six months following his release on light duties in a mixed battalion only 10 miles from Burleigh, the home in Balsall Common where she has spent so many anxious hours awaiting news of his safety. During this time he is billeted at a hotel named The Oaks, and it is here that he meets Judy, whose mother is the proprietor. Judy finds her new mother-in-law, Clara Milburn, to be a firm and friendly woman – ‘unique in many ways’. In her sixties, she continues practical and as busy as ever, gardening, reading, writing, painting and tending to her husband Jack’s needs. With Alan settled, she eagerly awaits the arrival of a Milburn grandson (and it
must
be a boy), for in Clara’s world view Milburn men still lead the human procession, while Milburn women are there to applaud, to wait and to sew on their buttons.

South Kensington:
Frances Parker (née Faviell) is remaking her life in London after the extremities of the Blitz, the anguish of post-war Berlin. The bombs had razed 33 Cheyne Place to the ground; she and Richard have moved to an airy and comfortable modern house with a large studio in a quiet street behind Fulham Road. John is at school. Back in her old haunts, Frances picks up the artistic social life that she left behind in 1939. She has time and peace of mind, too, to give to painting, and canvases accumulate. The studio is stacked high with portraits of her many friends, lovingly executed miniatures, the occasional exuberant flower piece: a rhododendron, joyfully magenta in its blue vase. But the war memories persist. Painful and difficult though she finds it, Frances embarks on a book about her time in Berlin, followed by a book about the Chelsea Blitz. Writing them is both liberating and cathartic, and the books are well received. But
A Chelsea Concerto
will be her last. Frances Faviell now confronts a war that is unwinnable, for at fifty-seven she is dying of an untreatable cancer.

North Berwick, the Firth of Forth:
it’s the Sunday before Kay Mellis’s wedding to Alastair Wight. In Scotland in 1950, working-class tradition still requires the engaged couple to hold open house for well-wishers, who are expected to call by bearing gifts: useful household items like wringers, sewing-machines and carpet sweepers. Kay’s mum has made it clear that she and Alastair ought to stay in to greet the many guests from their close-knit Edinburgh neighbourhood. But Kay and Alastair, who have known each other since childhood, have other ideas:

That weekend we decided that we weren’t going to be staying in on a Sunday, we were going to North Berwick on the bus. My mother wasn’t best pleased because she thought people would come and we wouldn’t be there. But still, away we went.

The couple walk along the bay arm in arm, past the outdoor salt-water swimming pool and round the picturesque harbour. Perhaps they reminisce about Kay’s Land Army days: the back-breaking years when girls like her ‘weren’t allowed to be miserable’ despite her sore hands, raw from hoeing, and the rats that plagued her nights. Or maybe she remembers John, the kindly farmer who employed her – ‘I was his chick’ – or the reels in the village hall after the day’s work was done.

But most likely she and Alastair talk about what it will be like when they are married. Dress-making is her love; she won’t have to give that up. His steady job with a printing machinery firm will ensure them an adequate income.

The war ending was going to be the start of something wonderful. We’d rent a house, it wouldn’t be bought, you know what I mean? – and we’d get some furniture. A Chesterfield suite, a dining room suite and a bedroom suite.

On that sunny afternoon, with the sea sparkling and the gannets calling from the Bass Rock, Vera Lynn’s promise of peace is being fulfilled for Kay and Alastair:

We had a lovely time in North Berwick. We had a bag of chips out of the chip shop. And I felt we had done what we wanted to do that day. Maybe we didn’t do the right thing. But we did it because it was what
we
wanted to do.

They feel lucky to be alive and in love. In a week they will be man and wife. They dream of a peaceful future. They will have a family and, in time, grandchildren. Kay’s sewing-machine will whirr all day, and there will be all the fabric she ever wanted.

Kay Wight is in her late eighties now. She and Alastair still live quietly in their modest home in an Edinburgh suburb. She tut-tuts a little about modernity – ‘Kids now grow up before their time. Och, it’s a disaster!’ – about the way her granddaughters don’t learn to cook – ‘What’s better than a plate of mince and tatties? Don’t get me started!’ – and about the way women wear trousers to dances – ‘There’s nothing worse.’ She laments the loss of community: ‘Life was so different then – your aunties and uncles and everybody lived nearby. Your whole life was different, you know what I mean? If you were bombed out it was a case of “Come in, come in.” There was always a door open.’ And teenagers get away with disrespect to the old in a way that to her is incomprehensible:

So I say, all right, I’ll go back to my wee old chair.

It is the fate of every generation, as it grows old, to be pushed to one side by the young. The achievements and sacrifices of the 1940s women have bought us peace, but we take them for granted. Their values are rejected as old-fashioned and irrelevant. We patronise them a little and, ultimately, forget them. The process is necessary, but we also lose by it. For if we are ever to learn from history, we must get under the skins of the people who made it: our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers, Kay Wight, and millions like her. They are us, and we will, in our turn, be like them.

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