Domestic Soldiers (24 page)

It seemed resoundingly unpatriotic for the miners to down tools that winter, and indeed many owners, officials and consumers cried foul. But for all the accusations of shirking, radicalism and general indolence levelled at the miners, the true problem was much more complicated than simple laziness or treachery. The economic slump of the inter-war period had ripped the heart out of the coal industry. Many miners had been thrown out of work for long periods of time and,
furthermore, the poverty and decline of the coal-mining villages meant that these communities often failed to reproduce the next generation of workers. When the war came, with its insatiable lust for coal, experienced miners were middle-aged and had suffered from years of privation and inactivity. In addition, equipment was antiquated, and many of the abundant coal seams of the nineteenth century were exhausted.

The industry, therefore, limped along during the war with inadequate numbers of workers, poor investment and poor coal reserves. The government tried to ameliorate some of the problems by allowing conscription-age men to ‘opt’ out of military service if they agreed to work the mines. Some took up this opportunity, but not as many as the government would have hoped. Additional shifts were created, and experienced miners worked well over a full shift on a regular basis to make up for the shortages. (The frequently voiced term ‘shirker’ must have rankled with these miners.) Extraction of coal from thin and less-prolific seams with out-dated equipment was also dangerous, and nearly a quarter of miners suffered severe accidents during the last years of the war.

With coal production well under what the war economy required, the government decided to send more men down the mines. In December 1943, the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, enacted a plan which would send one in every ten men eligible for National Service to work the seams. Many of these so-called Bevin Boys resented being directed to the coal industry, and many of the miners themselves held little love for the unwilling amateurs. Those who patently refused to do the work were packed off to jail, while others were regularly lax in attending work. Aside from the danger and
solitude of the work, one of the largest detractors to Bevin’s scheme was the fact that his ‘Boys’ were paid the dismal wage of a miner. Work in war armaments was far more lucrative.

The massive walkout that left families shivering and factories gasping for coal in March and April 1944 was ignited by the poor wage levels in the mines. Strikes and arbitration during the war had lifted the minimum wage of miners to £4.3s in 1942, and in early 1944 this was raised to £5. While this was well above the pre-war minimum, grave miscalculations in the pay structure that was set with this new minimum drove experienced workers to the edge, for the new guidelines wiped away wage differentials. Miners with years of experience could now expect to make the same wage as the volunteer workers who had opted for the mines over the military as well as the Bevin Boys. Moreover, soon after the minimum was implemented, it was announced that manual workers were making on average well over £6.

In this light, the anger levelled at miners was perhaps a bit unfair. And, indeed, despite the gravity of the situation, some Britons seemed willing to apply understanding to the situation. Though one of her conservative friends spewed forth condemnation on the miners (and the working classes in general), Natalie Tanner was very sympathetic to the miners’ plight. Pinched by the cold, Edie Rutherford nonetheless also registered her support of the strike, feeling that the miners had been abused for long enough. To Irene Grant, the continual animosity and inefficiency in the mines only pointed to the fact that the industry must be nationalized. Indeed, Grant felt most industry and land should be handed over to the people, as they should ‘belong to everyone’.

On Friday 7 April, the same day Rutherford noted the closure of several factories for want of fuel, Edie also announced that the miners had agreed to return to work the following week. Differentials were put back in place, and the miners emerged from the strike with the highest minimum wage of all industries. Angered at the intransigence of the miners at a critical period in the war – when the nation prepared for the invasion of Western Europe – Ernest Bevin wanted revenge. He was convinced that Trotskyites had orchestrated the strike, and to stave off future agitation the Minister of Labour would not rest until draconian anti-strike legislation was enacted. Under Regulation 1AA, convicted agitators could expect a prison sentence of five years or a fine of £500. Although the creation of the regulation resulted in a firestorm of criticism from the left in the Labour Party (led by Welsh MP, Aneurin Bevan) and nearly split the party just one year before its great electoral win, Regulation 1AA was never used.

The elevated rates of crime and industrial action of early 1944 were symptoms of the deep malaise into which the nation had descended in the fifth year of war. Despite the official Italian surrender less than six months before, in September 1943, the conflict now seemed to drag on endlessly, and the bleakness of austerity measures seeped into the fabric of day-to-day life, leaving many desperately dangling at the end of their tether.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WORST RAID EVER LAST NIGHT

Helen Mitchell lay awake cursing the German bombers buzzing over her Kent home on 22 January 1944, as a ‘foul raid’ raged well into the morning. After the raiders cleared out, there was still no sleep to be had, with RAF bombers en route to the Continent for retribution humming and growling overhead, shaking the windows and foundations of Helen’s home. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and an enervating cold, which made her temporarily deaf in one ear, she switched on the radio. Helen caught the morning news just in time to hear the BBC ‘gloat’ over the damage that those very same British bombers, which had kept her awake earlier, had wrought over Germany. The BBC’s behaviour was no better than Germany’s vicious crowing in the early years of war, Mitchell thought angrily.

At least Helen had someone with whom to endure the raids, and to whom she could grouse about what she called the BBC’s ‘childishness’. Helen normally lived alone since her husband, Peter, worked closer to London, and usually slept at a flat near his work. But recently, a houseguest had come to stay for a few days. A week before the ‘foul raid’ on the 22nd, Peter
had arranged for a friend of his sister’s to stay with Helen for company and to help with household chores during his wife’s illness. Caroline would also help keep Helen’s mind off the renewed blitz, Peter reasoned.

Since the beginning of the year, the raids over Kent had once again assumed the familiar drumbeat of the 1940–1 blitz. In early 1944, Hitler embarked upon a new bombing offensive, entitled Operation Steinbock, aimed at the capital. London and the south-east would now endure the so-called ‘baby blitz’, a four-month onslaught that would stretch nerves to breaking point.

After a relative period of peace, Londoners once again descended underground to the safety of the Tube. Although new deep shelters had been constructed in the capital since 1941, none was ready in 1944, and once again the Tube reopened and old bunks were reconstructed to accommodate the nightly migration of nervous city dwellers. In the countryside, people stole away to the protection of their outdoor Andersons, indoor Morrisons or other makeshift  precautions. Helen usually sheltered downstairs on a divan placed beneath a doorframe. When she had company over, Helen heaved a heavy kitchen table into the living room, ‘amalgamating it with grand piano as air-shelter’.

As the raids increased, Helen was initially happy that Peter had arranged for Caroline to come; however, it was not long before Helen tired of her guest. Certainly, it was a comfort to have someone nearby, but Caroline had a penchant for sleeping late, leaving the ailing Helen to wake early to start fires throughout the draughty ‘medieval’ home. After early chores were completed, Helen would tumble into bed, utterly exhausted, fed up and muttering at
the laziness of her houseguest. Mitchell quickly wrote off Caroline as thoroughly useless: Helen complained to M-O that Caroline’s idea of ‘“Nursing” consists of sitting on her bottom and sending out “healing vibrations”’. ‘Feel a spot of dusting would be more useful,’ she quipped. Conversation was hardly sparkling either. ‘Have rather forgotten what a dreadful bore a really unintelligent woman who makes vapid remarks can be, but have so far managed to be polite,’ Helen caustically remarked. Within a week, Helen was bored and Caroline was disappointed at the lack of things to do in the village; Helen was glad to see her guest off at the train station.

The renewed bombing campaign strained nerves in Helen’s village, yet people pulled together the best they could to provide comfort during the tense nights. Husbands living and working away from home – like Peter and the husband of another friend of Helen’s, Joan – did their best to be home when they could. When no help was forthcoming from husbands or others from the outside, the women in Helen’s circle sometimes visited each other at night. They brought along bedding and a few rations, offering conversation and companionship, hoping to sleep through the night, but often huddling together as bombs crashed to the earth all around them.

Margaret, the owner of a local cafe with whom Helen had become friendly as a frequent customer, seemed the most wits-shattered of Helen’s tiny village circle. In late January, Helen visited the cafe to find Margaret in an ‘awful state about raids’. Helen offered Margaret a place to stay if she needed comfort from the raids. The easily flappable Helen, however, soon regretted her kind gesture. ‘Alas!’ she told M-O, Margaret showed
up that very night, with cat in tow, no rations and then proceeded to blither non-stop the entire night.

Though the raid was only a ‘minor’ one and did not last long, Margaret failed to leave when the All Clear siren sounded. With each passing moment of Margaret’s unwanted presence, Helen’s silent rage increased, but she could hardly move herself to ask her guest explicitly to leave. Instead, fearing a future imposition on her already strained hospitality, and hoping Margaret would get the hint that she’d outstayed her welcome, Helen steadfastly refused to offer her guest tea. ‘Was tough about tea’, Helen told M-O, ‘as I fear there will be much of this.’ Later in the day, Margaret came back to announce that she had offered boarding to a Canadian soldier and, much to Helen’s pleasant surprise, would not need to come in the night.

That evening, 29 January, with Peter just returned home for the weekend, the village had yet another ‘foul raid’. It was so fierce that the blackout boards in the windows were blown out. The two tried to brave the raid by playing card games. Helen tried valiantly at stoicism, but she failed: her hands shook uncontrollably. Deeply disappointed with herself, she told M-O, ‘Am becoming more and more cowardly!’

The next morning, a Sunday, Peter woke early and went to his weekly Home Guard drill. The Home Guard was created in 1940 under the Secretary of War, Anthony Eden. Originally named the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), the Home Guard mobilized (mostly) male citizens to defend the country against a possible German invasion. Peter joined the Home Guard early, as did Tom Grant (Irene’s husband) and thousands of other men after the call was made for volunteers in the spring of 1940. Between the initial announcement on
10 May and the end of June, over one million men had heeded the call.

In January 1944, when Peter went to drill, the threat of a German invasion on British soil was decidedly minuscule, but the Home Guard had by then been mostly absorbed into Civil Defence and Anti-Aircraft (AA) duties. Other than preening his equipment for ‘ridiculous inspection’, Helen never revealed the details of her husband’s involvement in the Home Guard. Considering the number of heated air raids in the area, however, it seems reasonable to assume that Peter was involved in either AA work or recovery and other defence duties.

Typically, Helen awoke early to prepare breakfast on mornings when Peter was on Home Guard duty. However, that morning she slept late and left her husband to ‘turn the knobs’ on the cooker himself for breakfast. Though she needed the sleep, she confided that she ‘felt like a pig’ for being so lazy. When Peter came home after the Home Guard that day, the two took a walk together and enjoyed the waning sunlight of a crisp January afternoon. Later, Helen played card games with Peter and read P.G. Wodehouse aloud (possibly
The
Code of the Woosters
, her favourite Wodehouse, which she’d picked up ‘prewar paper and print’ in London only two months before). In an otherwise stormy relationship and during a particularly fearful period of the ‘baby blitz’, where Helen reported raids almost every night, it seemed a refreshingly tranquil moment.

The next day, Peter went back to work, and after morning chores Helen retired in the early afternoon, drifting off to sleep as she listened to Jane Austen’s
Sense and
Sensibility
on the radio, ‘alone again’. Margaret visited a day later, and though she was still boarding the
Canadian soldier, offered to stay with Helen during air raids. Despite feeling desperately lonely, Helen turned Margaret down flat.

The next morning, with an ‘excellent gale blowing’, Helen dragged old clothes out of storage to air and inspect for the telltale signs of moth damage that often plagued her wardrobe. ‘No moth casualties’, she happily informed M-O. As she sifted through the garments, she stopped to eye the old costumes and party clothes of bygone theatre productions and social evenings strewn about the room, nostalgic tears dropped gently off the edge of her lashes. ‘Am glad I did not know ten years ago what “life” would be like now,’ Helen thought miserably.

Later, she was stirred awake at 5 a.m. as German planes visited her village, bringing ‘new and terrible bangs and house shaking including self’. When she stumbled into the kitchen, fatigued from lack of sleep and too much living in the past, Helen discovered that one of the pipes had burst in the raid. Day and night, Helen emptied buckets in a relentless battle against the water torture that sprang from her ‘dear old house’. ‘Too much of water hast thou poor Ophelia,’ the former Shakespearean actor and producer lamented as she recalled the drowning of Ophelia in
Hamlet
.

In between the rattling raids that winter, Mitchell continued her daily grind and grouse of housework. In addition to the bombing, the house and the routine were, if possible, even more debilitating than ever for Helen. ‘Drooled through the day in usual manner,’ summed up her day’s experience in one terse January diary entry. Throughout the long winter, a variety of repairmen appeared to patch windows blown out from raids, fix plumbing, remedy the dreadful dampness
that seeped from the walls of the old place and tune her piano (which, in addition to Mitchell, was also suffering from the damp). All agreed with her: the old wreck of a home should be condemned. Even the doctor, who came to treat her cold, said it ‘was the most depressing place he’d ever been in!’

In the beginning of February, the raids over Helen’s village slackened off a bit. She was even able to sleep one night in her upstairs bedroom with the blackout down and windows wide open. Though it was a ‘pleasant change’, it didn’t last long: she was woken by machine-gun fire early in the morning. That morning, when she switched on the radio, she learned of a ‘new form of horror’. The BBC now spewed forth casualty statistics and ‘calculations’ of the damage that Allied bombing had wrought upon Germany. This ‘new entertainment with endless possibilities’ churned her stomach all the more as planes passed overhead. Helen understood the fear of bombing too deeply to glean any satisfaction from the BBC’s tales of RAF successes. And she knew all too well that Allied bombing sparked German retribution, which meant that her village would inevitably become a target once again.

Indeed, on Valentine’s Day, Helen and Peter experienced ‘the worst raid ever’. The two lay on the floor, shaking in terror while plaster and dust fell down all around them. Helen trembled uncontrollably as she heard the unmistakable clack-clack of incendiaries and the chilling rip of the air as high-explosive bombs fell to the ground. When morning came, Peter left for the week, leaving Helen distraught and worried about enduring the next horrible raid alone.

Five days later, on 19 February, London had its heaviest raid since the monstrous bomber’s moon bombing
of 10 May 1941. Luckily for Mitchell, the raid wasn’t too bad in Kent. Still, the siren went early that night, and – fully expecting a repeat of the Valentine’s Day raid – Helen cowered beneath her kitchen table, waiting for the worst. The raids were taking their toll; ‘Have descended to lowest depths and took bromide,’ Helen confessed.

As the raiders continued their bombing runs – flying west to London or east in revenge – Mitchell’s friend Joan stopped in one cold February morning and invited her to come to her house for the evening. For the remainder of the month, Helen divided her time between Joan’s home and her own, pulling together rations for an evening away and tidying up in the morning before heading home to do her chores. On occasion, Margaret would appear during the day, complain about the raids and announce that she was staying the night. Helen much preferred spending the evenings at Joan’s, since she seemed to get a restful sleep and found Joan ‘very nice to be with, as doesn’t grumble like Margaret’. But, with Helen’s seeming inability to refuse anything that smacked of ‘duty’ or sacrifice, this invariably kept her at home, with the attendant cleaning and airing of a room that having a guest necessitated. Much as she hated the imposition, Helen could not refuse Margaret when she appeared at her door.

After a nice evening at Joan’s, and an invitation to stay again that night, Margaret stopped by to tell Helen that her boarder would be late and she couldn’t possibly get through the night alone. Helen felt obliged to cancel with Joan when she learned of Margaret’s misfortune and, predictably, the night was spent in agony: Helen proclaiming to M-O that her houseguest was ‘most upsetting, grousing and reiterating interminably’.

By the end of February, Helen stepped up efforts to flee the torment of the ‘baby blitz’ and made plans to stay with friends near Oxford in March. She had been planning an escape from Kent for quite a while. In fact, she spent a great deal of the war trying to break free either of the old house or from the constant bombing that plagued the south-east. On numerous occasions, Helen went on short breaks to friends in Tunbridge Wells, Epsom or London, or took a train to the west for the tranquillity of Minehead and the Quantock Hills. But on this occasion, if she thought she was going to also escape the noisome Margaret, she was sadly mistaken. Once Margaret got wind of Helen’s plan, she asked to accompany Mitchell to the greener pastures beyond the capital, out of harm’s way. ‘Blimey!’ exclaimed Helen when Margaret elbowed her way in to Helen’s plans; nonetheless, she made arrangements for them both.