Domestic Soldiers (25 page)

To judge by the numerous renters and boarders that showed up at Helen’s own door, many people lived peripatetic lives during the war. In the periods when she was in Kent, one of the (many) banes of Helen’s existence was the numerous callers wanting to rent or buy her house. From men and women moving jobs voluntarily or through government compulsion, to bombed-out families searching for accommodation, to evacuees and individuals like Helen and Margaret trying to escape the terrifying pounding of enemy bombs, hundreds of thousands of Britons were on the move during the war.

On 28 February 1944, as Helen prepared to move to Oxfordshire, her friend from Tunbridge Wells appeared, ‘to talk over taking half of house’. ‘Says they may have to go back to their flat in London, as tenants have fled, and they may not be able to let it, but wants
to come here,’ Helen recorded in her diary. Since she was on her way to Oxford, this was less of a problem for Helen than the interminable interruptions of expected and unexpected enquiries that plagued her during the months when she was determined to stay in Kent.

On 6 March, Helen caught a train to London, where she and Margaret then switched to the ‘slow train’ at Paddington. Later that day, the two were finally installed at Francine’s, Helen being thoroughly fed up with Margaret and hoping her tagalong would soon disappear. Perhaps Margaret had also tired of Helen, for she did indeed move along with surprising rapidity. Within two days, Margaret had found a job and began to move her belongings to Oxford. ‘Devoutly thankful’, Helen wrote in her diary to mark the occasion. Margaret ‘has fed on me emotionally for the past month and am fed to the teeth’, she complained to M-O.

Without Margaret, the Oxfordshire countryside was a pleasant getaway from the continual air operations over Kent. The village where she now lived was much more lively than her home in Kent, and, though she felt compelled to do housework to earn her keep at Francine’s, the stay was enjoyable. Nonetheless, Helen could still hear the air-raid sirens of London at night, and it sent her into ‘much vicarious suffering, as know London was getting it’. As she lay in bed, listening to the sirens and distant gunfire, she thought of her husband and felt pangs of concern, knowing he was in the midst of the raid, worrying he was working too hard (as she thought he often did) and wondering if he was getting enough sleep.

Although the distant sound of raids cut into her own sleep, she bitterly contrasted those around town who
looked ‘so full of sleep’ with the ‘drawn tired faces in Kent and London’. The next day, she took advantage of the quiet and wallowed in the ‘1st
really
quiet afternoon I’ve known since I left Scotland 6½ years ago.’ Still, Helen felt unsettled: Francine’s family was descending on the farm for the Easter holidays and, although her friend insisted she stay, Helen couldn’t bear the thought of being a burden. So, once again, she made arrangements to flee – this time to her beloved Minehead.

German bombers darkened Kentish skies during Operation Steinbock, which lasted from January to April 1944. While this period certainly tried Mitchell’s nerves and, indeed, got the better of her, the ‘baby blitz’ of 1944 was only a spike in the horrifying air traffic that continually buzzed overhead throughout the war. Indeed, in the months leading up to the concerted effort of Steinbock, Helen marked numerous air raids in her village.

Although the 1940–1 blitz is the best known, and most intense, of the bombings over Britain, many – especially those in the south-east – endured an almost continual prospect of death and destruction from the air throughout the war. In the relatively quiet month of January 1943, for instance, thirty-eight children and six teachers were killed when a bomb hit their school during a raid on south-east London. And those living on the coastline were never safe from the so-called ‘tip ’n’ run raids’, where one or several planes materialized out of nowhere, rained bombs down and evaporated as quickly as they came. In May 1943, twenty-three young women working ack-ack in Great Yarmouth were killed when a tip ’n’ run raid dropped bombs on their hostel.

In mid-October 1943, the local air raid damage assessor came to look over the damage done to the Mitchells’ carpentry shed. Helen often retreated to the shed to read, as, compared to her dark dungeon of a home, it had good natural light. Despite the fact that she essentially lived in the shed during the day, the assessor informed her that there were no available funds to patch up damaged outbuildings, much to Helen’s chagrin. He also reported that thirty-two bombs had dropped around the village during the previous week. Although windows were blown out across the district and ‘filth’ shaken from the rafters of Helen’s ‘dear olde place’ – requiring extra elbow grease to clean up – luckily there were no casualties.

In February 1942, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, had decided to strike at workers’ morale in Germany, selecting Lübeck, a beautiful and historic city on the Baltic. Harris didn’t think the town ‘a vital target’, but it was better, in his estimation, to decimate an ‘industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city’.
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On 28/29 March, British bombers destroyed half the city.

The Lübeck raids initiated another phase of the blitz on Britain. In retaliation for the bombing, Hitler ordered raids on tourist towns chosen from
Baedeker’s
Great Britain: A Handbook for Travellers
. It was Hitler’s desire to attack civilians and centres of cultural and historical importance aggressively and thus exact the most severe damage on home front morale. ‘Terror attacks of a retaliatory nature are to be carried out against towns other than London,’ the order stated.
2
Goebbels noted in his diary that,

From April to June 1942, Exeter, Bath, Norwich, Canterbury and York were all targeted and suffered damage to medieval and Georgian buildings, as well as loss of life.

It was during these so-called Baedeker raids that Natalie Tanner and her family came the closest to experiencing the blitz first hand. She awoke in the small hours of 29 April 1942 to sirens and distant thuds that rumbled the foundations of her home just outside Leeds. In the morning, she gathered that York had been hit. When she went with Hugh to collect his belongings from the mental hospital, where he’d spent the previous eight months because of his breakdown, she was shocked at the damage done to the train station. Other than that, nothing else seemed particularly out of place to her. She never mentioned the nearly 10,000 homes and businesses damaged, the destruction of the mid-fifteenth-century Guildhall, or the two hundred wounded and ninety-three left dead by the bombers.

Sporadically between 31 May and 3 June 1942, approximately eighty bombers visited Canterbury, damaging buildings in the cathedral precincts, but causing little damage to the cathedral itself: some bombs fell on the roof, but failed to explode. Though she was not far from the cathedral town, the damage to Canterbury was not in the forefront of Helen’s thoughts. Tired of being cooped up inside, Margaret knocked on the door when the sirens went on 2 June, pleading with
Helen to roam the village lanes with her. Helen bluntly refused and ‘got rid of her at the all clear’.

That night, Helen’s thoughts strayed not to Canterbury, but across the Channel. ‘Can’t sleep for misery of thinking what it must be like in Germany with these raids,’ she noted in her diary. The night before the raids on Canterbury were carried out, 1,000 RAF bombers visited the historic city of Cologne in Germany, dropping 1,500 tons of bombs and causing significant damage. The so-called ‘Millennium’ bombing rendered over 40,000 people homeless, killed nearly 500 (on a par with the recent Baedeker raids carried out on Bath) and destroyed Cologne’s public transport, numerous factories and many buildings of historical importance.
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Several months later, in July 1942, raiders visited Birmingham once again. For the first time in months, Alice Bridges and her family rushed down to the Anderson shelter in her garden. The sirens woke the family at 2 a.m.; Bridges scooped up her daughter and, laden with clothes, gas masks and her key to the shelter, she dashed through the backyard. Once Jacqueline was safe, Alice realized, ‘I had nothing to keep my reputation up.’ Back to the house she ran, returning to the shelter with her hair tidied and stockings on. By this time, the bombers came, ‘pouring across hell for leather’ on their way to the Rover works.

Though Helen escaped to Oxfordshire during the ‘baby blitz’ of 1944, the war was never very far away. She had met her first Americans in Oxford and thought them quiet and a little too loose with their money. When she finally settled in Minehead after her stay with Francine, she saw more of them, training on the hills outside the
town by day, and loudly socializing below her window at night.

The ‘friendly invasion’ of Americans started in early 1942, but began to build rapidly in late 1943 and early 1944.
5
Just prior to D-Day in June 1944, American soldiers and support staff in Britain numbered over 1.5 million. Americans brought with them money, cigarettes, gum and easy smiles. Much to the dismay of British soldiers and moralists alike, they wooed giddy girls and, despite the fact that many ordinary Britons, like Alice Bridges and Helen Mitchell, had seen more bloodshed and destruction than the Americans had, they acted as if they were heroes and saviours. It wasn’t long before American arrogance, affluence and ebullience touched a raw nerve. ‘What’s wrong with the Yank Army?’ a friend asked Natalie. The answer was the oft-heard sentiment, ‘They are overpaid, overdressed, oversexed and over here.’

As the gradual build-up of American troops suggests, talk of a possible invasion of Western Europe had been in the news and bandied about in pubs for some time. After Hitler reneged on the Nazi–Soviet Pact and ordered troops into Russia in the summer of 1941, Stalin implored the Western Allies to open up a front in the west to take some of the heat off the German onslaught. Many at home agreed, and a great cry of ‘Second Front Now!’ erupted from communists and Conservatives alike in Britain. The slogan was scrawled on walls around the country, and mass demonstrations gathered to call for action on the part of the government. In the event, the opening of another front came not in France, as Stalin had hoped, but rather in Africa in 1942, in the action that eventually allowed for the invasion of Europe through Italy in
1943. While this did alleviate some of the pressure on Russia, it was generally accepted that occupied France must be invaded and liberated to knock Germany out of the war.

In the summers of 1942 and 1943, M-O questioned their diarists about their feelings regarding the possibility of invading the French coast. The overall tenor of the response was one of anxious fear surrounding the inevitability of impending, but necessary, doom. This fear was especially palpable at the nadir of British fortunes in 1942, while the country was still reeling from the losses of Singapore and Tobruk. The fall of Tobruk in Libya to the Germans – and the capture of the 33,000 British soldiers garrisoned there – was, as Churchill admitted, a disgrace that nearly cost him the premiership. In the wake of such stunning defeats, Nella Last was frightened by the very words ‘second front’, but her mind told her ‘timorous heart we
must
go sooner or later’. Helen Mitchell felt that ‘We should only make a mess of it,’ and thought it was better to do nothing and let the Germans tire themselves out. Edie Rutherford tried not to think about it. ‘I just can’t bear … it,’ she admitted. ‘My blood runs cold because I feel that if we do it we shall have to do it in such force that the slaughter will be worse than anything yet seen.’

After a raid on Dieppe in August 1942 decimated a trial invasion force of 6,000 troops, mostly Canadian, the women’s fears seemed validated and the ‘Second Front Now!’ movement lost some of its exuberance. For the diarists, Dieppe was a ‘confusing’ and impotent jab at a seemingly impervious foe. ‘The Germans seem so dreadfully strong,’ Nella Last worried. Helen Mitchell was simply ‘depressed’ by the raid, and they
all wondered why the military would attempt such an ill-planned and costly adventure.

There was more confidence in 1943, especially after the victory at El Alamein in November 1942, the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in January 1943 and Rommel’s surrender in the sands of North Africa in May, the very month that M-O put the question once again to its writers. But still, everyone dreaded the massive loss of life that they knew in their hearts – and for which the government braced them – was coming. The novelist and a fellow Mass-Observation diarist Naomi Mitchison perhaps struck the tone best when, anticipating D-Day in May 1944, she wrote,

In the spring of 1944, rumours percolated and bets were placed as to when the much-talked about second front would begin. Churchill himself fuelled speculation when, in March, he alluded to the impending invasion and beseeched the people to prepare for the ‘hour of our greatest effort’, when the Allies would ‘hurl themselves upon the foe and batter out the life of the cruellest tyranny which has ever sought to bar the progress of mankind’.
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Around Minehead, American training operations intensified as guns blazed continuously that spring. Everyone anxiously awaited the much-anticipated, but dreaded, opening of the second front. On a beautiful summer-like day in late April, Helen Mitchell sat by the sea and tried to rest. Though
everyone around her seemed happy, she nonetheless felt as though ‘We’re on edge of volcano.’