Singled Out (6 page)
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
journey through suffering. Ruth Holland dedicated her novel ‘To the
memory of A.I.E. Killed in action in France, ’. Clearly autobiographical, a sample of Holland’s thinly fictionalised experience must have expressed what many of her readers knew on their own account:
Something had snapped. Instead of a life that was like a splendid tune in her ears, with ordered sound and movement, a definite form, even though on a scale beyond her human powers to grasp, she was surrounded by a mocking terrifying jumble of discords, in which she could find no sense at all. It was that loss of contact that was so terrifying, as if she had lost the key and could no longer read the signs of life around her.
In
A World of Love
(),* a later novel which describes the sabotage wrought by one soldier’s death on two generations of living women, Elizabeth Bowen wrote even more eloquently of the dislocation the First
World War introduced into the lives of the living:
[Guy] had had it in him to make a good end, but not soon; he would have been ready to disengage himself when the hour came, but rightfully speaking it had not . . . It was simply that these years she went on living belonged to him, his lease upon them not having run out yet. The living were living in his lifetime; and of this his contemporaries . . . never were unaware. They were incomplete.
For many of the bereaved the established Church fell short in answering
the questions posed by the deaths of such a multitude. How could a
beneficent God have permitted them to suffer and die? Were they now
before God’s throne? Large numbers of those who could not bear it at that
time turned in their grief-stricken denial to psychics and clairvoyants, who in turn conjured up bogus visions of the returned dead. In those dark * An extraordinary metaphysical ghost story, in which Guy, killed in , haunts the former home now inhabited by his cousin, his ex-fianceé and her daughter. Inescapably, all three women are drawn into the vortex of his non-presence. ‘By striking when it did, before he had tried to see, even, whether he
could
consolidate, death made him seem a defaulter, a runner-out upon his unconsummated loves . . . His immortality was in their longings . . .’ (Chapter ).
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
days spiritualism flourished; by the Spiritualists’ National Union had
doubled the number of its pre-war affiliated societies – an estimated quarter of a million bereaved members conducting seances to reach out to their lost loved ones. ‘Poor human beings . . .’ mourned Beatrice Webb, when
she heard that her sister Maggie was seeking to communicate with her son,
killed at Ypres. And Maggie conceded that she was powerless in the face
of her terrible need for him: ‘How deep is the craving for extended
personality beyond the limits of a mere lifetime on earth!’
After Roland Leighton’s death, Vera Brittain went back to her job as a VAD
in a hard-working London hospital. Gertrude Caton-Thompson put her
hopes behind her and got a lowly job working as a filing clerk in the Ministry of Shipping. The war was a fact of life, and with the men away, Britain’s women stiffened their upper lips and set to work to run the country:
War Girls () by Jessie Pope
There’s the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
There’s the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
Strong, sensible, and fit,
They’re out to show their grit,
And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
No longer caged and penned up,
They’re going to keep their end up
Till the khaki boys come marching back.
There’s the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
There’s the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
There’s the girl who cries ‘All fares, please!’ like a man,
And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
Beneath each uniform
Beats a heart that’s soft and warm,
Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
But a solemn statement this is,
They’ve no time for love and kisses
Till the khaki soldier boys come marching home.
Singled Out
But too many of the khaki boys were dead. Too many of the soft warm
hearts kept themselves pure in vain. Bereavements were everyday occur—
rences; but there was a different kind of bereavement lying in wait for many of these strong, sensible, fit war girls. Motor girls and butcher girls, lift attendants and ticket collectors may have set their hopes on love and kisses after the Armistice, but the make-up of British society had changed
irrevocably.
All over Britain the husbands, fathers and young men had gone. In
churches across the country the Roll of Honour bore witness to lives cut
short: sons, brothers and cousins, often half a dozen bearing the same
surname, many of them wiped out in a single campaign or within a few
days of each other, on the Marne, or the Somme, or at Loos. Who would
the gritty war girls love and kiss now? ‘
But who will look for my coming? . . .
Who will seek me at nightfall
?’ wrote Vera Brittain. Like Gertrude, and May, like Emily, Olive and Barbara, she had lost the man she loved; but at least these women
had
loved. Countless women simply never had the chance of romance, let alone marriage or children.
*
This fact had to be faced. In the senior mistress of Bournemouth High
School for Girls stood up in front of the assembled sixth form (nearly all of whom were dressed in mourning for some member of their family) and announced to them: ‘I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out
of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It
is a statistical fact. Nearly all the men who might have married you have
been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you
can. The war has made more openings for women than there were before.
But there will still be a lot of prejudice. You will have to fight. You will have to struggle.’ One of her pupils, seventeen-year-old Rosamund Essex, was never to forget these words. It was ‘one of the most fateful statements
of my life’. When Rosamund, who never married, wrote her memoirs
sixty years later she accepted that her teacher’s pronouncement had been
prophetic:
How right she was. Only one out of every ten of my friends has ever married.
Quite simply, there was no one available. We had to face the fact that our lives would be stunted in one direction. We should never have the kind of happy homes in which we ourselves had been brought up. There would be no husband, no children, no sexual outlet, no natural bond of man and woman. It was going to be a struggle indeed.
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
Winifred Haward was of the same generation. Born in , she grew
up in the village of Old Felixstowe in Suffolk, the daughter of a country
solicitor. The family were not well-off, but they considered themselves
‘gentry’; they were sincerely Christian, and Conservative. Despite being
relatively hard-up, the Hawards sent their children to private schools, and
at Ipswich High School Winifred soon began to show questionable signs
of cleverness. Even then, she was aware that ‘men were not supposed to
like clever girls, and girls were supposed to get husbands’. She was sixteen, and still at school when war broke out. The Hawards’ village was turned into an armed camp, and the family joined the war effort providing ‘comforts’ for the soldiers. Winifred helped, selling cheap cigarettes, tea and buns to the men; she went with her mother when the troop trains left Felixstowe station for France, giving out chocolate, tobacco and postcards to the
soldiers crammed into the carriages. ‘Many we never saw again.’
Winifred became head girl at her school. She was industrious, and an
academic high-flyer; but ever in the background the hideous cruelty of the
war tormented her like an insistent howl of pain. ‘[It] came when I was at
a very sensitive and impressionable age. Dimly I realised that it was going
to be a world without men.’ Teenage boys that she knew, her contemporaries at the Ipswich schools, were sent out to the Front with commissions.
On average they survived two weeks.
In Winifred Haward won the top history scholarship to Girton and
went up to Cambridge. She and the other girl students went to lectures in
Trinity Great Hall; they outnumbered the men four to one. Oblivious, the
lecturer addressed his audience, ‘Gentlemen . . .’
On a misty November morning when Winifred was in her second year
at Cambridge, the war ended. She heard the pealing of bells from St Mary
the Great; students had got into the church and were ringing the long-silent chimes in a wild burst of rejoicing. But she couldn’t find it in her heart to join them. ‘I went into my room and cried for a lost world.’
After the Armistice, Winifred buckled down to her studies. She was a
talented historian, with a questioning mind. And she was ripe for conversion from her Christian Conservative background. Impelled by notions of social injustice and the meaningless suffering of the war, she joined the growing
ranks of socialists and agnostics among the gifted students of her group. But when it came to finding romance, the possibilities started to close in. For a start, chaperones were still compulsory. If you couldn’t get one, you couldn’t go out. Going out was expensive anyway, and she was hampered
by her lack of funds. On £ a term, it was impossible to lead the kind of
life that threw one in the way of eligible boyfriends. It was all very well for
Singled Out
moneyed literati like Rosamond Lehmann and Frances Partridge (her exact
contemporaries at Cambridge), but for Winifred boating and dances seemed
prohibitively pricey on such a modest allowance. Back at home in Suffolk,
the irony of her position was reinforced when she was invited by some of
the local regimental officers (still not demobilised) to play the role of
‘Mamma’ to her pretty younger sister’s ingeńue in an amateur revue. She
found herself on stage in a fright wig singing:
‘If you ever want to marry’ –
‘And I do, dear Mamma’ –
‘It is wisest not to tarry’ –
‘Very true, dear Mamma’ –
Winifred Haward came down from Girton in , after beating all the
men in her two-part History tripos, and staying on for an extra year to do
a research studentship. (Being a woman, she wasn’t eligible for a degree.)
She was now in debt, having borrowed from a student loan fund; she didn’t
want to live in a hostel all her life, she was twenty-three, and she had
reached the age where either marriage or a career would have answered
her need for security. But Winifred had been born into a generation that
could no longer hold to comforting certainties, and she was growing up,
as she had already suspected, into a world without men – particularly
suitable ones. Those brave young officers from her Ipswich schooldays had
all been in front when they led their men over the top. Casualty rates
among officers were roughly double those of the ‘Tommies’. And so
Winifred Haward joined what came to be called the Surplus Two Million.
The same year that Winifred came down from Cambridge, , the
National Census was published. The figures were devastating, confirming
the worst fears of the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School. In
England and Wales there were ,, females and only ,,
males – a difference of a million and three-quarters. This was far worse
than predicted. Already, since the end of the war, newspapers had been
running scare headlines about ‘Our Surplus Girls’. By February the
Manchester Evening News
was running a report on Dr Murray Leslie’s alarming analysis of post-war demographics, in ‘Husband Hunting – Tragedy of England’s Million Surplus Women’. The
Daily Mail
caught the story, with ‘A Million Women Too Many – Husband Hunt’. But with the
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
publication of the Census the figure doubled over—
night, and the
Mail
’s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, felt able publicly to refer to ‘Britain’s problem of two million
superfluous women’. The phrase – with all its insinuating
baggage – refused to go away.
For months the Census story was never out of the
news. The
Daily Express
ran a headline: ‘Problem of the
Surplus Woman – Two Million who can Never
Become Wives’. The
Daily Chronicle
responded,
‘No such thing as a Surplus Woman’. The
Daily Mail
rejoined the debate by
asserting that ‘the superfluous women are a
disaster to the human
race’. The
Times
editorial, more measured but no less
serious, expressed
the
view
that
‘Two millions of
surplus woman—
folk
create
a
question so immense and so far-reaching that few
have yet realized
its import.’ LetIn an issue of
Strand Magazine
caricatured the Husband ters started to fly.
Hunters in full cry
The issue was at
the forefront of
public debate. It seemed nobody knew what to do. Views ranged from:
‘Learn to be useful – transform themselves into an army of workers for this
