The Girl from Station X (16 page)

Anne seems far more interested in these vignettes, in the delightfully Italian flavour of the little streets near her headquarters in Cleveland Street and in her colleagues, than in David. There
is Mrs Chavasse – Chevvy – who has already lost a husband and a baby, and Dawes, an RAF ‘Lothario’, who had come over in 1914 with the 1st Australians as a Trooper,
joined the Royal Flying Corps and is as tough as hell. He was very badly injured in a plane crash and has to wear steel clamps and suchlike.

When at last she writes of David –
You suddenly know they are the only person for you and it is marvellous
–
it does not ring true. She adds:
You don’t notice their looks or anything.

What young woman would not notice her fiancé’s looks? She adds obliquely that her friend Juliet’s aunt wrote to congratulate her, meaning, presumably, that Anne and David are
now engaged. I was struck by the contrast to her diary of four years earlier, of how excited she had been when Fife had declared his love.

There is a glimmer of this when, at last, in early January 1940, David sends a telegram announcing that he is coming to London that night on leave.
Was so thrilled. I rushed home. I
never realised how much I missed him before.
Anne notes that she is about to accompany David to see his parents, but there is not one word after that about the visit – strange
for such a conscientious diarist.

Her life then as Duty Driver – negotiating her way through the blackouts to balloon barrage sites, being chatted up in Soho Square in her lunch hour by a well-travelled ARP warden, whose
company she seems to have enjoyed more than any encounter with David – contrasts with the life led by David’s parents, who, judging by later diary entries, sound rather stuffy and
unlikely to have approved of their future daughter-in-law being picked up by strangers. I enjoyed these anecdotes about Anne’s casual meetings in wartime London. They showed a side of my
mother that I appreciated.

There were a couple of aborted meetings with David that January of 1940 and Anne recorded that he had the new naval job he wanted, adding proprietorially:
I am not too pleased,
especially as I heard Haw-Haw (for the first time) tonight saying that they proposed to treat the new ships as warships.
(‘Haw-Haw’ was William Joyce, who, throughout the
war, had broadcast Nazi propaganda to the British from Germany by radio. He was tried, found guilty of treason and put to death in 1946.) Nor was David the most eager of suitors, leaving longish
intervals between his telephone calls. Still a virgin, Anne had a long talk with her older widowed colleague about sex and marriage:

I told Chevvy that I thought it a good idea to sleep with someone before you married them and she agreed . . . and said that for success in marriage there needed to
be a great physical harmony or it could be hell . . . She asked me: ‘Does the physical side frighten you?’ To which I replied yes, it did a bit and that I couldn’t reconcile the
mental with the physical. She said that married life might do that for me and remove any repressions that I suffered from and that I should only marry somebody kind and who would understand me . .
. She asked me too if I had any photographs of David.

Anne, it appears, had not.

I told her that I had been discontented with life for the last two years and she said that it must have been amazing for me to come to K. Hse and see life from the
bottom up, instead from the top down. She suddenly said to me too: ‘You keep everything to yourself, don’t you?’ To which I replied yes.

Anne was
not
keeping everything to herself – she had her diary. The fact that she wrote it nearly every day of the war, despite a demanding work schedule and an often hectic
social life, shows that, as an emotional outlet alone, it was essential to her. She also expresses in it her first sign of personal ambition, stating, after a couple of months at Kelvin House, that
she is sick of always being in the ranks, and could do a whole lot better.

In late March 1940, having been encouraged by her boss, Mrs Welsh at Kelvin House, she completed a Code and Cipher course at Harberton Mead, Oxford. When I read about this
– she was hopeless at arithmetic, as I am – it was with delight that I saw how she improved each day, encouraged by the teacher, nicknamed by the girls ‘The Flying Flea’.
When she listed everyone’s final exam marks, with herself two-thirds of the way down, with 75.6 per cent, I found to my surprise that I was extremely disappointed that she was not in the top
three.

Immediately afterwards, Anne started a new job, at Bicester, as one of two clerks. Bicester was an airfield used by the RAF, from where the two main types of aircraft, Hudsons and Blenheims,
were sent out to bomb Germany. Anne had to receive and send messages from Bomber Command headquarters in High Wycombe. She enjoyed using her new skills.
A Type X came.
A.M.
[Air Ministry]
excelled themselves with 5 Corrupt GPs in 10 lines, which I succeeded in working out, before the amendment came and was v. proud of
myself!
– and she was particularly thrilled by one secret message which she recorded in her diary, surely against the rules:

A thrilling Type X case in today, the 1st really interesting message so far from Bomber Command Headquarters. To say that the RAF in France were making V. important reconnaissances
today and that if any planes landed at our aerodrome a report from the crew were to be telephoned to Bomber Command Intelligence at once. They say that on this reconnaissance depends a lot of our
next moves.

Not until early April does Anne meet David again, in London –
I was so glad to see him.
David and Anne do not appear to have known each other well when Anne
agreed to marry him. It is clear also that she did not know herself.

I see her in that period being pulled in two directions, by the old world, represented by David and his parents and by the old-fashioned country life that my grandmother wished her to lead, and
by the new world of work, in a setting where many of the old class barriers were being broken down. Because of the war, she and many other girls like her who had had leisured lives were now using
their brains in a disciplined way.

Anne was also meeting a wide range of people. There are several references to class – she often repeats, as though to convince herself, that she feels more at home with people from her own
background. However, judging from her accounts of daily life, and having known myself some of those with whom she made lifelong friends during the war – Mrs Hunt, her landlady in Leighton
Buzzard, Ida Knott (Knotty), with whom she first worked at Bomber Command, High Wycombe, and Rita Davies, a Communist from Glasgow encountered at Bletchley Park, and countless others – I am
not sure that this was the case. I suspect that one reason for the frequent references to feeling ‘at home’ with those from
the same world
was that my mother,
unlike my grandmother, did
not
feel socially secure.

My grandmother was the daughter of a man who had made a fortune in less than twenty years. He had carved a place for himself and his family in British and American ‘society’ and had
lived to see his four daughters successfully married. He had provided for them and for future generations. He could hold his head high and my grandmother and her three sisters were proud of him. My
mother, however, was an only child with no father to protect her and, because of the early death of her brother, a sole heiress. She was the granddaughter of a self-made Irishman (‘squireens
from Queens County’, my grandmother said of her father’s antecedents), who had founded his fortune on the back of the guano trade. Michael’s effort and hard work were certainly
something to be proud of and, on Anne’s father’s side, her ancestry could be traced a long way back in Ireland and a cousin, Raymond Grace, was featured in
Burke’s
Peerage
. However, her fortune was relatively new and she was not of the same aristocratic class as some of her smarter friends, such as Rosemary Bowes-Lyon, a close relation of the Queen
Mother, or the daughters of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, with whom Anne had occasionally socialised in Paris in 1932, and when ‘doing the season’.

Jean told me that Anne had confided to her that she felt she was an heiress by default. If her brother had lived, he would have had Knowle and at least half of the inheritance.

On 7 April 1940, Anne, with twenty-four hours’ leave, accompanied her fiancé David to one of his family homes near Warwick Castle, where the basement was now
occupied by boys from one of Dr Barnardo’s homes. Anne found it sad going round upstairs, with everything shut up and falling to pieces.
Often I still can’t believe that the
war won’t end tomorrow and we shall all be happy again . . . It could really be very attractive I think if a lot was spent on it.
She added that there were about 7,000 acres,
including two villages, but no electric light or central heating, and she doubts that they could ever afford to live there properly. It seemed that she was trying to play the part of a suitable
future wife.

Judging from her inability, or refusal, when she was married to my father, to run a far smaller country house, it would surely have been a disaster if they had gone ahead with the marriage. Even
if they had not taken over that huge estate, my mother would have been expected by David, and his parents, to run her home like any upper-class wife of that period. David might not have been as
long-suffering as my father proved to be in taking on duties that traditionally belonged to a wife.

After my father died, my mother had for several years a cook who was a physiotherapist by training. My mother didn’t care about food but my aunt and others who came to stay were astounded
by Mrs S’s ‘cooking’. My aunt told me that for supper one evening all they’d had was a slice of old pâté and some lettuce leaves. Surely this was not what you
employed a cook for. One Christmas, I recall Mrs S telling me proudly that she had sliced the vegetables for the Christmas lunch two days in advance. When finally my mother asked Mrs S to leave,
she did not dare do it in person but instead wrote her a letter which was delivered by the driver who picked Mrs Stubbs up from the station on her return from her annual long holiday. Mrs S refused
to accept a written dismissal and marched in to talk to my mother. My mother was terrified.

Like other young couples in wartime, Anne and David must have found it difficult to get to know each other better. His short, infrequent leaves from the navy did not coincide
often with hers, and he seems then to have always felt obliged to visit his parents. Maybe he was simply being a dutiful son, but it appears that he was in thrall to them.

After that visit to his home, Anne drove alone in the blackout back to Bicester, while David went by train, to return to his ship. He wanted her to move back to London, so that he would be able
to see her more easily when he did come on leave, and had begged her to ask about a reposting.

Two days after David’s departure, after Germany had invaded Norway and Denmark, Anne did show concern, writing of her fears of David’s possible involvement in the ensuing long naval
battle. Like many in wartime, now it seems that she felt the pressure to marry because events were hotting up in Europe and at home. It was almost as though she thought that marriage would allay
her unease about her country’s general situation.

April 21st 1940. 40 Belgrave Square.

I think of David constantly, I never realised quite how much I am in love with him, until this naval warfare really started. Came to London tonight, the train packed
with soldiers returning to work, mostly the West Kents. The moon looked marvellous, just rising, as we came along, but we had to have the blinds pulled down as it was blackout time, although quite
light. I always miss the lights most as they used to look going over the river. I always used to look forward to it at night and with all the lights reflected in the water it used to be very
beautiful just there. London seemed very empty tonight, and as beautiful as I have ever seen it, a brilliantly clear night with myriads of stars in the sky and the moon, absolutely full lighting up
the whole sky. I walked round the square to enjoy it, with Mum, when we came here. Every now and then, if you looked hard enough up into the sky, you could just make out the dark form of one of the
balloons, which seemed to be flying rather higher than usual and there was one which appeared to be almost touching the moon itself with its fins outlined clearly in the moonlight. I thought if
London were bombed, how terribly I should mind and how I should never forgive the Germans. I love London, in a way new to me now. I used to know only a tiny bit of it, but now I feel that I begin
to know it more and I have seen it in so many moods. I love every stone.

The following day, she tried on her half-finished wedding dress. She still was able to escape, sometimes in the Knowle woods, where she had been earlier that day:

April 21st 1940. Knowle.

The most perfect day. Rode, the woods are full of primroses and the sunniest banks are a mass of cuckoo flowers, with celandines and a few violets too, filling in
between. In one part of the wood there are thousands of anemones. It was the hottest day since last summer by far. Almost without a cloud and it made me think of all those marvellous days of the
past . . . It made the war seem worse than ever somehow and so remote from the calm of today.

On April 22nd, Anne was stationed at Bicester – 13 Operational Training Group – and was soon enjoying being in the thick of the action on a Bomber Command station,
where planes were flying in and out. She felt, in this job, that she was contributing to the war in a more direct way.