Hearts Undefeated

Having pondered the wartime futures of the characters in Susan Scarlett's Babbacombe's, I picked up my old Virago copy of Hearts Undefeated, an anthology of Women's Writing of the Second World War - and, lo and behold, it fell open at a page mentioning Noel Streatfeild who, of course, was the real person behind Susan Scarlett. And if that's not serendipity, I don't know what it is!

Writing on September 11, 1939, at the very beginning of the conflict, novelist F Tennyson Jesse said:

It is a very queer war. Our little social life such as it was - quiet but pleasant -has come to a complete end. Noel Streatfeild, complete with gas mask and tin helmet, dashed in for lunch, full of stories about the firemen and ambulancemen at the station where she is an ARP warden. She was going down in the pitch black the other night, dressed in her slacks and dark blue sweater, when a voice with a French accent murmured to her: "Would you like to come home with me, pretty boy? It was one of the French Bond Street tarts. "Shut up, you fool,"said Noel.

"Mon dieu!" said the tart.

Noel Streatfeild. (Pic from Wikipedia).

Streatfeild was tall and thin, so I guess that dressed in trousers and jumper, and in the dark, she might easily have been mistaken for a boy,  and at that time it was still rare for women to wear trousers. She produced 12 light-hearted romances between 1939 and 1951, whilst continuing to write around a dozen novels under her own name, for adults and children. During WW2 she volunteered as an Air Raid Warden in the Mayfair area, and also helped provide support for people in impoverished parts of London. 

Throughout the war Fryniwyd Jesse Tennyson, novelist, playwright, journalist and criminologist, wrote to friends in America describing life in England. Afterwards, she asked for the letters to be returned for publication, Several of her pieces are included in the Virago collection including this little gem, penned on November 4, 1939.

The ARP authorities informed us that it is very important during an aerial bombardment to sit with a cork in your mouth, as the blast from a shell (even a long way off) may snap your jaws to and then, not only may your tongue be cut off, but your ear-drums are blown in. So we ordered our old man to produce us three corks for us to take upstairs, and when he served the coffee after dinner he solemnly presented Tottie with three corks on a little tray in the most correct manner imaginable, remarking: "Your corks, sir!".

The book, edited by Jenny Hartley, features writing by more than 100 women, from the Queen and Princess Elizabeth to titled ladies and MPs, through novelists and journalists, to ordinary housewives, and from service women and nurses to volunteers, as well as internees and refugees. There are excerpts from novels, newspaper reports, magazines, diaries, letters and radio broadcasts on a variety of subjects, from reflections on the humdrum and everyday to accounts of the momentous historic events taking place around the world. 

The Queue at the Fish Shop, by war artist Evelyn Dunbar, who recorded life on the Home Front 
during WW2. It is in the Imperial War Museum, Part of it is on the cover of Persephone's Good Evening, Mrs Craven, by Mollie Panter-Downes, whose work is featured in Hearts Undefeated.

You will recognise many of the names from the old green-spined Viragos and the Persephone lists. There's Mollie-Panter-Downes on rationing, Edith Olivier on a shopping bag and food queue, and Sylvia Townsend Warner on the new austerity, to name but a few. In addition you'll find Joyce Grenfell entertaining the troops, and Barbara Cart;and, who persuaded woman to donate used wedding dresses to be borrowed by service brides! Her maid, who helped press and clean the gowns, never wanted to see another white wedding dress, but Cartland was proud of what she saw as a job well done. She says:

The brides, however, were pathetically grateful. For one day at least a girl who was never meant by nature to be 'a fighting unit' could forget the war, her uniform, her duties, and be a woman. A woman lovely, glamorous, and enticing, a woman to be lost and won.

Others were equally proud of their efforts - which, it has to be said, were probably a lot more practical, even if they lacked the feel-good factor of a posh frock. Zelma Katin a quiet, well-spoken, well-educated, married, suburban woman, became a tram conductress, and in the process transformed into what she called another 'I':

... an aggressive woman in uniform who sharply orders people about, has swear words and lewd jokes thrown at her, works amid rush and noise, fumbles and stumbles about in the blackout, and has dirty hands and grimy neck.

Women bus and trolley bus conductors at the Hammersmith
depot in 1942, (Pic London Transport Museum).

And in another entry, towards the end of the war, she tells us more about her feelings, summing up the way many women must have felt:

I am glad I have done this kind of war work, proud that I still have the moral and physical energy to follow it and I hope that out of this experience I shall have gained a new understanding of life, people and marriage. Like millions of men and women in uniform I cannot pretend I am liking it. Perhaps the sacrifice and hardship are giving us a strength which will enrich us in the future and toughen us for the struggle which lies ahead. 

I will confess that I am thinking not only of a future for humanity, but a future for myself. I want to lie in bed until eight o'clock, to eat a meal slowly, to sweep the floors when they are dirty, to sit in front of the fire, to walk on the hills, to go shopping of an afternoon, to gossip at odd moments.

The war turned women's lives upside down, and the pieces in this book show how they coped, setting to and doing what had to be done without complaint, taking from the experience any small joy they could to keep positive and keep going. You'll find laughter, sadness and anger here - and tremendous resilience and courage. 

When I was a child, the war still was still a recent memory. Now it has become history. But it's worth remembering that these women were writing in the moment, as the war was happening. We know the outcome, but they didn't, so there is an immediacy to the writing - especially the pieces in the final section about the end of the war. I've seen newsreel footage, watched TV programmes, read accounts by historians, but nothing prepared me for the horrors of the written word, put down on paper by those who were there. War artist Mary Kessell's description of the sights and smells of derelict, defeated Berlin will haunt me for a long time. And Martha Gellhorn's report on the living skeletons released from Dachau, and the atrocities committed there, is the stuff of nightmares. How did she, and the soldiers, and the various other people who went in, live with what they had seen and heard? And how did the survivors ever manage to lead a normal life? 

*I've referenced this to the LibraryThing Virago Group's December the - which is a book not fitting any of the previous themes this year!