Spring 1976
Pauly, I’ve mentioned my brother Ernie before, haven’t I? Of course I have.
He got called up in March 1916, along with all the other single young men, when the Government introduced conscription. I think I might have told you that?
Well, anyway, he did. Conscription caused quite a bottleneck, actually. Suddenly, the Army had more recruits than it could handle. So for weeks, he hung around at home. He’d given up his job, and anyway, who was buying stockings in the middle of a World War? Nobody.
Then from one day to the next, they whisked him away, to do his basic training.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to go very far: they sent him to a big camp in Hyde Park! For weeks he lived in a smelly, leaky tent along with the other recruits, in the cold and damp, eating stodgy food that upset his delicate stomach.
Sometimes they were put on trains or lorries to Reigate, just south of London in the North Downs, for long, exhausting night marches on ‘haversack rations’, which wasn’t much. They spent June on manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, growing blisters on their heels and getting lost in the driving rain.
‘Join the Army and see the world’, they used to say. Ha!
After his basic training was over, and he could march without bumping into the man in front, and dig trenches and use a rifle and a bayonet, they were going to send his unit to France, to the Western Front. Then they didn’t. Then he was going to Greece, the Salonika campaign. But he didn’t.
No explanation.
What with one thing and another, he spent most of 1916 hanging around in barracks with the rest of the reserve battalion.
He wrote home, of course, but wasn’t allowed to say much. Sometimes we’d get letters or postcards with words or whole sentences blacked out.
Anything about troop movements or training could be used by the enemy to work out what we had planned, you see. You couldn’t mention place names. Anything which criticised the Army, the food, the officers, the training was a bad idea, because all your post would be read before it was sent, and you could get in serious trouble.
You know, Pauly, it’s quite surprising what people can get used to, what quickly becomes ordinary and dull. War films make wartime look so much more thrilling than it really was.
The first year of the Great War was exciting alright – in a frightening, worrisome sort of way. After that, well, we just got used to it. It was just a relentless, never-ending slog.
Everything being in short supply; the dark streets; the cheerful newspaper headlines about victories here, there and everywhere – but the long, long, lists of casualties. The disappearance of horses from the streets, and the motor cars we’d just got used to.
The horses had all been sent to the Front, poor things, and the cars were all locked up in garages, because there was no fuel for them. Or they were scrapped to use the metal for guns, tanks, aircraft and ships.
Even the bombing became routine. In summer 1917, the Zeppelins started to be replaced by big biplanes – Gothas. They were faster, more manoeuvrable and could do more damage, but our defences were better too. After a few daring raids in broad daylight, when several of them were shot down, they went back to night raids, like the Zeppelins before them. We went down the Underground when the raids were bad, but otherwise, we just got on with it.
Young men had disappeared from civilian life – the workplace, social life, family life – but they reappeared in uniform, looking very dashing, we thought. London became much more of a cultural mix. There were troops from all over the Empire, you see: Indians, Canadians, Africans, Australians and New Zealanders, West Indians. Different faces, exotic accents.
Then in 1917 the Americans came in, too. That was all quite exciting for us girls and young women. Though my favourites were still our own Navy boys and the Royal Flying Corps, which became the RAF.
On the whole, though, the public mood was low.
Winter 1917 was particularly bad. The Government was obsessed with the ‘spy threat’, so communications of all sorts were heavily monitored and censored. Everyone got quite paranoid.
The German U-boats were affecting our trade situation badly. Britain in those days was the centre of a world empire, and being a small island with a large population, we were heavily dependent on overseas trade. When the Germans started sinking our merchant ships, and forcing others to take longer routes across the Atlantic, it had a big effect on the goods in the shops. Even basic foods became scarce and we started to worry that we were really going to starve. Ration cards were introduced.
It was obvious that the Western Front wasn’t moving. The opposing armies had got bogged down in the mud and barbed wire, and nobody could advance without terrible losses. The War was just grinding on and on, killing more and more of our young men. The unions and others called ever more loudly for an end to the War, and we no longer thought that was treachery. It was starting to seem like common sense.
Then out of the blue, we got a postcard from Ernie. He was in Egypt!
He made it sound like the most wonderful holiday: glorious sunshine and swimming in a lake and eating exotic fruits like melons and dates. He’d even ridden on a camel!
As for me, I was having a good War, all things considered.
Relations with Mother had improved, now that we hardly saw each other. By the middle of 1917, so about when Ernie was in Egypt, I suppose, I’d finished my training and I was a qualified ‘lady clerk’.
There was no shortage of work.
Although a lot of peacetime activities were limited, or shut down completely, there was plenty to do in the textile mills that were producing soldiers’ uniforms and kit bags and canvas tents, and in the munitions factories. There was the Land Army, growing food to keep the nation from starving, and there was … well, everything actually. Women were carpenters, painters, tram drivers, mechanics.
Women could do anything a man could do, as it turned out.
My first job was at Waring & Gillow in Hammersmith – just up the road from the Girl Clerks School in Fulham. Before the War it had been a famous furniture factory, but now it was making parts for fighter and bomber aircraft. The shop floor was in operation continuously, night and day, two shifts.
No, I worked in the office. I wasn’t building aircraft personally.
Don’t you laugh, though. All the craftspeople were women by this point, as I recall. Only the supervisors and managers were male.
Oh, there was lots of office work to do. There was no end to it. Ordering materials, cataloguing, checking inventory. All the other administrative tasks involved in running a large business with hundreds of employees. It was vital work, and I was proud to be playing my tiny part in it. It was a great opportunity for a sixteen-year-old, actually.
If I thought that earning a regular wage was going to make me financially independent, though, I was very much mistaken.
I had to hand Mother my wage packet as soon as I got home, every Friday, and if it was opened, and the money inside wasn’t exactly what it said on the packet, questions were asked, I can tell you!
Then, unexpectedly, Father started to talk about ‘doing his bit’, now I was earning a regular wage. Mother was livid.
You see, the removals business had died. Pickfords’ nice new vans and lorries had been sent to the Front, and they never came back. The beautiful big draught horses went to pull artillery and supplies through the Flanders mud, and that was the end of them, too.
Though people still needed things moving, if they’d been bombed out for instance, there were few vehicles to move them, and petrol was strictly rationed. Civilians were reduced to moving house using hand carts, or wheelbarrows.
Father was in his mid-forties, and a big, strong man, fitter than many half his age. He knew all about transport, how to load a lorry or a waggon safely, he could drive a heavy goods vehicle, and he knew horses.
So in winter 1917, he joined the Royal Army Service Corps.
After basic training, they put him straight to work as a driving instructor, teaching recruits to drive lorries. He must have been perfect for the role.
Coming up:
This Friday in Tales from the Wood: Pauly considers the deficiencies of changing room design, and the mystery of girls. (Paid subscriptions.)
Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: Ernie has a narrow escape. Lizzy May begins her post-war life with a new job.
Reading this feels like stumbling across someone's old letters in an attic. Funny how it's not the big dramatic moments that stick with you - it's the stuff about leaky tents in Hyde Park and censored postcards home. Makes the whole thing feel weirdly... normal. Real.
Thank you for writing this Steve.
Wasn't so long ago that we went to war on horseback. Imagine what will happen in another fifty years.