Women’s Lives during the Second World War

The paperback will be released by Penguin Books on 15th March 2012.

This book - which covers the war and its aftermath, 1939-1949 - is my most ambitious to date, and was Viking’s lead non-fiction title in Spring 2011. Strong on narrative and emotion, Millions Like Us tracks women’s experiences of a momentous decade through a host of individual stories, drawing on autobiographies, archives and living memory.

 Moving and compassionate but never sentimental, Virginia Nicholson's brilliantly researched, multi-voiced chronicle opens up a new front in our understanding of a tumultuous ten years .  
David Kynaston

This book is my most ambitious to date, and was Viking’s lead non-fiction title for Spring 2011. Strong on narrative and emotion, Millions Like Us tracks women’s experiences of a momentous decade through a host of individual stories, drawing on autobiographies, archives and living memory.

In the 1930s most women still expected to become wives and mothers. The war years took the inferiority myth and destroyed it, catapulting servants and mistresses alike into a world of life and death responsibilities.

From 1941, in an unprecedented move, women were conscripted (though not to combatant duty). Uprooted, these women were now launched into new lives in the WAAF, the WRNS, the ATS, the Land Army, the FANYs, the WVS. They became nurses, railway porters, code-breakers, motorbike despatch riders, lumberjills, fire-watchers, ambulance drivers, entertainers, welders – and even pacifists. Emotionally, their lives were turned upside down by the effects of bereavement, the evacuation of children, homelessness, family break-ups, shotgun marriages, illegitimacy and divorce. But in conditions of “Total War” millions of women – in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed. Women emerged from the war transformed. A whole generation had awakened to their own potential. Deep down, they no longer bought the myth that women were inferior.

Then came peace. Within a year the number of married working women was down by almost a million and a half. The nation’s wives appeared to be retreating to the comfort zone of home and family. At the same time tensions ran high between soldiers expecting to return to their position as undisputed head of the family, and their wives, who might have spent the war years running the home as well as keeping down a job. By 1947 divorce figures were topping 60,000.

By 1951 the number of working women was back to pre-war levels, and the brief encounter with trauma, risk and independence seemed to have given way to traditional values: safety, domesticity, economy and restraint.

But the women who went back were changed for ever. The days of World War 2 had revolutionised their lives. Millions Like Us tracks women’s experiences of a momentous decade through a host of individual stories, drawing on autobiographies, archives and living memory. It tells of their pioneering contributions to our national story, of how they tried to re-make their world in peacetime, of how they loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared. And of how they would never be the same again…

During 2012 I will continue publicising MILLIONS LIKE US through appearances, interviews and articles.
For further information contact Lija Kresowaty at Penguin Books Lija.Kresowaty@uk.penguingroup.com

In 2009 Virginia Nicholson met and interviewed Dame Vera Lynn at her Sussex home. The veteran “Forces’ Sweetheart” talked to Virginia about her wartime singing career and her time in Burma with ENSA. In Millions Like Us, Virginia writes:

 Vera’s voice, and her songs had – and have – a uniquely affecting and patriotic quality which touched her listeners’ souls . Yet she herself recognises that it was her very ordinariness that stole her audiences’ hearts. In her nineties, this woman is still luminously beautiful, but the comfortable cardigan and clipped Cockney are the clues to Vera Lynn’s sweetness and approachability. The lads of the West Kents and the Durham Light Infantry, killing and dying in a rat-infested wilderness strewn with human remains, recognised her as a symbol of the world they were fighting for. 

Excerpts from MILLIONS LIKE US:

Excerpt 1

Chapter 8 “Over There” includes the events of D-Day, May 1944:

In Portsmouth, teenager Naina Cox was working in a big dry-cleaning firm that dealt with service uniforms; she had just completed a Red Cross course that spring. At 2pm on D-Day she was summoned by her commandant to come up to Queen Alexandra's Hospital and help with casualties. Quickly, she ran home to tell her mum, scrambled into her uniform, and headed up the hill to the hospital. There she found the wards had run out of space; the corridors were lined with stretchers. As an inexperienced junior, Naina was given the job of cleaning up the patients. Many were bloody and grimy, but fear had also struck at their bowels, resulting in fouled bodies and garments. For several days Naina washed the excrement from hundreds of traumatised soldiers. "[They] were so completely exhausted they didn't care one jot what happened to them… As I worked… I was thinking, 'How long will it go on? If I come tomorrow and the next day, will I still be doing this?'" But she barely hesitated when the sister asked her to perform the same task on the German prisoners' ward. In a stinking Nissen hut, the terrifying enemy lay festering and utterly demoralised: dirty, unwholesome and glazed with defeat. "Some of them were only kids, they weren't really much older than me. One of the rules of the Red Cross is that you are there to help everybody. I'm glad I didn't refuse to help those men."

During that terrible first week as the Allies battled to gain their foothold in France and German forces retaliated, planes were crashing on the Isle of Wight, and bodies were washed up on its pebbly shores. Sometimes Monica Littleboy accompanied stretcher cases across to the mainland hospital. "I saw sights [there] which I hope I may, please God, never see again. They were burnt so badly as to be unrecognisable, only the burning eyes could one see, and as we loaded our stretchers I could feel those eyes following me round the ward. I tried to smile at them; my smile was stiff and I felt sick and though I was so full of sorrow for them something inside me just seemed horror struck."

Maureen Bolster was equally appalled when she met a shell-shocked lad just back from the fighting. He was trembling, and could barely speak. "Poor kid, all he could say was, 'Make me forget it, please make me forget it. I've just got to.' I felt quite sick with pity… What that kid had seen was beyond telling. For one thing he had seen his special pals blown to pieces."

A soldier who must face fear and horror deals with it in a number of ways. Above all, he has been trained to obey orders, to kill or be killed. If he feels pity, tenderness or sensitivity to his fellow man, he must learn to suppress it in the interests of winning the war. He cultivates a veneer of brutality; he develops black humour, bravado, cynicism, impassivity. He forces himself to forget. Instilled from boyhood, such qualities are all part of growing up to be a man. By contrast, the reactions of Maureen Bolster, Monica Littleboy, Naina Cox, and many other women show the vulnerability of women exposed to war's horrors. Pity, compassion and distress at the pointlessness of human suffering are the emotions of an entire sex unhardened to inhumanity; more than that, a sex as indoctrinated with susceptibility as men have been with their stiff upper lips.

It is impossible to say whether women are by nature more humane and tender-hearted than men. Probably they are not, but it is safe to say that mid-twentieth-century society assumed passivity of its women, just as it expected vigorous action of its men. Built into the 1941 National Service Act was the precondition that women would not make use of lethal weapons, would not kill. Aggression and heroism were left to men. But for many of those soldiers, D-Day proved traumatic; seasick and terrified troops floundered up those beaches past the bodies of their drowned and dying comrades. And the wounded survivors of that bitter fight returned to have the unheroic shit swabbed off them by meek teenagers like Naina Cox.

Excerpt 2

Chapter 11 “Picking Up the Threads” – about the end-of-war celebrations and demobilisation:

As the homecomings began, parties were laid on for the returning servicemen. In Liverpool, as elsewhere in the country, communities welcomed them back with slap-up feasts. There was great baking and cutting of sandwiches. Helen Forrester couldn't help but feel bitter envy at the sight of happy wives, equipped with pails of whitewash, chalking the house walls with their husbands' names: WELCOME HOME JOEY. WELCOME HOME GEORGE. Harry O'Dwyer was one of 30,248 merchant seamen who would never come home to her. Eddie Parry was one of the 264,443 British servicemen who would never come home either. It struck her then that nobody ever painted messages for "the Marys, Margarets, Dorothys and Ellens, who also served.

 It was still a popular idea that women did not need things. They could make do. They could manage without, even without welcomes. 

In fact, many Marys, Ellens and Dorothys spent the next couple of months, or more, feeling jaded and impatient. WAAF driver Flo Mahony was in north Wales for the victory celebrations. There were, she recalls, some small bonfires. But more memorable to her is the sense of uncertainty and resentment:

 None of us knew how much longer we were going to be in the Air Force, or when we were going to get out. The war basically stopped. There was no more wartime flying. And so air crew were redundant and they didn't know what to do with them. So they sent them to the Motor Transport section and told them to go and be drivers – and of course that was our job. So there was quite a bit of resentment of these air crew. And a lot of people were at the end of their tether and were quick to flare up, and there were lots of frictions. 

Everybody was given a Demobilisation number. When your number came up, you went to the Demob Centre and were sent home. Flo Mahony's friend Joan Tagg, a wireless operator, had joined the service later than she had, so didn't expect to be released as early. But the great pride she had taken in this important and highly-graded job suffered a mortifying blow when, in the summer of 1945, it was stopped overnight, and she was posted to Gloucester to do number-crunching in the Records Office:

 The men were coming back, and the men automatically took over our jobs. We weren't wanted… And this was the worst possible posting they could give me because it was clerical. Also, when they posted me as a clerk they wanted me to re-muster, which meant going back two grades. I had loved being a wireless op, and I was absolutely livid. 

Men and women alike chafed at the tin-pot bureaucracy and officiousness that now prevailed. "The day war ended they started the spit-and-polish," says Joan. Flo agrees: "The Air Force was known for being relaxed compared to the army. But now there were so many people sitting about with not enough to do, and suddenly, you had to go on church parade, you had to do this, you had to do that. You had to be properly dressed. And they started making us do drill all over again." There was work, but it seemed to have no purpose. Idle servicewomen – and men – were encouraged to attend EVT (Educational and Vocational Training) classes to prepare them for civilian life. A future as a shorthand typist or counter clerk beckoned…