The Great Silence (33 page)

The Daily Mail Cookbook
of the year included a helpful sequence of diagrams for the cracking and separating process of eggs. Many women had not learned the technique, having never entered the kitchen before. With fewer servants more involvement from the mistress of the house was necessary. Little known practical tips for handling a new world were offered. A lit cigarette allowed to smoulder in the hand was an infallible way of clearing nasty lingering onion smells.

Mills & Boon had published a perfect guide for the novice housekeeper.
Life Without Servants
, subtitled
The Rediscovery of Domestic Happiness
, was by a writer ready to identify themselves only as ‘A Survivor’. The tiny volume measuring four by three inches, designed to fit handily into any pocket, was aimed at those who could not find a good servant or who could not afford the inflated prices of domestic staff in 1920. Further titles in the Mills & Boon series of miniature books designed to offer practical help of other kinds to their post-war readership included
A Little Book for Those Who Mourn
compiled by Mildred Carnegy and
Nerves and the Nervous
by a doctor called Edwin L. Ash.

Eileen Rafter was determined to escape from the domestic drudgery that she saw all around her. Eileen lived in Liverpool and the ever busy Merseyside docks had inspired in her a wish to see the world. Eileen had no ambition to go into service or to be a housewife, and would only marry, she told her mother, if she managed to ‘land an Admiral’. That way, she explained, she could travel abroad on beautiful ships and visit exciting places. Otherwise she would stay firmly single and be in charge of her own life.

Clothes were her passion. The ragged black shawls and greasy braided hair of the older women who lived in the houses in her street filled her with horror. Their manner of dress had remained unchanged for three reigns. But standards in Eileen’s own home were different. One day she remembered looking up at her elegant mother who was dressed for the ballet, wearing a hat ‘with a jaunty little veil thing hanging off it, which was just to keep the flies off, but I thought to myself “oh she looks so lovely“’. The creamy panama-coloured broderie anglaise hat that Eileen herself wore each week
to church in Birkenhead was so fussy that the lacy folds had to be ironed every Sunday. Mrs Rafter was a wonderful dressmaker and would make up patterns from the Weldon pattern book, but adapted under her young daughter’s direction so that from the age of ten Eileen was the self-appointed ‘style-setter’ of the Rafter family. ‘This dress has two frills at the bottom, but I think it would look better if you leave one of them off,’ Eileen would advise her mother and Mrs Rafter would oblige.

As soon as she left school Eileen had applied for a job in a shop. Answering an advertisement in the
Liverpool Echo
for a cashier in Lewis’s department store, Eileen soon became anxious that she ‘would get a big bottom’ if she remained sitting down in the glass box for days on end taking the money, and reading poetry in between transactions (‘a novel would have been too frequently interrupted’). Here she learned the secrets of the commissions system and soon, after smiling winningly at the manager through the tiny window between her own office and his, she found herself employed in the haberdashery department selling the new silk stockings. She had worked out from behind her cashier’s desk that the commissions there were far higher than in the gloves section or even in the newly popular cosmetic department.

Shortly afterwards Eileen was transferred to the London branch of Lewis’s where she slept in service block accommodation with other girls. Her room had a sofa that turned into a bed if you pulled it apart. ‘It was very new and very strange.’ But Eileen’s eye for the stylish had impressed the dress buyer, Mr Leak, so much that he took her with him to Paris to view the collections and put her to work making sketches of the designs she saw there. The plan was to bring the drawings back to London and make copies of the clothes for important customers.

One evening in Paris Eileen was taken to dinner for pressed duck and champagne in the grandest of all Parisian restaurants, La Tour d’Argent. There, feeling herself to be well on the way to a lifetime’s career in fashion, she renewed her intention to avoid the double horrors of domestic service and marriage. Her mother was proud of her child. She could never have imagined such a life for herself.

Late Spring 1920

Adam Thorpe, born in the wonderfully sunlit year of 1911, wished everyone would forget about the war. In the early months of 1920, on successive rainy Saturday afternoons, Adam had travelled with his family from village green to village green, standing around in the mud listening to the bugler playing the Last Post as the all too familiar sound ‘cut across a silence like the silence in a church before the coffin arrives’. On each of those cloud-filled Saturdays Adam had watched as the white sheets covering the still shapeless object fluttered to the ground to reveal memorial stones dedicated first to his grandfather, then to his uncle and finally to his own father and the other men of the village who had fallen with them. He watched the grief of his grandmother, his aunt and his mother and, with some impatience, wondered whether life would always consist of looking backwards.

Lucy Neale was still unable to believe she would never again feel the rough khaki uniform of her father’s jacket brushing against her cheek during an embrace. Only when ten-year-old Lucy went to bed at night and remembered to say her prayers did her adored father’s absence seem believable. In tears she would say her prayers just as he had taught her, but she found it almost impossible to sleep without receiving his kiss on her forehead or hearing the words ‘Goodnight, Lulu, God bless you.’

For some the return of a parent did not add to the comfort of life at home, especially if the lack of a job contributed to lack of money. In the overcrowded homes of the very poor tension had intensified since the Armistice. Henry Freedman slept upside down in the same bed as his two brothers, trying to find space for his head between two sets of toes that agitated his hair all night. Despite the mass of bodies, they were cold, and a dusty red brick warmed in
the fireplace joined them under the sheets. The ever present smell of carbolic and sulphur that hung over the bed was never strong enough to deter the bed bugs and the walls were covered in tiny insect-sized bloodstains indicating the moment when the squashed creatures had finally met their end. A stinking pot-pourri of tea, manure, tobacco, sweat, soup, fried fish and poverty rose up to the bedroom floor. Jobless men clustered on benches outside in the street, bored and apathetic.

Women struggled to find enough money to feed their children, starving themselves so there was more to go round, paying the doctor with precious ounces of butter, dreading the knock on the door that would bring the debt collector. Cleanliness was a mark of pride, but in the soot-filled back alleys of the cities there was little chance that the heavy sheets that had taken so long to wash would be clean by the time they had dried in the filthy air of the back yards. Keeping the dirt out of the house was a daily challenge. Outside taps, the only source of domestic water, would freeze over in cold weather. The temptations offered by the moneylender led only to further debt, but sometimes desperation won. Outside in the streets smells continued to identify the different areas of London’s commercial districts. Commercial Road itself was thick with smoke from the cigars that were rolled in the factories there; from the furniture-making warehouses in Curtain Road came the smell of linseed oil and turpentine.

Unemployment had become the axis on which fear of destitution and shame balanced precariously. For the majority of the poor the ending of the war had not improved life. It was a world full of insecurity. And the middle classes developed a new contempt for the poor. Those who had enough money to celebrate their survival found the spiritlessness of the malnourished and the cynical hard to tolerate.

But children have a way of ignoring or not noticing the hardship that adults endure. Street games in the East End remained constant before, during and after the war. Empty cocoa tins threaded with a piece of string to form a support provided makeshift stilts. Hopscotch grids were chalked on to the pavement. Skipping was accompanied by rhymes handed down from parent to child. The click of marbles and the thwack of conkers
in season were heard up and down the back streets, accompanied by childish laughter.

Away at boarding school Tom Mitford lived a lucky life that knew nothing of hardship. The spring holidays, at home at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire, were the happy confirmation of the end of a long winter. While food at Lockers Park in Hemel Hempstead was not quite up to Savoy standards, Tom was relieved that the quantity had not suffered much even during the war years. What is more, he was allowed all sorts of dishes that he was never given at home; his mother, known to him and his sisters as Muv, had a rule that ‘what was good enough for Moses was good enough for us’. The Mitford children therefore craved all the foods that were forbidden to the ancient Israelites, including bacon, lobster, pigeon, rabbit, hare and mackerel.

The girls who remained at home considered it most unfair that Tom was allowed some of these delicacies while away at school. And he never tired of detailing for them all the delicious things he had to eat there. ‘The other day we had fried bacon for breakfast,’ he wrote in his weekly letter home, adding, ‘sometimes we have brawn.’ And in case his sisters did not quite absorb the full joy of such a dish he emphasised that it was ‘Oh! So Good.’ As the sisters sat around sighing with irritation, Tom had not finished. Often, he told them, he was given ‘sardines and sometimes tongue and sometimes ham and sometimes HOT ham for lunch’. The latter dish was ‘scrumshus’. Other people’s parents also understood what a growing boy needed. On a day out with the mother of his friend Gore, Tom was allowed
two
large helpings of roast chicken as well as one and a half sausages.

His mother responded at once to the barely concealed hint. Tom’s next single-page letter was dominated by exclamation marks of gratitude for the ‘LOVELY’ cake, which the Asthall cook had baked for him, although he adds at the end to his mother that ‘Sometime no matter when, I wish you would make me a cake with your own hands.’

Despite the superior standard of food at school, Tom was looking forward to the holidays, and to days filled with pony riding, mucking about with his sisters and as much cake as he could eat. And there was something else to look forward to. Everyone had told him that his mother’s expected baby was bound to be a boy. Although he got
along well with his sisters, coming exactly halfway down the family in order of age, after Nancy and Pam and before Diana, Jessica and Unity, it would be good to have someone in the family who could play football properly and be an ally against Nancy in particular who was such a brag. Tom often got his own back on her by replying in Latin to the show-off letters that she wrote him at school in Greek, and none of the sisters could compete with Tom’s repertoire of thirty card tricks. Only his father was a match.

With five sisters it would be extreme bad luck and quite against the odds if his mother was to have yet another girl. The longed for brother was expected to arrive at the end of March and on the 30th he went into the garden with Pam and together they gathered for their mother ‘some pheasants eyes, some enenemys, some cowslips and a few primroses’ which he sent up with his father to London where the new arrival was scheduled to appear.

When the telegram containing the eagerly anticipated news arrived at the end of the following day, 31 March 1920, a dreadful gloom fell upon the household. Another girl. The housemaid Annie, very close to tears, immediately expressed her sympathies, voicing the thoughts of them all. ‘Oh WHAT a disappointment!’ she sniffed, while confirming to Nancy that she had heard from Mabel, the London parlourmaid, who had suspected the dreadful truth ‘after taking one look at his Lordship’s face’. Nancy was rather thrilled by the drama, telling everyone who would listen to her that the church bell had tolled as if for a funeral, the cattle in the surrounding fields had begun to moan at the news while inside the house the prospect of a nursery filled ‘with another furious occupant, shrieking like a cage of parrots’ had been greeted with horror.

However, Tom knew how important it was to muster the sum of his not inconsiderable sense of tact when he sat down the following day to write to his mother, while not forgetting that she always stressed the importance of telling the truth. ‘My Darling Muv,’ he began, ‘I am so glad you have got a little girl’, continuing, ‘but of course it is a great pity that it was not a little boy but still.’ And hoping that would do it, he went on with a bit of home news that he thought might cheer her up. ‘Pam collected ten shillings this morning for the starving children and she is now
keeping a shop or stall for them and she is going to have a box for collections.’

Tom returned to school for the summer term on 4 April, just before Easter, promising not to make too much of a fuss about going back if his mother would guarantee to send him some chocolates and some of his favourite
langue de chat
biscuits.

Pam Parish was also a happy member of a large family. Sometimes they all went to visit one of their grandmother’s seven brothers and sisters, the favourites being Charles and Frank Beadle, who had both made a lot of money developing warehouses at Erith on the Kent estuary.

Charles’s wealth had bought him Wood Hall, a beautiful Georgian house in Essex, with a lovely farm filled with horses, sheep, pigs and cows. Uncle Charles was a generous man who paid for the founding of a school at Erith and for the laying of a gas pipe to the village. He loved nothing better than sending a big limousine for his relations and friends and bringing them all to celebrate Christmas at Wood Hall in style. Pam loved her Great-Uncle Charlie so much that she would do anything for him. One day she handed him her favourite embroidered handkerchief to fold, but mistaking her intention he thanked her and put it in his pocket. Pam said nothing. Uncle Charlie was the only person she could imagine forgiving for inadvertently stealing her favourite handkerchief. But one summer, after spending a few days at the farm recovering from having her tonsils out, Pam became surprisingly reluctant to return with her parents and brother and sisters on these once-treasured expeditions.