Giving it to them with both barrels
Matthew Dennison
DEBS AT WAR by Anne de Courcy Weidenfeld, £18.99, pp. 258, ISBN 0297829300 ✆ £16.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Lavinia Holland-Hibbert joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) during her first Season. The following year, she forwent that Season’s smartest ball, held at Blenheim Palace, to attend FANY camp. There she read War and Peace and quoted to herself Cecil Day Lewis: ‘Who live under the shadow of war, what can we do that matters?’ It was 1939. Lavinia had been finished in Paris and afterwards Munich. No one responsible for her education expected that she would think about politics, and yet she had seen, even in 1937, that there was something rotten in the state of Germany. In joining the FANY, she answered her own and Day Lewis’s question, settling on her choice of war work before call-up papers made such a course obligatory.
Like many but not all of the 47 women whose memories make up Debs at War, Lavinia Holland-Hibbert recognised war’s inevitability and determined voluntarily to do something to help. Perhaps, like Lady Elizabeth Montagu Douglas Scott, she understood that it would change her life for ever: ‘This is the end. The end of our lives. The end of the world.’ Women who did not learn how to make a cup of tea until shown by their husbands, did not know how to sweep a floor, were hazy concerning the facts of life or, at a loss how to decorate a Christmas tree, tied silver teaspoons to the branches, joined the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service) and the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force); deciphered codes at Bletchley Park (‘a blend of country house and internment camp’); made aeroplane parts in factories in Cricklewood and Reading; farmed; and nursed — disciples of an upper-class code of doing one’s duty and not making a fuss that has since vanished.
Their reward was a degree of independence and experience inconceivable in the cosseted, chaperoned dancing days of their pre-war Seasons:
Working in the hospital and being a Wren allowed me to live as myself, without my family background — without being somebody’s daughter or sister. One had been defined by the men in one’s life ... The war helped me hugely with my self-confidence and feeling of independence — in fact, it was the making of me.
There are those who will dismiss Debs at War as a self-indulgence, slaking an incorrigible British thirst for class nostalgia and these islands’ finest hour. But Anne de Courcy shows clearly that the contribution to the war made by these women was in large part a result of their background and particular upbringing. Totally lacking in domestic experience, they were accustomed to an essentially male world that equipped them well for service life; years on the hunting field and a class code that discouraged the expression of any but happy feelings contributed to their very real fearlessness; like their brothers they had been trained implicitly to take the lead and made obvious officer material; well-connected, they were often able to bypass red tape and improve working procedure and conditions; confident, they had no qualms about taking up arms against the ‘little Hitlers’ running the show at ground level.
Jean Falkner remembered nursing at the Radcliffe in Oxford:
I crossed swords with the Matron. I said to her: ‘This is quite ridiculous. You leave us on a ward of 20 people, all of whom are in intensive care, and expect us to be totally responsible for them, and then you tell us we have to be in bed by half-past ten if we go out dancing.’ So I went off to a job with Sir Harold Gillies — and Matron was sacked.
Debs at War is happy, sad, intermittently very funny and consistently engaging.
Matthew Dennison’s biography of Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, The Last Princess, is published next year.
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