Farming, Fighting and Family Read online

  Grew beneath the garden wall,

  Where the Pinks in sweet disorder

  Tumbled like a waterfall,

  Where the Roses blew so gaily,

  White and yellow, pink and red,

  Here with careful hoeing daily

  Have I made an onion bed.

  Here where now my Love-lies-bleeding

  Jilted for a Carrot’s sake,

  Have I passed along unheeding

  Armed with shovel, prong and rake,

  Beans succeed my two Robinias,

  Peas gave London Pride the poke,

  And here’s my bed of choicest Zinnias

  Murdered by the artichoke.

  So now instead of merely showing

  All my friends my latest buds,

  I march them through the garden crowing

  ‘Wait until you see my spuds’.

  But was it thought or was it blindness

  Next time Anne came round for tea,

  With just her same well-meaning kindness

  She brought a bunch of Rosemary?

  * * *

  This, therefore, was the inauspicious backdrop against which Pamela and David’s courtship was being conducted. What, under normal circumstances, should have been a happy period of their lives, was marred by constant frustrations and even despair about when and how they might next be able to meet. Pamela’s diary reveals that from the time of David’s posting to Weston-super-Mare in early January 1941 till his embarkation in late April, the pair only saw each other on a handful of occasions. Despite the obstacles presented by their respective war work, David’s letters and Pamela’s diaries show an impressive degree of determination on both sides; for example on 10 February David, describing a new scheme for officers’ weekends off duty, wrote to Pamela: ‘We can’t apply till the Wednesday before so how we are to get the same weekend off I don’t know. They say that nothing that is easy is worth doing – so let’s try anyway. People don’t make things easy in this war.’

  For her part, Pamela was constantly at odds with her conscience about asking for time off in order to see David. In particular matters came to a head in early March, when once again she was obliged to go on sick leave. Her diary reveals that she was suffering from a heavy cold, and on 3 March (her 20th birthday) came home to recuperate. It so happened that David had asked her down to Weston-super-Mare the following weekend, and Pamela’s diary entries show how she agonised about how she would be perceived by the hospital authorities if she went ahead with the visit instead of returning to nursing duty:

  March 1st David wired last night – next Friday & Saturday – told Matron and she said she’d do her best …

  March 3rd [Pamela’s birthday] … steaming headache & came home sick … probably next weekend is off …

  March 4th Awful. Mummy rang Matron when Dr. Stratton had been and she thinks I’ve done it on purpose – mean old cat … I’ve mucked everything up completely & thoroughly. Probably shall lose job and David and everyone’s in a flap …

  March 6th Completely on tenderhooks [sic] about David and the weekend … expect David will run off with a blonde … I must see him soon or I shall bust …

  March 8th The doctor came and says I can go to Weston next week to get well – now won’t the sparks fly …

  Evidently the family doctor’s advice allowed Pamela to travel to Weston-super-Mare with a more or less clear conscience, and a few days later she describes the trip in enthusiastic terms:

  March 13th Went!!! Just caught the connection at Bristol and David met me at Weston and kissed me on the platform and was very sweet. Terrified & stage-struck of Ma & Pa at first but they were really awfully nice. David & I went out with a whole lot of people to play darts at Bleadon and had bacon & eggs and didn’t get in till 12 …

  March 14th … they are very nice to me and David is sweet. How wonderful it is to have happened …

  March 15th … went to the Imperial in the evening and danced … Mrs M – I hope she approves of me – comes too now!

  March 16th Going today. David’s given me his photograph. Rode along the sands this afternoon – alternating between being violently happy and terribly depressed – he goes on a course tonight & Ma & Pa return tomorrow – we aren’t engaged or anything like it yet to all intents and purposes behave as though we are …

  It is abundantly clear from Pamela’s diaries and other writings that above all she was hoping for a proposal of marriage from David before he left. In a letter dated 13 February in which David suggested that Pamela should come to Weston-super-Mare and how she should persuade the hospital authorities to allow her the necessary time off, he added somewhat tantalisingly: ‘If necessary you could say you were secretly engaged to me & I was going to Egypt. It would not be a bad idea at that!!’

  Pamela’s entry for 15 February records what took place after she received this letter:

  David … wants to come up next weekend and said I could say we were unofficially engaged if I got into difficulties. Well I tried but wasn’t any good and I shall write and tell Hitler about it. It’s awful. Here I am stuck here … he won’t want to come and probably go to Egypt before I see him. It’s ghastly to think of because I’m half in love with him …

  Back in September 1940 Pamela’s erratic nursing schedule had already frustrated David to such a degree that he took matters into his own hands, as her entry for 28 September reveals: ‘David came to the hospital for me and sent everyone flying round including Matron …’ Decades later Pamela used this incident in her novel Many Waters. The heroine, Emily Mason, recently engaged to her childhood sweetheart John William, is summoned to the Matron’s office in the emergency hospital where she is now working. Expecting to be reprimanded for a previous misdemeanour reported by one of the sisters, Emily is amazed to discover John William rising from a chair in the corner, greeting her with a casual ‘Hello darling’. The episode continues:

  ‘You did not tell me, Nurse Mason,’ Miss Butler remarked, while Emily looked first at one and then the other in total confusion, ‘that you were engaged.’ Her voice did not sound quite so threatening as usual. In fact, Emily reflected later, if she herself had not been in such a state of anxiety she might have noticed that it was quite pleasant, even benign.

  ‘I … that is …’ Helplessly, she turned back to John, standing there in his officer’s uniform … She was astounded at his lack of embarrassment, at the way he seemed so utterly at ease in this terrifying sanctum … She noticed that there was a cup and saucer on a table by his chair. He must have been given tea …

  Sadly for Pamela, however, David did not ‘come up with the goods’, albeit for totally honourable reasons, as her diary entry for 23 March – just after a rare visit by David to Wilton – explains:

  Heavenly day. Pop in Home Guard Parade etc. National day of prayer.* David and I went to Grovely [the wood overlooking Wilton] in the afternoon … Then we said goodbye because it’s probably the last time we shall see each other now – he said he’d marry me if he wasn’t going abroad …

  Many decades later Pamela expanded on David’s reluctance to become formally engaged:

  I suppose we had what was known as an ‘understanding’, not a particularly satisfactory liaison. But there were then many conscientious young men who, facing the prospect of death, did not feel it right to marry or tie a girl down by becoming officially engaged until hostilities were over.

  Throughout this period David’s embarkation for Egypt continued to be postponed, presumably because of encouraging reports from the area, to which occasional snippets in Pamela’s diary refer; for example:

  January 25th We’re doing well in the east …

  February 3rd We’re smashing the Italians in Africa and the Greeks are going strong but when will it end?

  February 7th The war goes on and on – sometimes when it’s springlike you think it can’t last and then you don’t see how it can stop – there’s marvellous news from the East …

  The fortun
es of the Allies were soon to change, however. Following their early successes in North Africa at the beginning of the year, the pendulum began to swing the other way. In mid February Hitler sent reinforcements to the North African desert, the notorious ‘Afrika Korps’, headed by the very able Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel (later to be dubbed the ‘Desert Fox’, because of his unexpected lightning strikes behind Allied lines). Hitler was now concentrating on dominating the Balkan States (Romania, in particular, being important for its oil fields), and was obliged to come to the aid of its new ally Italy, which had recently launched an invasion of Greece, initially met by stiff opposition. In turn Britain came to the aid of the Greeks by sending a detachment of its North African forces to Greece in order to repel the invading Axis forces, thereby depleting Allied strength in the North African desert; the battlefield would shortly extend to the island of Crete. Moreover, as a Mediterranean base, it was essential to the Allied cause that the islands of Malta (then still part of the British Empire and situated halfway between the straits of Gibraltar and Alexandria on the Egyptian coast), which were currently experiencing heavy Axis bombardment, should remain in Allied hands.

  More snippets about the progress of the war appear in Pamela’s diary during this later period, for example:

  April 5th We’ve lost Benghazi in Africa. Wonder what’s happening …

  April 7th Germany has attacked Greece and Yugoslavia …

  April 8th Frightful news from the Balkans. Germans pressing in …

  April 9th Bad news from Africa and Greece & Yugoslavia …

  April 11th The Germans have got Salonika and pushing on in Africa and oh it’s awful.

  For these reasons it must have become apparent to the British High Command that by April 1941, regiments in waiting such as David McCormick’s needed to be sent, after all, to the North African theatre of war.

  Before David left, however, he and Pamela were able to meet a couple more times. Pamela’s entry for 22 March reads:

  David came – we went to Salisbury and round by the kennels and it was lovely seeing him again and then we quite kicked over the traces and went to Jessie Sivewright’s thing – it was nice to dance again and we didn’t stay long. David was very sweet – he wants to pack me in his valise to take to Egypt or Libya …

  David followed up this visit with a couple of affectionate letters. In the first, dated 23 March, he wrote:

  I got awfully lost on the way back here [signposts had earlier been removed in order to thwart German invaders]. In the end I had to disturb a loving couple in a car, as they were the only people awake in the neighbourhood. They were very nice and unclenched & led me onto the right road …

  Have put a kiss into the envelope so be careful opening it or it may escape!

  David’s next letter continued in the same vein; on 4 April he wrote:

  I am glad you caught the kiss! I will send you some more as they do not last! Their ultimate climax is to touch your lips & then they must flutter off & die. You cannot put a pin through them & shut them in a case!

  * * *

  During this period, Arthur Street was frequently commissioned by the BBC to deliver short propaganda talks from various venues around the British Isles. One such occasion occurred on 28 March, when he was due to visit a flax mill in Bridport on the Dorset coast. With Pamela on sick leave at the time, her father evidently thought it would take her mind off her problems if she were to accompany him. Her diary entry for the day in question reads simply: ‘Went to Bridport with Mummy & Daddy. Quite like the old times except for barbed wire round the sea. Went over a flax mill …’

  In Hitler’s Whistle, Arthur Street elaborates on this visit. He explains that by the late 1930s, apart from the flax grown on King George V’s estates at Sandringham and that of a handful of other producers, flax as a farming crop had all but died out in Great Britain, being readily obtainable from countries such as Russia and Belgium. By the early 1940s, however, flax was once again in demand for military usage such as canvas, tents and parachutes, and since it could no longer be imported from across the Channel, it needed to be home grown. Arthur Street – practising what he preached – was just about to plant his first crop of flax and made an analogy between military needs in 1941 and those in 1213, the latter exemplified in an edict from King John to the Sheriffs of Somerset and Dorset, quoted in the Bridport town guide, as follows:

  We command you that as you love us, yourselves, and your own bodies, you buy for our use all the oats you can lay your hands upon in the counties of Somerset and Dorset – also cause to be made at Bridport, night and day, as many ropes for ships, both large and small, and as many cable as you can, and twisted yarns for cordage for ballistae.

  This was the peg on which Arthur Street was able to hang his broadcast, during which he repeatedly made his case for the importance of British agriculture to the current war effort:

  which is yet another case of history repeating itself. The sails of Nelson’s Victory were made in the West Country from English-grown flax: and as past victories depended, so also will our coming victory in this war depend, largely on the produce grown on the land of our own country.

  Although Arthur Street came across in his radio broadcasts and writings as the epitome of down-to-earth rural common sense, his public persona belied an altogether different side to his character. In the same diary entry in which Pamela referred to the Street family’s visit to the flax mill, she continued: ‘Afraid Daddy is one hell of a temper – quite inexplicable – nerves very bad and Mummy’s getting worse under it …’

  The reality was, in fact, all too explicable. Arthur Street was a worrier. Dotted here and there in Pamela’s diaries are several other references to her father being in a bad mood about such things as lack of progress of the book on which he was currently working, or adverse weather during harvest or haymaking. Unfortunately at such times he was liable to vent his frustration on his nearest and dearest, which in turn affected the mental state of his delicate wife, Vera. Arthur Street was used to getting his own way, so his feelings of impotence as the war ground on inexorably must have been, for him, particularly galling.

  * * *

  Pamela managed one final visit to Weston-super-Mare before David’s departure, this time accompanied by her mother. It is clear from family papers that both sets of parents approved of the potential match, and indeed on the Street side actively encouraged it, judging from all the hospitality given to David at Ditchampton Farm. After Pamela’s meeting with David’s parents at Weston-super-Mare she kept in regular touch with Phyllis McCormick by letter or telephone, and indeed continued to do so following David’s departure. He evidently told his parents that he hoped to marry Pamela after the war, for in a letter written in late 1941, his mother gave him the following – albeit somewhat patronising – opinion:

  I have had a nice letter from Pamela giving what news she had of you. We wouldn’t at all mind you marrying her; only we think it is a pity to get too much involved until you get back. However that is for you to decide. I can’t think of anyone else for you and I like her much better than any of your previous ‘girl-friends’!

  Pamela and her mother travelled to Weston-super-Mare on 14 April, despite serious misgivings on Pamela’s part, as explained in the following diary entry:

  We went. I was dreading it – I didn’t know whether it was right or wasn’t and it was because I think David was terribly pleased. He’d got rooms for us at the Grosvenor and had done everything and then he’d asked for a special dinner because it was an occasion and Ian and a girl came and there were carnations and Mummy was sweet & we went to the Imperial and danced and oh it was worth anything and David & I went into the air raid shelter for fun because it was all fun and because it was sad and there was a war …

  The next day was evidently just as successful:

  Oh lovely day. David came to lunch and then tea and then we went and shopped and I bought him a camera and he gave me his badge and one of his handkerchi
efs and we went out to Bleadon and got the landlady to take our photograph with it and then in the evening we went to the flics … and then it was goodbye – Please may it not be for very long …

  The following morning Pamela and Vera Street returned home. This really had been David and Pamela’s last meeting before his departure, and Pamela summed up her feelings in her diary as follows:

  Came home early – did not see David again. I don’t think I could have borne it … I think we’d said everything there was to say and it was almost a relief to come back but thank you for the loveliest two days – Mummy, Daddy, David and everyone. I shan’t forget – ever.

  Judging from David’s letter to Pamela following her visit, he had enjoyed it every bit as much; on 18 April he wrote:

  Pamela Darling, I have got your lovely letter & the photos. What a wonderful camera it is – it works! I have got a lot of films for taking away with me. I love the photo of you & me & you don’t look cuckoo! Though slightly seaweedish! … It looks just what it was, a farewell outing for the soldier off to war …

  Darling, it was lovely seeing you & having you down here & wonderful of your mother to bring you. I did appreciate it so, & it made all the difference to my last days here …

  On 20 April, a Sunday, David wrote another letter from a hotel in Cheddar, enclosing a couple of mementos for Pamela to keep: