Farming, Fighting and Family Read online

  Although my mother’s literary career only started in earnest in her later years, she had ambitions to become a writer – no doubt heavily influenced and encouraged by her father’s unexpected literary success – from an early age. She first began writing poems whilst still at the Godolphin School, Salisbury, several of which appeared in school magazines. After leaving school she spent much of her time composing poems which were occasionally accepted and published in magazines such as Everywoman, The Field, Farmer’s Weekly and later even in Punch. Several were composed during the war years, and add another, more lyrical dimension to her descriptions of the period.

  Besides my mother’s diaries and other writings, by far the most valuable source material for this volume was the hoard of family letters, written during or shortly after the war period, that I discovered my mother had kept. My mother wrote to her parents assiduously during the period of her ATS officer training and from her various postings once she had received her commission; her parents replied equally assiduously, often with exhortations on how to put up with the unaccustomed conditions in which their daughter now found herself living. My mother did not have a ‘good’ war in terms of derring-do behind enemy lines or suchlike. On the contrary: being of a highly-strung, anxious disposition – though conscientious to a fault – she was temperamentally totally unsuited to war work. She clearly tried her best at a number of wartime occupations, but they finally became too much for her and towards the end of the war she was invalided out of the ATS. This was also partly due to affairs of the heart, as the following pages will reveal.

  Especially poignant are the many letters my mother both sent and received, sometimes after long intervals, to and from my father, David McCormick, the unofficial fiancé whom she was later to marry. Whilst reading them, a sudden thought occurred to me: several years earlier my father had bequeathed to me a piece of furniture in which I vaguely remembered seeing some of his own family’s wartime material. I went to investigate, and rummaging through the drawers I struck gold in the form of two typed fragments from a memoir he evidently wrote shortly after the war. The first describes the period he spent at Dover Barracks in the spring of 1940, and includes a vivid, grim account of the part he played in clearing the boats returning from Dunkirk of bodies and body parts before they set off across the Channel again to collect more survivors or corpses. The second, longer fragment, describes in detail his time spent in the North African desert preparing for, and taking part in ‘Operation Crusader’. I also found a cache of letters written between my father and his parents at various stages of the war. Amongst these was a batch of letters written to my father by his parents during the winter of 1941–42 once ‘Operation Crusader’ was under way, including several returned unread in their original envelopes many months later. These reveal his parents’ – and in particular his mother’s – intense anxiety that deepened each day that passed with no news of him.

  In the pages that follow I have tried, as far as possible, to allow the voices of my parents, grandparents and other family members and friends to speak through unhindered; in a sense I am the editor rather than author of this volume. However to put the quotations into context, I needed to include some explanatory text of my own. One immediate difficulty I encountered in so doing was how much knowledge of the Second World War I could assume that potential readers already had. For example, for British-born people of my generation or older, the very name ‘Dunkirk’ automatically conjures up vivid pictures of the evacuation across the English Channel of the British Expeditionary Force in late May–early June 1940. The reason for ‘Operation Dynamo’, as it was code-named, having to be launched was in reality an appalling military disaster; however for reasons of propaganda at the time and national pride thereafter, it was hailed as a feat of considerable heroism, even giving rise to the phrase ‘the Dunkirk spirit’. My generation and older ones hardly need to read yet another account of this episode in British history. Yet speaking to younger people, in particular those born abroad but now living here, made me wonder; some really knew very little about it, and I am writing as much as anything for future generations. ‘Dunkirk’ apart, I myself had only a hazy knowledge of certain episodes and campaigns of the Second World War. Faced with this dilemma, in the end I decided that my yardstick should be my own ignorance. Therefore whenever I came across any reference to aspects of the Second World War that I did not fully understand, I made it my business to find out about them, and wrote the explanatory text accordingly.

  * * *

  One passage from my mother’s unpublished autobiography seems a fitting way to end this Introduction:

  The miracle of the Battle of Britain was only truly brought home to the nation after Winston Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons. I have often thought that if there was one ‘intangible’ which helped us to win the Second World War it was the voice of the Prime Minister: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

  Young modern historians denigrate him. But they weren’t there. At that moment. There was something infinitely inspiring, infinitely reassuring about the man at the top during the war years. He may have had his faults – who hasn’t – but he was surely the right man at the right time. He had the kind of charisma which spurred you on to greater effort.

  Leaving aside the validity or otherwise of my mother’s opinion of Churchill, for me the key phrase in the above quotation is ‘they weren’t there’, which brings me back to the whole point of this volume. My generation wasn’t there; neither was my son’s generation nor those to follow. This is why it seems imperative to record the first-hand accounts of members of my family who were indeed there, during the Second World War, before they are lost forever.

  One

  Before the War:

  The Streets

  Arthur George Street was, in his own words, ‘just a humble tenant farmer’ when his daughter, Pamela, was born. Few could have foreseen how her formative years would be affected by her father’s unexpected success in occupational pastures new.

  Some three years after the end of the First World War, the country was enjoying a period of peace and relative prosperity. This is how, in a later memoir, Pamela described her home town, and her father’s status within it:

  The West Country town of Wilton, near Salisbury, was a small peaceful place when I was born on its outskirts in 1921. Nevertheless, it could boast two thriving industries: a carpet factory and a felt mills [sic]; while the surrounding countryside – until the depression – supported a third: thousands of acres of productive rented farmland belonging to the lord of the manor, the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House.

  My father was one such farmer on this estate. Having, to his great regret, been rejected by the army in the First World War, owing to crippled feet, he had taken over Ditchampton Farm on the death of his own father in 1917.

  Arthur’s father, Henry Street, started his working life as a grocer’s apprentice, and by the time of his marriage to his wife Sarah, was running a grocery shop in Wilton. He evidently made a sufficient success of it to enable him to take on the tenancy of Ditchampton Farm – 300 acres close to the town – and to become an equally successful farmer. As Pamela put it: ‘The Streets, as it were, had moved up a peg.’ Henry Street was a charismatic, somewhat domineering individual, nicknamed ‘the organiser’, and it was perhaps inevitable that as a young man Arthur Street – himself a forceful personality – would one day come to blows with him. The second youngest of six siblings, Arthur was born with his feet pointing in the wrong direction. He spent his early years in irons to correct the condition; his consequent immobility obliged him to yell to attract his family’s attention, which in turn went on to influence his adult character.

  Pamela went on to describe her street forebears as ‘solid, honest and hard-working. All were exponents of self-help, perhaps none more so than my father, who had to overcome physical disability.’ Her maternal family, however, were something of a contrast:

/>   My mother’s forebears were very different. They were the Foyles from the Felt Mills. They might have had the same work ethic as the Streets, but they were mercurial, quixotic, good-looking, proud, compassionate, generous and poor. In my youth I was given to understand that Grandfather Foyle – who died in 1918 – had been the Manager of the Mills; but I came to realise he must have been more of a foreman.

  Granny Foyle was the daughter of a well-to-do clothier from Trowbridge. She was doted on as a child and had silk stockings specially made for her. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that her father did not think that Francis Foyle … was good enough for her. But she was a fine-looking spirited young woman and married him, nevertheless.

  They had seven children, two boys and five girls, and lived in what the family referred to as The Mill House. But I suspect the fact that it was little more than a hovel was the reason why the owners of the Mill allowed my grandmother to go on living there after her husband’s death.

  In 1911 Arthur Street quarrelled bitterly with his father Henry, and to assert his independence sailed to Canada, where he worked as a farm hand – a period to which he later referred in his first, best-selling, book Farmer’s Glory, as ‘A Canadian Interlude’. The explanation he gave for the row was as follows:

  I can see now that it was inevitable that we should come to serious argument as time went on. I was most certainly an insufferable young pup in many ways, as, I think, are most of us at eighteen or thereabouts. Anyway, some two years after I left school we came to the parting of the ways. My idea was that I had become a sort of errand boy between my father and the foreman, and that this was hardly good enough for a man of my qualifications. My father’s idea seemed to be that he was blessed with a half-wit for a son … I said that I was tired of being an errand boy, and wanted a job of my own with some responsibility … My father said … that if I knew of a better job, why not take it? Youth’s pride being mortally injured, I said that I damn well would, and was rebuked for swearing in addition to my other crimes.

  This was not the whole truth of the matter. Evidence came to light many decades later that one of his other ‘crimes’ was to have got a maid working in the Street household in the family way. Legal and financial arrangements were made between Henry Street and the girl’s father for her confinement and the maintenance till the age of 14 of the resulting child, on condition that the maid’s family should have no further contact with the Streets. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the young Arthur Street needed to be removed from the scene with all possible haste.

  In early 1914, having proved that he could indeed stand on his own feet, Arthur returned home. Despite the hard work, he had enjoyed his time in Canada to the extent that he hoped his father might lend him sufficient funds to purchase some land of his own in the ‘new’ country. Henry Street refused, and Arthur returned to Canada empty-handed. However one beneficial outcome of Arthur’s visit home was his meeting with Vera Foyle and their subsequent courtship. Pamela wrote thus about the Foyle family’s reaction: ‘When my father started taking an interest in the youngest daughter, Vera, the family was both surprised and flattered; for the Streets had become members of a higher social stratum, however much they might once have been in a lower one …’

  After Arthur’s return to Canada the pair continued to correspond. At the beginning of the First World War Arthur tried to enlist in the Canadian army, but was rejected because of his crippled feet. Consequently he made arrangements to sail home and attempt to enlist in the British army. On 18 October 1914 he wrote to Vera:

  I can’t get into the Canadian contingent owing to my feet and I suppose it’ll be the same when I get to England. I’m almost afraid to come home. All the other fellows around Wilton will have gone … Up till this I’ve always been able to hold my own with other fellows in spite of my feet at all outdoor sports and this is getting on my mind … I suppose I ought to be jolly thankful I can do what I can considering they never expected I should be able to walk when I was a baby.

  Arthur sailed home a couple of months later. Shortly before his departure he wrote to Vera about the perils of crossing the Atlantic in wartime: ‘I’m not worrying a bit about sailing. You see when one is born to be hanged you can’t be drowned and the Prodigal Son is sure to turn up alright like a bad penny. I’m sailing on Dec 2 on the Lusitania from N. York … I’m a bit excited with coming home.’

  On returning home, Arthur’s worst fears were realised; once again he was rejected for active service on account of his deformed feet. However, with so many members of Ditchampton Farm’s workforce called up and his father in failing health, there was more than enough to keep Arthur busy on the land. Yet he was still in no position to support a wife, and a lengthy engagement ensued until the death of his father in 1917 changed his circumstances; Arthur finally took over the tenancy of Ditchampton Farm and married the long-suffering Vera Foyle.

  The young couple prospered; in the first years that followed the Great War, farming experienced something of a boom time. The Corn Production Act of 1917 guaranteed farmers a minimum price for their grain, and returning servicemen and townsfolk flocked to buy or rent farming land. This is how Arthur Street described the period in Farmer’s Glory:

  As all the world knows, the war ended in November, and it was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from the whole country. The reaction to this was that the whole population went pleasure mad. All classes indulged in a feverish orgy of all those sports and pastimes which had been impossible for four long weary years.

  And I was as bad, or as daft, or, possibly more truthfully, as criminally extravagant as any one. I kept two hunters, one for myself and one for my wife; and glorious days we had together with the local pack. I went shooting at least two days a week during the winter. We went to tennis parties nearly every fine afternoon in the summer, and in our turn, entertained up to as many as twenty guests on our own tennis-court, and usually to supper afterwards.

  He then went on to describe the difference the advent of the motor car made in enabling farmers to seek pleasures further afield, such as taking seaside holidays, and how he took up golf in 1919:

  and in 1921 I was the proud possessor of a handicap of eight, which statement tells only too plainly the amount of time I must have spent at the game …

  My world went very well then. I was newly married, and my wife was an ideal playmate. The war was over, for ever and ever, and farming had returned to its old splendour. Farmer’s Glory was then a glory of great brilliance. How were farmers to know that it was but the last dazzling flicker before the fusing?

  Pamela Street’s birth in 1921 coincided with the repeal of the Corn Production Act. Ironically, cheap wheat from those self-same Canadian prairies that Arthur Street had been breaking a decade earlier was now beginning to flood the market. By the early 1930s farming’s steady decline had turned into a full-blown depression. As a consequence, in the Street household the hunters had to go; shooting, tennis and other parties were things of the past, and Arthur Street was working hard to stave off bankruptcy. His solution was to terminate the tenancy of one of his two farms and to put all his arable fields to pasture, concentrating entirely on dairy farming. Not only did he become a milk producer, but also a retailer. Pamela writes of this period of her childhood:

  The first time I was made dimly aware of the situation was the Christmas of 1928. I was seven years old then and my father gave me a very cheap edition of Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Wretch that I was, I remember being disappointed with it because it contained no really good coloured pictures and the print was so small. He had always been generous with presents and I think this one puzzled me, even at an early age.

  Then later on, we did not own a car like the parents of the other children I knew in the little town of Wilton … instead, we had a large van with A.G. STREET, OPEN-AIR MILK written on its sides. In order to save us from complete bankruptcy, my father had changed his whole system of farming, and now, besides getting up at four th
irty a.m. seven days a week to milk seventy cows in an open-air milking outfit, with only the help of one pupil, he also started a milk round in Salisbury, putting on a white coat and doing the delivering himself straight after the morning’s milking.

  How my father was able to manage all this I simply do not know, except that he always had the most enormous capacity for hard work. He worked all day and every day non-stop, and on Saturdays he would sit at his desk and work far into the night, totting up figures in the milk-books; he would then stump up to bed for a few hours’ sleep, before the Sunday morning round-up of the cows started the week rolling all over again

  Financial hardship was not the only serious problem confronting the Street household during this period. When Pamela was 6, Vera Street fell ill with what was eventually diagnosed as a duodenal ulcer, and following two operations she very nearly died. There followed a long period of convalescence, but Pamela felt that her mother never fully recovered. Into the breach at this point stepped Pamela’s cousin Vivi. Violet Boon was the daughter of one of Vera’s impoverished sisters, and had joined the Street household shortly after Pamela’s birth to help out with the new baby. Having already taken on considerably more domestic responsibilities, she now became indispensable, assuming the role of cook, housekeeper and nurse. During the critical phase of her mother’s illness Pamela was sent to stay with her grandmother and aunts; being unaware of the severity of her mother’s condition, she greatly enjoyed this period.

  Arthur Street struggled on stoically despite all these vicissitudes until one day in November 1929 something occurred which was to change the course of his life, and his family’s fortunes, forever. Whilst recovering indoors from a bad bout of flu, an already frustrated Arthur read an article about farming in the Daily Mail, the inaccuracies of which caused his temper to reach boiling point. Vera Street, almost equally exasperated by a husband who had been behaving like a caged lion, threw down the gauntlet, suggesting that if the article were that bad, why didn’t Arthur try to write something better? Pamela later described how he rose to the challenge: