4 From ‘Gerontion’ by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).
5 From the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400).
6 From Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 66’.
7 Full Height.
8 King’s Parade, a street in the centre of Cambridge.
9 From ‘The Dedication’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
10 Ian Nance joined the Colonial Service in Africa, before serving in the Abyssinia campaign with the King’s Own African Rifles.
11 Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) was a British politician and later leader of the British Union of Fascists.
12 At the beginning of the war the government had set up the Central Register to process the thousands of temporary civil servants that Whitehall was going to need.
13 Officer Cadet Training Unit.
14 His Full Height.
15 The Dorchester lunches, organised by Lord Nathan in support of Army Welfare. Sir John Anderson, the guest speaker at this lunch, was effectively the home front supremo in the wartime government, but best known now for the ‘Anderson Shelter’ named after him, a curved, galvanised corrugated steel air-raid shelter, 6 ft high by 4.5 ft wide and 6.5 ft long, that could be sunk into the ground or covered in soil and sandbags. Issued free to all householders with an income under £5 per week, over 2.5 million were erected before and during the war.
16 Measure for Measure, Act III, scene i.
17 Anthony Eden, Conservative MP and enemy of appeasement, was Foreign Secretary from 1935–38 and after being Secretary of State for War returned to the Foreign Office at the end of 1940.
18 ‘The Definition of Love’, by Andrew Marvell (1621–78).
19 Young Fellow.
20 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, scene i.
21 Ack-ack or Anti-Aircraft fire.
22 Orde Wingate met his future wife, Lorna, on a sea voyage from Egypt when he was thirty and she sixteen, and they married two years later. They were both committed Zionists.
23 My Full Height.
For fifty-six out of the next fifty-seven days and nights, beginning on 7 September, London would be bombed. The shift in German tactics from the airfields to the cities might have been a tacit admission of failure, but if it arguably put paid to Hitler’s invasion plan, that would be of precious little comfort to the capital, where in the East End and the docks, more than four hundred were killed and sixteen hundred wounded in that first massive raid alone.
It was typical of Britain’s pre-war planning – too little and too late – that in crucial ways London, and particularly the poorest and most crowded areas, was hopelessly unprepared. The Luftwaffe might not have had the planes or accuracy to inflict the kind of casualties feared, but until Londoners took matters into their own hands and occupied the underground stations, a government wary of nurturing a defeatist ‘deep shelter mentality’ had left the capital criminally short of the kind of shelters that would have saved so many East End lives.
While it was of no help to the thousands already left homeless, however, with each passing September day the threat of invasion was receding. On the same Saturday that the Blitz began, the codeword ‘Cromwell’ – the warning of an imminent invasion – had been issued, but for all the false alarms and rumours of German parachutists, no invasion came and by the 17th, with the ‘weather window’ closing and Britain’s Fighter Command still defiantly intact, German invasion plans were indefinitely postponed.
But if the Battle of Britain was won, there was no let-up in the bombing, and with Britain’s night fighters as yet ineffective, and the capital’s anti-aircraft guns as much a danger to Londoners as Germans, the nights ahead would belong to the Luftwaffe’s bombers. In the early days of the Blitz the raids had generated a good deal of class hostility, but as the attacks spread from the East End across the whole of London, and the king and queen found themselves as likely to be bombed out of their home as was a bank clerk, ‘Britain’, as J. B. Priestley memorably put it, found itself ‘being bombed and burned into democracy’.
Something of this new democratic feeling – and with it a more richly varied cast of characters – finds its way into Eileen’s letters. For the first year of the war her view had not stretched much beyond her family and Cambridge circles, but with the beginning of the Blitz the letters broaden out to embrace a world and a London of bus drivers, chars, wardens, policemen, secretaries, cinema queues and – most fertile of all – work.
She had, of course, helped out in Leslie Hore-Belisha’s constituency office, but her first real job was at the War Office’s newly formed Welfare Department. The Army Welfare Service, to give it its proper title, was the brainchild of a distinguished veteran of Gallipoli and the Somme, the London-born and St Paul’s-educated solicitor, Liberal MP, newly minted Labour peer, Zionist and ‘Vociferous Clatter’, Harry Nathan. At the beginning of the war Nathan had realised that there was nothing in place to help soldiers with the myriad problems of long separations, and after consultations with service chiefs had come up with the Welfare Service, a voluntary organisation, dependent on unpaid workers and charitable donations – Nathan’s ‘Dorchester Lunches’ were a rich source of supply – and aimed at relieving ‘as much as possible the anxieties of a soldier about his family, his job, his home’.
As there was no Treasury money available for this, Nathan had persuaded his law partners in Finsbury Square to partition off fifteen rooms of the firm’s offices, and it was here, at the end of October, after the best part of a month humming and hawing over the offer of a job at Bletchley, that Eileen reported for her first paid work. It was an hour for her on the tube from Swiss Cottage to Moorgate and for the next two months, until the offices were badly bombed and their records destroyed in the terrible raid of 29 December, Finsbury Square and the bizarre antics of bigamist soldiers and unfaithful wives would provide Eileen and her letters with much of their copy.
The strategic bombing of Britain’s major cities and ports would continue deep into 1941, but Britain, under