All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [218]
It was more like the death of an insect than of a man.
Countless families struggled to come to terms with loss. British Army officer’s wife Diana Hopkinson described a reunion with her husband on a station platform in Berkshire, after a long separation during which they received news that his brother had been killed in action. ‘His strange uniform, his strangely thin face glimpsed in the dimmest light, gave me a feeling of artificiality. Even in our kisses there was something unreal. In bed there was a terrible sadness to overcome – Pat’s death – before we could make love. When at last he turned towards me, we made love as if we were partners in a solemn rite, strange, speechless, but familiar.’
Sheffield housewife Edie Rutherford was just preparing tea when her young neighbour, the wife of an RAF pilot, knocked on the door. ‘Her face was wooden and she jerked out: “Mrs Rutherford, Henry is missing,” thrust the telegram into my hand. Of course I just opened my arms and took her in and let her have a good weep the while I cursed audibly this blasted war. “He isn’t dead. I’m sure he isn’t dead. He was home only last Wednesday. He’s alive somewhere and worrying because he knows I’ll get this telegram to upset me” … It is difficult to know what to say to a wife in such trouble. I did my best, poor lass. Felt myself as if my inside had fallen out. I wish to goodness this war would end.’
Housewife Jean Wood recorded: ‘I had a very nice lady and her husband, neighbours. She was having her son on leave and she didn’t have any meat for him. But that particular day the butcher let me have some rabbit … a taste treat. I didn’t want the rabbit, ’cause I’d rather give my small children an egg, if I could get eggs. So I took the rabbit round to her. She was so thrilled. On that particular day, her son was killed. We could have flung the rabbit anywhere, for all we cared. He was such a nice boy, a young officer, nineteen years old.’ They were all ‘nice boys’, to those obliged to mourn them.
Muriel Green, one of Britain’s 80,000 ‘land girls’ providing agricultural labour, burst into tears on the last night of a home leave in Norfolk in June 1942. ‘I cried because of the war. It has altered our life which can never be the same. To see the desolate emptiness of the seaside upsets me. When you are away and Mother writes to say the latest desecration, the latest boy missing, the latest family to sacrifice, it is just words. But in the home it is mortifying. Life will never be so sweet as before the war, and the last two summers and early ’39 were the most perfect years of my life when all seemed young and gay. I could have cried for hours had I not known it was upsetting Mother.’
American Dellie Hahne was one of many women who married the wrong man amid the stress and emotional extravagance of the time, and repented at leisure during the years that followed. ‘He was a soldier. He could not be anything but a marvelous, magnificent human being,’ she said, with the ruefulness of one who learned better. She came to pity others who experienced domestic miseries: ‘Pregnant women who could barely balance in a rocking train, going to see their husbands for the last time before the guys were sent overseas. Women coming back from seeing their husbands, traveling with small children. Trying to feed their kids, diaper their kids. I felt sorriest for them. It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t half as much fun as I’d been told it was going to be. I just thanked God I had no kids.’
Many children clung to parting memories of fathers from whom they became separated for years – in some cases forever. Little Californian Bernice Schmidt was nine when her parents got divorced. As a newly single man, her thirty-two-year-old father Arthur thus became eligible to be drafted. He was given leave from training camp before embarkation, and took his three children to a Los Angeles amusement park. He told them how homesick he was, and gave each a little parting present: Bernice’s was a pin in the shape of two hearts held together with