Diary of a Wartime Affair Read online

  Doreen Bates

  * * *

  DIARY OF A WARTIME AFFAIR

  The True Story of a Surprisingly Modern Romance

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1934

  1935

  1936

  1937

  1938

  1939

  1940

  1941

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  List of Illustrations

  p. xiii Doreen, Rosa and Margot, 1914

  p. xvii Margot, Wyndham and Doreen

  p. xix E, Kathleen and her parents

  p. 2 The Grand Union Canal, King’s Langley, Hertfordshire (© Pete’s Walk’s/www.petes-walks.co.uk)

  p. 3 E with his dog

  p. 7 Shere Memorial Cross, Surrey

  p. 14 Doreen on a walk

  p. 28 Richmond Park, Surrey (© Piotr Adamski/Dreamstime.com. Courtesy natureflip.com)

  p. 48 East Hagbourne, Berkshire

  p. 53 West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire (© Francis Frith Collection)

  p. 66 Hughenden church, Buckinghamshire

  p. 71 Abinger Bottom, Surrey

  p. 78 Walton Heath, Surrey

  p. 93 Thorn tree at Crowlink, Sussex (©Adrian Talbot)

  p. 102 Shoreham, Kent, watercolour by Eileen Lewis

  p. 108 E aged twenty-six

  p. 115 The Cuckmere river, Sussex (© Adrian Talbot)

  p. 132 Gatton Park, Surrey (© Stephen Webb)

  p. 142 Riddlesdown Common in winter, Surrey (© Brett Oliver)

  p. 156 Old Roman road, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire (© Francis Frith Collection)

  p. 162 Weybridge ferry crossing, Surrey (© Sunbury & Shepperton Local History Society)

  p. 170 Ashridge Woods, Hertfordshire (© Pete’s Walks/www.petes-walks.co.uk)

  p. 176 Moulsford, Berkshire

  p. 189 Hurley riverside walk, Berkshire (© Jenny Stephens and Hurley Riverside Park)

  p. 202 A Billingsgate porter

  p. 206 Ashtead Common, Surrey (© Francis Frith Collection)

  p. 221 Bomb damage, Portman Street, central London (© Getty Images)

  p. 252 The Compasses Inn, Gomshall, Surrey (© Francis Frith Collection)

  p. 270 Queuing for rations (© Getty Images)

  p. 296 Doreen and E with the twins

  p. 303 Andrew and Margaret, January 1942

  All photographs not acknowledged belong to Doreen Bates’ estate.

  Introduction

  Doreen Mary Bates, the author of this diary, was born on 25 April 1906, the first child of Rosa and (George) Wyndham Bates. Her parents had been born and brought up near Plymouth and it was there that they met and married. Rosa was the youngest daughter of a gunner in the Royal Navy and went to the village school at Kingsand, just across Mount Edgcumbe Bay from Plymouth. She taught in the same school for several years after she finished as a pupil in the top class, and then obtained a post as a cashier at a large Plymouth store. Wyndham was the fifth eldest child in a family of fourteen. After leaving school he went to Birmingham to learn retailing. After their marriage in 1904 they moved to the outskirts of London, renting a small house in Tooting. It was there that Doreen was born. Both Rosa and Wyndham had strong religious convictions and Wyndham eventually became a church warden in an Anglican church for many years. Wyndham worked at Crittalls, a department store in Victoria, and later at Waring & Gillow, before going into partnership with a friend to form a company that imported furnishing fabrics from continental Europe. The company flourished modestly for several years.

  Rosa found Doreen an active, restless and challenging toddler who was intelligent, determined and hard to distract, but also loving and rewarding to care for. When Doreen was four she was joined by a sister, Margaret (known as Margot). Doreen was disappointed in the new arrival at first; she had expected a playmate, not a helpless baby. However, they were soon on good terms and remained close for the rest of their lives. The family moved to a house they bought in Thornton Heath, where they lived until 1928. In that year they moved to a newly built house in Riddlesdown, near Purley in Surrey.

  Rosa was a firm believer in the importance of education, and Doreen and Margot were first sent to a school near their home. Rosa taught them both to read before they went to school. Doreen learnt quickly and developed a love of reading from an early age. Melbourne College was strict and ladylike and not very inspiring, but it taught the basics well enough. Much later in life Doreen wrote a short memoir of her time at Melbourne College:

  I went to my first school on May 6th 1912 when I was six. It was conducted by the survivor of two Victorian sisters, Miss Blanch, as she was always called. She wore long skirts and high necks to her blouses, and mousy hair plaited and arranged in a kind of bird’s nest on top of her head. She was pale and dry with a severe expression. The worst punishment was to be ‘sent to Miss Blanch’. I was sent to her only once, for pulling the long plaits of a girl who was very tall and delicate and liable to faint.

  It was a small school and its fees in the top form were about £2/15 shillings a term.

  One of the objects must have been to produce ‘young ladies’. We always had to wear gloves out of doors; we were supposed to walk, not run; never shout, always be polite. We did not wear uniform except our large flat straw hats with the red school hat band. I never remember any discussion about the future or careers although we took Oxford Preliminary Junior and Senior School examinations. The great virtue of the school for me is that it taught me to work. There was no possibility of shirking. If you did not learn your lesson it was returned. You were given a ‘detention’. It was returned till you could demonstrate that you had learned it. Having observed this arrangement I decided that I might just as well learn my lesson the first time and avoid detentions. I kept this resolve except for one awful occasion when the whole form was given a detention because we had failed to master Henry II’s legal reforms.

  I had one term in the Kindergarten. I remember learning to subtract with buttons (there was one much coveted button with a Dutch boy on it). I had a year in the first form but I remember little of what I learned except some of Blake’s Poems of Innocence. In the second form I remember some ‘natural history’ all out of a book about dragonflies and their development; about shepherd’s purse, and about hedgehogs. In the third form we read Hiawatha and learned fractions and I remember a detailed lesson on the Panama Canal. In the fourth form when I was nine we did decimals, Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ and ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and The Princess, and began geometry. I was interrupted in this form by going to Plymouth for a spell during the First World War. In May 1918 I resumed after we had returned home following my father being invalided out of the Royal Flying Squad. Perhaps this was why my first Shakespeare in the fifth was Twelfth Night which I found difficult, although we had read Lamb’s Tales in the second form at seven. We went on to Julius Caesar and I was thrilled. We did some Roman history to go with it and I developed a passion for it. I shall never forget the experience of seeing the play at St James Theatre with my father. I could have prompted any of the cast from the gallery and I could hardly bear the play to go on and reach its end. We also ‘learned’ As You Like It and Henry Vth, reciting passages at elocution and working hard at the notes and glossary. These lessons gave me a lifelong interest in Shakespeare and apart from anything else would have justified the school for me.

  At the end of each term we had a function called ‘Poetry Saying’ in the hall before the whole school. One or two girls from each form were chosen to recite a selection of what they had learned during the term. I loved this. I rememb
er speaking the part of Cassius in the quarrel scene from Julius Caesar. Once five of us recited the whole of Macaulay’s ‘Armada’. I had what I still regard as the best bit from, ‘With his white hair unbonneted the stout old sheriff comes’ down to ‘our glorious Semper Eadem’. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was another – I loved the dramatic bits – ‘She left the web, she left the loom, she made three paces through the room; she saw the waterlily bloom; she looked down to Camelot.’

  The school library was quite inadequate. We were allowed to change our books on Wednesday mornings and take one book at a time. Mine never lasted me the week. I never had enough to read before I was fourteen. I read my own books over and over again. Nevertheless, besides Shakespeare, we had also read and studied Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, The Talisman and another Scott which no one seems to know, Anne of Geierstein, as well as Adam Bede, Silas Marner and Robinson Crusoe.

  Doreen, their mother Rosa and Margot, 1914

  Doreen was eight years old when the First World War broke out and Wyndham was called up to join the Royal Flying Corps, later the RAF. Before he left for the war he took Doreen aside and asked her to look after her mother and little sister. Doreen took this responsibility seriously. She became co-operative and helpful. The family was short of money and had to budget carefully to make ends meet. This period of frugality made a strong impression on Doreen, who husbanded her resources carefully throughout her life. Although she was reluctant to spend money on herself, however, she took much pleasure in being generous to others and enjoyed spending money in this way when it was available. In 1917 Wyndham was invalided out of the Royal Flying Corps after being wounded in a shoulder. The family rented rooms to be near him in hospital while he was recovering at Dungeness. They were then able to be re-united as a close and loving family.

  When the war ended Wyndham resumed his fabric importation and Rosa and Wyndham started to think about sending Doreen to a school with higher standards and greater intellectual ambition than Melbourne College. They decided on Croydon High School, one of the schools run by the Girls’ Public Day School Trust. It was only a bus ride away from Thornton Heath and it opened up new horizons for Doreen, as she records in this memoir:

  When I reached the top form at Melbourne College my mother looked further afield and her choice lighted on Croydon High School which had been founded in 1875. I did an entrance exam but was told I should have to wait a year for a vacancy. Hence I did not go to the school until September 1921 when I was fifteen. I went into the Upper Fifth – a class of about thirty – which was working for the London General Schools Exam the following June. I found the transition difficult. The girls were noisier, more assured and I felt an outsider. The fees had increased to 10 guineas a term and I felt guilty at costing my parents so much. It was an effort to provide the school uniform and in fact the navy skirt and white blouse which the prospectus prescribed was hardly worn in my form. Nearly everyone wore a navy gym slip which I chose for my birthday present after two terms of feeling wrongly dressed. I was very shy and hardly ever volunteered to answer questions in class. I was inevitably behindhand in some subjects. I began Euclid in the middle; I had missed the first year’s botany; I had done less Latin than the rest of the form. The teaching was good. I had extra informal botany; the English and history thrilled me. We read European history, a new slant for me. The history mistress was a magnificent teacher as I was to discover in my two years in the Sixth but I was afraid of her sarcastic tongue in the Fifth and hardly uttered a word. The freer discipline and noise scared me but I did reasonably well in the end of term exams and managed (in company with only one other girl) to get Matric exemption in the General School exam in which I took 8 subjects. So, elated, yet abashed, I entered the Sixth at 16 in September 1922.

  My two years in the Sixth form were a revelation and I loved every minute. The girls were more congenial. The rougher, tougher ones had left or gone to ‘Home Studies’ – a course of domestic arts which, of course, we more academic girls despised. We had the run of the school library and a common room of our own where we enjoyed our picnic lunch. There were school societies and expeditions, play-readings and music and art. I need play nothing but tennis – I was still afraid of the games mistress, and with luck need never see her. I began to make friends and, best of all, in my second year had history lessons either to myself or with one other girl. I remember those lessons best in the summer term sitting under a tree in the school garden – Roman history, nineteenth-century English and European. I learned to work independently – to read and make notes – to write rudimentary essays. At no time have I encountered better teaching – certainly not at the University – enthusiastic, yet disciplined. It ranged wide and yet kept to the point.

  I cannot remember that we ever discussed careers but I was encouraged to try for a university education as the greatest prize. There seemed no question that it was to be desired. The whole atmosphere of the form was of enthusiasm for learning as the best way of spending the years from 16 to 21. We were very young emotionally. I remember no problems with boyfriends or make up. My activities were centred on school. I rarely went to the theatre, though I loved it – more rarely to a film. There was no radio or TV. We had no car. I went to school which was one and a quarter miles either by bus, or walked and kept my penny fare.

  We rarely saw the headmistress who was a mild Victorian old lady who must have been 64–65. When I was not quite 18 I was going to Westfield College London with 2 other girls to take the Scholarship and Entrance exam and we saw her in her study to be patted on the head and we were told to ‘keep together’ and be very careful on the journey, especially if it was foggy. Of course, there must have been more to her than I experienced. The general spirit of the school, which was very good, must have been due in some measure to her guidance at the top if only because of her part in the selection of staff. Perhaps I see the school through rose-tinted glasses as two thirds of my time was in the Sixth where I felt privileged to be in touch with teachers whose intellectual and personal qualities seemed to be quite above any ambition of mine. What they gave me then was beyond price and with their help I managed to get an entrance scholarship to a residential college of London University and a State Scholarship to enable me to take advantage of it. This was the gift of the first Labour government, and on the result of the Higher School Certificate exam in June 1924 I was able to start at once on the London Honours Course in History. Those two years 1922–24 were marvellous years when I worked harder than I have ever done, enjoyed every minute of it and when circumstances conspired to give me, for once, just what I wanted and needed.

  Her years at Royal Holloway College from 1924 to 1927 were decisive ones for Doreen. For the first time she was living away from home during the term. She encountered young women from many different backgrounds and made lifelong friends among her fellow students, some of them mentioned in her diary: Mary Roney, who read History and later joined her father’s firm of solicitors; Elsie Fisher, reading English, who later worked indefatigably to promote literacy among the gypsy population; and Ella Hewson, who read English and later worked in publishing and was eventually to write fiction herself. These young women were among the first to take advantage of the new opportunities in women’s education and saw themselves not first and foremost as wives and mothers-to-be but as budding professionals in their own right. They questioned accepted norms in society and tried out new and more independent ways of living. Doreen entered into the spirit of this different life with enthusiasm and pleasure. She played a particularly active part in dramatic productions and play readings. She perhaps neglected her academic work to some extent without quite the same inspiration from her University teachers as she obtained from her Sixth form school teachers, but she nevertheless achieved a respectable 2.1 degree at the end of her three years. There are brief diary entries from this period which refer to the active life she led at Royal Holloway College but it seems to have been some years after she left this place of intellectual ferment
and returned to her home surroundings that she started writing the more comprehensive and revealing diary that is published here.

  After graduating Doreen wanted a job that would give her a regular and secure salary, bringing with it the chance of more permanent independence and also a chance to contribute to the family finances. She was keenly aware that Rosa and Wyndham had made considerable financial sacrifices to enable her to go to college and she wanted to repay that debt. She became a civil servant working for the Inland Revenue and the diary commences in 1934 when she was twenty-seven and working in one of the London offices of the Inland Revenue to which she commuted by train from the family home in Riddlesdown.

  Margot, Wyndham and Doreen

  At this time one senses that she did not greatly enjoy her work but regarded it as a secure way of earning her bread and butter. Most of her satisfaction in life came from the activities she participated in outside work. She joined an amateur dramatic society, the Croydon Players, read books voraciously, went to plays, lectures and concerts, met her friends and went on stimulating holidays with her family or with friends. She bought a car and learnt to drive (there was no test to be passed in those days) and resumed piano lessons. In this way she laid down the lifelong habit of filling every day with as much activity and interest as she could cram in.

  But it was her work as a civil servant that led to the most significant emotional encounter of her life. This was with an older colleague, William (Bill) Evans, referred to in the diary mainly as E. William Evans was born in 1894 in Stoke-on-Trent. He was the eldest of a family of seven, one of whom died of diphtheria at the age of five. His mother had been a teacher before her marriage and his father ran a bicycle shop and was also a fiery preacher in a local non-conformist church. The family was poor but Bill gained entrance to the local grammar school where he was able to stay until he was seventeen, when he had to leave school to obtain employment. However, that was not the end of his education, for he was able to take advantage of evening classes run by the Workers’ Educational Association, eventually obtaining a degree in Economics while working as a civil servant in the Customs and Excise Department. He continued his education throughout his life, gaining a degree in Mathematics and, after his retirement, a Diploma in Archaeology from London University.