Millions Like Us by Virginia Nicholson

Author:Virginia Nicholson [Nicholson, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141969749
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

If you really wanted a dress, and you didn’t have the coupons … well, I used to think, you know, when the war’s finished I’m going to buy material and I’m going to make myself a new dress.

That was what we saw the future as being. A free life, being able to go into the shops and buy materials and make things, or buy a couple of pairs of shoes.

And my friend Connie – she was a great knitter. She was going to knit for Scotland, and I was going to sew for Scotland.

When they thought about their own role, most women focused on the fulfilment of domestic aspirations. Lovely breakfasts were what Clara Milburn missed: coffee, butter and marmalade, though above all she looked forward to her son Alan’s return. After three years in the FANYs Patience Chadwyck-Healey, exhausted by the lack of privacy, yearned for a rural retreat. ‘I just wanted to grow roses in a little cottage miles away on top of a hill somewhere – utter peace and flowers and relaxation – that was what I thought would be absolutely gorgeous.’

Thus, for most, the principal preoccupations were the traditionally feminine concerns of home and hearth. In 1944 the author Margaret Goldsmith set out to inquire on women’s wartime state of mind. Many wives, she reported, ‘are so homesick for their pre-war way of life that they seem to have created in their imagination a glowing fantasy of what this life was like. All the small yet grinding irritations of domesticity are forgotten.’

But what would the reality be in that longed-for home, in that imagined dream-time ‘after the war’? The millions of women who had taken on war work or been conscripted knew that the world they’d grown up in would never be the same again. They would still be mothers, housewives, feeders, healers, carers and educators. But after so much sacrifice, they wanted to believe that life after the war would be better than what had gone before.

So when, on 2 December 1942, the liberal social reformer Sir William Beveridge published a report which promised a ‘comprehensive policy of social progress’, the women of Britain turned eagerly to its pages to discover what plans their leaders had to improve their lot. Was it possible that the government was starting to recognise that half the population of Britain lived lives of unaided struggle, and that there existed a genuine political will to assist and support their efforts?

That evening, Nella Last listened to Sir William broadcasting to the nation as he laid out a utopian vision. In the new, post-war world Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness would be regarded as the evils of a past age. He explained with care the workings of a contributory scheme which would supply a comprehensive safety net covering all eventualities, for the entire population. There would be Family Allowances, a National Health Service and National Assistance for the unemployed. The pioneering scheme offered everything from maternity grants to funeral grants, ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

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