Diamonds at Dinner (14 page)

Poor Roland felt ashamed that he wasn’t good enough to serve his country. On top of which he was to lose his job: with the Earl away fighting and the Countess in charge of whatever ATS unit she had been given, there would be no place for a chauffeur at Croome. In fact, there was to be no Croome at all: the great Court was shut up and turned over to the War Department.

The first thing I had to do was to find somewhere to live. With Croome under dust sheets and the idea of living in at Norton Barracks not deemed suitable by the army, I was homeless. Fortunately, Roland’s brother Arnold came to the rescue. He offered me digs at the farm where he worked, and one sad day in late September 1939 I took my little cardboard suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe, packed up my few belongings and made ready to say goodbye to life at Croome.

You might think that such a momentous occasion – for that was how it felt to me – would stick in my memory.
But the truth is I can’t remember a single thing about it. I must have bade farewell to Mr Latter and Winnie and all the under servants; I must have taken one last lingering look at my wonderful bedroom – bigger than I had ever been used to in my life before service; I must, too, have attended one last time to my mistress, brushing her hair and making sure she had everything she would need for the day ahead. Yet I can’t recall a single moment of it and, if Her Ladyship said anything to mark our separation or to recognise my years in her service, it has slipped away into the mists of my fading memory. But, you know, I’m not even certain that she did.

Our story must now split into distinct and separate sections – and ones which I have only been able to glue back together in the years since the world descended once again into war. Perhaps they are like the reels of a great film, which have been separated and can at first only be viewed individually.

One reel follows Private Hilda Mulley in her new life at Norton Barracks – and, in truth, that is a short reel. Another shows the war as it tore up the countries of Europe, leaving a generation of young men as names only to be listed in the ever-growing roll call of casualties. While the third will give us a peek into the life of Croome Court when its owners and all their servants have departed. And that, I think, is a very interesting reel
indeed. I shall try my best to glue and splice the frames of these films into a single story.

Norton Barracks – a depressing 20-acre hodge-podge of tarmac and Nissen huts (great prefabricated steel buildings) had existed for more than 100 years by the time I reported there for duty. In 1939 the function of the Depot was to train recruits and administer the ‘home’ of the Worcestershire Regiment. That training was divided into ‘Primary’, covering the first six weeks of a new recruit’s service, and ‘Corps’, which concentrated on the more advanced skills they would need to operate as infantry troops in battle. What struck me most of all on my first day in uniform was the sheer number of men gathered there. Everywhere I looked men were marching, or being yelled at by fierce-looking sergeant majors, or running at a sort of half-trot between the various barracks buildings. It seemed like half of the army must be concentrated here and, in fact, their numbers were so great that an old disused jam factory had been requisitioned and a
brand-new
camp of wooden huts had been constructed at one end of the base. It was to this camp that I was assigned.

You might have thought – and I most certainly did – that my training as a dressmaker-tailor might have been noted and some use found for it. But there’s an old saying that the army never actually thinks in straight lines, and so it proved. As I stood before the Commanding Officer that
day, I learned that my great service to King and country was going to be waiting on tables in the Officers’ canteen – or mess as it was called in the services. It seemed then – and still to this day I feel the same – an act of short sightedness: wasn’t there a need for my skills?

I was sure there was and equally sure that my mum and dad hadn’t scrimped and saved to find the £25 for my apprenticeship only to see their daughter wait hand and foot on the dining tables of a bunch of la-di-da officers. Even my five years in service to Her Ladyship had managed to make some use of what I had been trained for. My new role seemed both a great waste of my abilities and an odd way to keep the home fires burning during the country’s darkest hours. Still, the army did things its own way and I could have no more budged it from its decision than I could have taken up a gun and had a pop at Hitler myself. I consoled myself that, while I wasn’t convinced the army knew best, at least I would be able to make sure the boys who were to go and do the fighting started out with a full stomach and clean tables to eat from.

In that, they were better off – as so they should have been – than the rest of the population. On 8 January 1940 rationing came into force and the people of Britain (me included) began to learn the meaning of tightening your belt. When war broke out, the country was importing an enormous proportion of its food – 20 million tons per
year, including more than half of the meat, three quarters of our cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of all fruit and about 70% of cereals and fats. Not surprisingly, Hitler ordered his warships and U-Boats to attack the merchant ships which kept us alive – and barely a day passed without news that a vessel had been sunk.

The first items to be ‘on the ration’ were bacon, butter and sugar. The government issued every single person in the country a little green ration book, with coupons to tear out and hand over with payment for your allowance. This was followed quickly by meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk and canned and dried fruit. Almost all of these controlled items were rationed by weight – an ounce of this or three ounces of that – but meat was rationed by price. We all had to get used to counting our coupons as well as our pennies and eking out the decreasing quantities of the rations became, as the war years ground on, a constant struggle.

The thing everyone hated most was ‘the national loaf’. Bread wasn’t actually rationed during the war (although it would be after the fighting had ended) but the government ordered bakers to produce a new type of ‘national loaf’, made of wholemeal flour, which replaced the ordinary white variety we had all been used to. It tasted mushy, looked grey and was widely blamed for causing what might politely be called ‘digestion problems’:
since most of the country didn’t have indoor plumbing, you can imagine why this was an issue!

Things got worse when the government issued a new order that bread must not be sold to a customer until the day after it was baked: the idea was to help the country cut down on the amount of bread we ate. Some bright spark in one of the ministries in Whitehall worked out that it was difficult to slice freshly baked bread thinly so our portions were a little too big, and that the tastiness of a loaf fresh from the oven was likely to encourage people to eat too much of it.

Like bread, fish was not on the ration but the price increased considerably as the war progressed and supplies dropped to 30% of pre-war levels. Long queues outside fishmongers became a common sight, and at the good old English fish-and-chip shop. In fact, everywhere you looked there were queues. Housewives – and that was a term you could use in those days without fear of seeming sexist – often spent much of their day lining up in one queue or another in the hope of finding enough to feed their families.

In fairness, it wasn’t just the ordinary people like the Mulleys in Stamford and the Newmans in Severn Stoke who were having to live on a much reduced diet. Because rationing was controlled by coupons rather than money, being rich didn’t guarantee you a full stomach.

Even for those with enough cash to go to eat out found that the government had seen them coming. In May 1942
an order was passed that meals served in hotels and restaurants must not cost over five shillings per customer and must not be of more than three courses, only one of which could contain meat or fish or poultry.

As the war progressed, other basic commodities joined the ever-growing list of things on the ration. Clothing was rationed on a points system. When it was introduced, on 1 June 1941, no clothing coupons had been issued and, at first, any unused margarine coupons in ration books were valid for clothing. Soon, though, our little ration books had special sections for clothes. Initially, the allowance was enough for one new outfit per year – and that included shoes, hat and gloves – but, as the war progressed, the points were reduced until buying a single item like a coat used almost a year’s clothing coupons.

At least in this bit of the war on the home front my training came to the fore. I was able to run up material into something useful and to make new clothes from old ones. And in June 1940 I was to have a very good reason to do so.

But first our attention must turn to the second reel of our film, and to the northern coast of Europe. The Battle of France began in earnest on 10 May 1940. The German Army Blitzkreig had swept through Holland and advanced westward through Belgium. Four days later it burst through the Ardennes forests and advanced rapidly
northward to the English Channel. A combination of British, French and Belgian units tried to stop the German spearhead but by 20 May Hitler’s troops had reached the coast, splitting each of the three Allied armies off from one another. With their backs, literally, to the sea, the Battle of Dunkirk began: it was a disaster.

The story of how a flotilla of small ships rescued more than 330,000 allied troops has gone down in history as one of the defining moments of Britain during the war. At the time, the full extent of the crisis was kept from us by the official censor, who stopped newspapers publishing details of the unfolding disaster. But the papers – and the wireless – did tell us that the King had called for an unprecedented national week of prayer, and his call was echoed by the Archbishop of Canterbury when he led a special service ‘for our soldiers in dire peril in France’.

All of us knew someone – or knew of someone who knew someone – trapped on those beaches at Dunkirk. And we prayed, intensely and gladly, for their safe return. And when, by some miracle – or so it seemed – the gallant little ships succeeded in rescuing our boys from the beaches and getting them under a hail of gunfire and bombs from above to the safety of the navy carriers, we rejoiced and thanked God for his deliverance.

But there was one soldier – one among many, I know, but one whom I had known, whose hand I had shaken and
whose bread I had eaten – who did not return. William George, 10th Earl of Coventry died at Dunkirk.

When I heard the news, I confess that I wept and I looked in and amongst my possessions for a little photograph, no more than two inches by two inches in size, which I had taken the summer before. It was a photograph that had got me into a little hot water with Mr Latter but which I treasured as much as anything else I had brought with me from my old life at Croome. It was a picture of His Lordship and my mistress, holding hands with Lady Maria and young Bill, taken at the back of the Court. Milady was wearing a bright, patterned summer dress, her long dark hair tucked up and pinned at the back; the children were smiling shyly and carrying wooden tennis rackets. The Earl himself was staring directly into the camera lens, his trousers hitched high above the waist with braces (as was the fashion in those days) and a smile just visible underneath his wide, sandy moustache.

I remembered Mr Latter’s shock and outrage when I asked His Lordship if I might snap their picture. ‘Miss Mulley, a servant must never take a photograph of the family – never!’ And I recall His Lordship’s gentle response that it would be fine this one time for an exception to be made. Now he was gone: a body amongst many bodies, lying somewhere on the bloodied beaches of Dunkirk.

I wondered how my mistress was taking the news. At
one time I might have been of some comfort to her in her grief and loss – for, as I have said, I am convinced that she truly loved him. But she was in barracks many miles away and I was stuck waiting on tables at Norton.

As the month of June moved on, however, I had happier thoughts to take the place of grief. For on Saturday, the 15th, I returned to Stamford and to the church of St Michael to be married to Roland Newman. Somehow – goodness knows from where – I had found enough material to make up a white wedding dress with a
full-length
veil. On my head I wore a tiara – not as priceless as the one I had drawn from the bank for Milady to wear at the coronation but a source of some pride for me nonetheless. In my hands I carried a huge posy of flowers and, beside me, Roland – my Roll – sported a smart carnation in the buttonhole of his three-piece suit.

We didn’t, of course, have a honeymoon and our first home was a little terraced cottage in Hatfield, one of the villages near Croome Court: close enough to Norton Barracks for me, and to Worcester itself, where Roland had found work driving a lorry for a local company.

The house itself was a far cry from what we had been used to at the Court. There was no hot running water, no electricity and the days of the luxury of having my morning bath prepared for me by a housemaid were long gone. In those days, for us, posh sanitation meant a
non-slippery
path to the toilet at the bottom of the back yard! But it was our own home (though rented, never bought) and, if we began our married life amid the privations of war, we were happy just to be with each other.

What of Croome itself in those wartime years? Had we but known it – and it would be a secret kept until long after Hitler had been beaten and peace declared – our old home had been turned into one of the most important places in the whole war.

Shortly after the Coventry family moved out, the RAF moved in and began constructing an aerodrome on the estate. In all, it would take two full years to transform the Croome parkland into RAF Defford and, although it was never an operational flying base, what happened there would be the key to winning the war. In May 1942 scientists and officers moved in – all in conditions of utmost secrecy – and began to establish something called the Telecommunications Flying Unit, or TFU for short. So hurried and so secret was the move to Defford that many of the personnel had, at first, to be accommodated in tents. Before long an entire new set of buildings had been erected to house at least 2,500 personnel, as well as hangers to accommodate 100 aircraft. What was all of this in aid of? One word (although not one we heard, nor would have understood if we had): radar.