JOAN RICE

Sand in My Shoes Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF's Diary

In memory of Hugh, my husband of forty-six years.

And in memory also of those young Hurricane pilots of 504 Squadron who fought so bravely in the Battle of Britain.

SAND IN MY SHOES

(Frank Loesser/Victor Schertzinger)

Sand in my shoes, sand from Havana Calling me to that ever so heavenly shore Calling me back to you once more Dreams in the night, dreams of Havana Dreams of a love I hadn't the strength to refuse Darling the sand is in my shoes Deep in my veins the sensuous strains Of the soft guitar Deep in my soul the thunderous roll Of a tropic sea under the stars, That was Havana You are the moonlit mem'ry I can't seem to lose That's why my life's an endless cruise All that is real is the feel of the sand in my shoes

(Instrumental Interlude)

Deep in my veins the sensuous strains Of the soft guitar Deep in my soul the thunderous roll Of a tropic sea under the stars, That was Havana You are the moonlit mem'ry I can't seem to lose That's why my life's an endless cruise All that is real is the feel of the sand in my shoes Sand in my shoes Sand from Havana.

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Foreword by Jonathan Rice

Introduction

Part I: Hendon, The Phoney War

1939

1940

1941

Part II: Medmenham

1941

Part III: Egypt

1942

Afterword by Eva Rice

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

When Mother asked if we thought it would be a good thing to type out her war diary for the family to read, we politely said yes. We assumed there would be no real heroics in there, but we did not really know what Mother had done in the war (apart from get married in Cairo – oops! I've given away the ending) so we did not quite know what to expect. And even though we knew that Mother was a good writer, we did not expect anything like this.

For those of us lucky enough to be born after the end of what proved to be the last World War of the twentieth century, 1939 is beyond our imagination. L.P. Hartley's description of the past as ‘a foreign country’ is not powerful enough: for those of us who have been civilians all our lives, those war years are a different world. We grew up in the shadow of war, maybe, but it never became a reality. We never had it so good, as Harold Macmillan never said.

My parents were among those unlucky ones who were of a generation who had to fight. But, to read their diaries, we might feel that in many ways they were the lucky ones. As my mother's diary makes very clear, she enjoyed the war most of the time, ‘Never in my life have my days been so round and so snug,’ she writes in 1940, ‘and this is a war, a clash of civilization. It is odd.’ For my brothers and me, my parents' war experiences were crucial, because without the upheaval that Hitler caused, my father and mother would never have met, and we – my brothers, our children and our grandchildren – would not be here. We are not unique, of course: there are millions of us all over Europe, America and elsewhere who owe their existence to Hitler's decision to invade Poland in September 1939. No wonder Europe was entirely reshaped by the war, and not just in terms of national borders traced on maps. Hitler's pursuit of his belief in the ideal of a Master Race proved to be an Orwellian reality, probably resulting in a greater mongrelization of Europe than any other single event in history. I am proud to be one of those mongrels.

It is a very strange sensation to read the diary of your mother, especially when it deals with the time before you existed. In many ways, the person revealed in this diary is a stranger, a woman who happens to have the same name as my mother. If I didn't know it was Mother who had written it, I would never have guessed. When we were growing up, I never noticed the determination and ambition that are revealed in the diary, never thought of Mother as a person who had ever scored three goals in a hockey match, or who actually enjoyed gardening, or who ever smoked. Yet here it is, a true picture of the young woman who, within seven years of finishing her diary, would be mistress of a vast crumbling farmhouse with three sons rushing around her feet. I never remember her remarking, as she does in the diary, ‘Housework is nothing like as soul-destroying as typing.’ But I am still worried about the entry for 31 March 1941. She was in hospital, sharing a ward with ‘thirty bawling brats’, an experience which, she writes, ‘has soured me as a confirmed child hater.’ Not the person I know.

Mother's ambition to be a writer was the one thing that never flagged. I remember throughout our childhood hearing the clatter of the typewriter as Mother somehow found time between school runs, dog walking and keeping Popefield Farm in some sort of order, to write another short story, or a piece for Woman's Hour or Punch. It seemed to us quite natural that a person could earn money from writing and broadcasting, because Mother did. She never had time to write that epic novel, for which the three of us must be largely to blame, but she was a good and regularly published writer. We all, to a greater or lesser extent, have followed her example.

Neither of my parents were ever remotely military people. They never spoke about their war experiences, except to tell us of their wedding day or self-deprecatory anecdotes about why Father never won the M.C. or about his German measles in the invasion of Sicily. We found it odd (as did Father) that his tailor persisted in addressing him as Major Rice over a decade after the war had ended and he had been demobbed, and it has only really occurred to me now, on re-reading the diaries, that none of my parents' wartime colleagues became friends after the war. I do not think I ever met any of the people mentioned in the diary, apart from those that Mother knew from before the war and with whom she remained friends for years, in one case to this day. The war was a break in existence, and it was clearly one they were both eager to put behind them as soon as it was all over.

I also have to keep reminding myself how young Mother was when the war began. It was only a fortnight or so after her 20th birthday. I was at university on my 20th birthday, the extent of my worries being which pub to celebrate in. When she went to view the Blitz damage in Kilburn, she noted one shop, ‘where I used to buy my school hats’, which hadn't a window left. She would have been buying her school hats there only three or four years earlier. It must have been terrifying to be part of ‘a generation without a tomorrow, alive and beautiful in our lovely today.’

On board a ship to Egypt, aged 22 and a half, she gets into a deep discussion about the state of the world, and notes, ‘it's a dreadful and depressing thing if the men with ideals and intelligence are already so disillusioned that they will not even fight for the future. And then Diana came over, and Roger, and we played a game of deck quoits.’ The answer to everything when you are 22, a game of deck quoits.

Jonathan Rice January 2006

INTRODUCTION

In 1939 I was nineteen years old, living with my parents in the small Surrey village of Claygate. We had a detached house, a largish garden, a car in the garage. Our comparative prosperity was a recent event; my parents, whose financial highs and lows had punctuated my childhood, had found themselves three years earlier on a high. I was now a typical middle-class unmarried daughter. I had left school at just seventeen with matriculation. No thoughts of higher education were considered. Universities were not an option for girls except for the brilliant few or those with wealthy parents who did not consider a university education a waste of time for their daughters.

Like many of my contemporaries I went to a secretarial college and from there to a job as a shorthand typist. I was considered to be one of the lucky ones. I was taken on by the Asiatic Petroleum Company (Shell) which – according to the principal of my college – chose only the cream of the cream. As the cream we were paid top salaries, £2 10s (old money) a week as opposed to the £2 paid by the next most desirable firm – ICI.¹ My fellow typists in Bitumen, the department to which I was assigned, were a pleasant lot; the work, if boring as far as I was concerned, was far from arduous and the attitude of Shell towards its female staff was positively paternal. We might have to wear a uniform provided free by the firm – navy-blue serge in winter, beige shantung in summer – until we reached the rank of senior secretary, but unlike the men and almost everyone else in those days, we did not have to work on Saturday mornings.

There was a staff canteen where we were provided free with morning coffee and afternoon tea, and an excellent lunch at bargain prices. On Fridays, just before pay day, a satisfying dish of chips and peas and lashings of gravy could be bought for five (old) pence. Our leisure hours were equally well catered for. On the river at Teddington near where I lived was Lensbury, the firm's palatial sports club where just about every sport was provided for and where there were weekly dances. In Claygate itself there was a tennis club and an amateur dramatic society. Nearby Richmond had an ice-skating rink. The cinema was a walk across the common to Esher. I had a bicycle; I was learning to drive. It was the sort of life most girls of my class were contented with until they were married.

I wanted to get married, of course, since the alternative was to end up a despised spinster like the head of our typing pool, an old woman of forty, pitied and mocked by us younger girls. In my depressed moments I saw that as being my fate. I was not a success with my male contemporaries. However hard I tried to conform to the then social climate where men called all the shots, they seemed to sense that I was different in an undesirable way. My ambitions were not the ambitions of my contemporaries. I wanted to write; I wanted to travel; I wanted to be famous. But all I got were rejection slips from editors, and how could I save up for a world trip on £2 10s a week?

Then, in September 1939, war was declared. This was my opportunity, I seized it immediately. I joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).

This diary covers the years from September 1939 to December 1942, by which time I was engaged. Thereafter until the end of the war if I wanted to write up any goings on, I did so in letters to my fiancé, later my husband.

For the first eighteen months of the war I was posted to the RAF Station, Hendon as a secretary, progressing from ACW2² to corporal, and where the so-called ‘phoney war’ eventually gave way to the Battle of Britain and the bombing of London. RAF Station Hendon also had its share of air raids during this period.

In May 1941 I was commissioned and posted to RAF Medmenham as a photographic interpreter.³ This, for me, was the least enjoyable period of my WAAF career, but it led in January 1942 to an overseas posting to Egypt. There I remained for two years, except for an interlude when the WAAF members of our unit were evacuated to what was then Palestine. (We owed this abrupt departure to General Rommel and his army who had come dangerously near to occupying Cairo.) In this, final section I have included excerpts from my husband's own diary.

In January 1944 I was given a compassionate posting back to England. My husband, after service with the Eighth Army through the desert, Sicily and Italy, had also returned home to join the preparations for the Second Front. As a result I became pregnant and left the WAAF in the summer of 1944. In November that year the first of our three sons⁴ was born.

Joan Rice

¹ Imperial Chemical Industries plc.

² Aircraft Woman 2nd Class.

³ Photographs of enemy territory were taken, brought back and examined for any relevant information.

⁴

 1944 Tim. Lyricist, author and broadcaster

 1947 Jonathan. Author, broadcaster and lecturer

 1950 Andrew. Advertising guru (South Africa) and broadcaster

PART I Hendon, The Phoney War