How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

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СКАЧАТЬ The Guide. ‘Left behind by the tide of evacuation which had swept the teachers along, they were having dull days with no teachers.’ ‘Our Guide company had to clean out empty houses to take evacuees,’ said Iris O’Dell. ‘Mothers and children from Manchester. It was quite dirty, but we had fun. The billeting officer came and sorted the families out, and children were taken round private houses.’

      Margaret Collins was a keen Guide living in Maidstone, Kent.

      The actual moment that war was declared, I was helping out in the Town Hall. We listened in the Mayor’s parlour to the declaration of war and immediately afterwards the air-raid sirens all went. The Mayor got very agitated and sent us down to the cellar. He dashed out onto the Town Hall steps and directed people furiously to ‘get under cover’ but everyone was just gazing around. The sirens had gone off by mistake.

      Various information offices were set up and I helped direct the evacuees. First, we Guides scrubbed the large old houses along the London Road, which had stood empty because of the Depression. They were taken over by the council and we got them ready for pregnant mothers.

      We hardly went to school at all, even though it was my last year. Once air-raid shelters had been dug and blast walls put up, then we got back to school. Then we welcomed an evacuated school from Plumstead. We had three little boys to live with us: Alfie, Eric and Ernie Bell. They arrived with hardly any clothing, and were very unused to baths. The countryside was quite new to them, and they soon enjoyed apple scrumping. Their billeting fee was paid by the government but after things got better organised, their families were required to pay towards this. Then a lot of them went home to their parents.

      A Kensington Brown Owl accompanied her Brownies when they were evacuated to Sussex by bus.

      We loaded up with picnic food. The Brownies also took dressing-up clothes and a wind-up gramophone so that they could give a performance of their latest concert once they got there. The Brownies sang their songs, but travel sickness overcame Alice, one of the liveliest and naughtiest Brownies. A more pathetically deflated sight I never saw. She lay back green and limp and for once almost silent. ‘Never no more,’ she groaned, ‘will I roam.’ Barley sugar, a reminder of the Brownie smile in time of trouble, and an assurance that I didn’t mind a bit if she was sick, helped a little. For these things, when she recovered, she was touchingly grateful. She was led away by the billeting officer, a little less green.

      During this turbulent time, children could see the distress, upheavals and deprivations that their parents were coping with. But older Brownies and Guides had the advantage that they could see how to make themselves useful, which also alleviated their own feelings of helplessness. Families were separated and children sent to live with strangers, often of a different class, creed or culture, perhaps hundreds of miles from home. The children had to undergo long journeys to unknown destinations on overcrowded trains and buses. The younger ones had no idea why they had been wrenched from their mothers’ arms; the older ones had to cope with their own homesickness and the distress of their younger siblings. Unqualified adults, often not parents themselves, became surrogate mothers and fathers overnight to severely homesick children.

      There was no time to match children and foster parents — the evacuees were simply handed out by billeting officers at railway stations, or driven around and deposited on doorsteps. The countryside was filled with urban children wearing labels and carrying their gas masks. Rumours circulated about the horrors of children who knew nothing about closing farm gates, were covered in lice, wet their beds and never stopped crying for their mothers. Local Guides came to the rescue by helping to bath and feed evacuated babies, playing with toddlers and organising games for older children. Evacuee girls over seven became Brownies in their local packs, and the older girls became Guides; both organisations provided instant friends. Small village companies with only eight or ten girls were suddenly swelled to fifty or sixty. Most of the evacuated children were young, so Brownie packs grew overnight. ‘Life was disorganised for everyone,’ wrote The Guide’s Miss Christian. ‘Schools took place in shifts, so that in many cases there was half a day’s holiday at least every day in the week.’ With children spending less time at school, Guide meetings could be held more often than once a week.

      In addition to their gas masks, evacuees were expected to bring with them ‘a change of underclothing, night clothes, house shoes or plimsolls, spare stockings or socks, a toothbrush, a comb, towel, soap and face cloth, handkerchiefs and, if possible, a warm coat or mackintosh’. Many children were too poor to own half of these things, and their foster parents had to find clothes for them too.

      Within a few days 660,000 children and carers were evacuated from London, and 1,220,000 from other towns and cities. By the end of the war the General Post Office had registered thirty-nine million changes of address — for a total population of forty-seven million. Never before had so many people from different backgrounds — the country and the city, the rich and the poor — been thrown so closely together.

      The war against Germany changed the role of Britain’s Guides in other, more profound ways. As well as assisting evacuated children, those Guides who had left school were called up to military service: they were ideal recruits for WAAFs, NAAFI (the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute, which provided the armed services with shops, restaurants and other facilities) and the FANYs. At the start of 1939 The Guide had featured a series called ‘What Shall I Be?’ By September of that year the series had reached ‘No. 9 — Domestic Servant’. The photo shows a pretty young woman with beautifully coiffed hair, ironing a shirt. ‘Cheery and trim,’ says the caption, ‘the domestic servant of today finds the varied work of a house gives her scope that is lacking in more mechanical occupations.’ The next month’s cover showed a female soldier apparently changing the track of a tank using a small spanner. Domestic service was off the agenda, and the Girl Guide Association now encouraged working Guides to join up. Over 1,000 Sea Rangers enlisted with the Wrens.

      With many Guide Captains and Commissioners being called up as ambulance drivers, Air-Raid Wardens, nurses or into factories, thousands of Guide companies all over the country found themselves with no Captains. Patrol Leaders stepped into the breach, even though most of them were no more than fifteen years old. They offered their companies’ services to the billeting authorities, to town halls and airraid posts, asking, ‘Can you use us?’

      People who had never heard of Guides before, suddenly realised how useful they could be. Guides carried messages, wrote down timetables, helped officials at railway stations. They waited on railway platforms all over the country. ‘Quiet, friendly, smiling figures in blue,’ wrote Miss Christian in The Guide, ‘waiting to meet the trains, to carry luggage for tired mothers, to take charge of crying toddlers, to give a friendly, reassuring greeting to the boys and girls of their own age, arriving lonely, homesick and perhaps scared, in utterly new surroundings.’ ‘I have never had much to do with girls,’ said a billeting officer, ‘but I find these Guides most level-headed and sensible. When you ask them to do a job they do get on with it, and they do it thoroughly.’

      They tidied up rest centres in village halls and schools, and cleaned houses that evacuated families would live in. In Glasgow, the hostel for servicewomen was in such a dreadful state that the local Guides had to clean it from top to bottom before they could start running it. ‘They only acquired it a few days before the opening,’ reported The Guide. ‘Guides got down to it and scrubbed and scoured every evening after work to get it ready in time. The running of it in voluntary shifts entails more than would appear, for the trains deposit girls for interviews in the very early morning. It means an all-night shift of Guides every night. The Brownies are knitting dishcloths and intend to keep them steadily supplied.’

      In Eastbourne, a large empty house was taken for fifty girls expected from London. The local Guides set to work scrubbing it. Then they went round to everyone they knew and begged for food, cooking pots, crockery and bedding. They even scrounged hessian to cut up and make into blackout СКАЧАТЬ