Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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you don’t get caught. Such advice might equally have applied to his own links with law-breaking extremists at the same time as continuing his career at the Bar. Moreover, he went on, why weren’t you the ringleader? ‘I found this marvellously liberating,’ she says. ‘I remember it so clearly. It had never occurred to me before to be the ringleader. I was the youngest and I just followed.’ The rebel in Alun Pugh’s heart was reaching out to his youngest daughter.
It was not ultimately Miss Orford – or her sporty successor, the cricket-playing Miss Lickes – who turned Dr Williams’ from confinement into a nightmare. It was the war. Bronwen’s childhood and adolescence were dominated by the Second World War. Cut off from her parents, denied the only familiar surroundings she had known when her father and mother went off to work in Lancashire and shut up the family home in London, she felt herself virtually cut adrift.
Her father’s knee injury meant that active service was out of the question for him, but he was still young enough in theory to qualify for call-up, which in 1941 was extended to men up to fifty-one. He was determined to serve King and Country. In a national emergency his particular loyalties to Wales, Plaid Cymru and Saunders Lewis were forgotten. Lewis urged the Welsh not to fight, saying the conflict had nothing to do with them. Alun Pugh, however, was ready to take up his rifle, or its non-military equivalent. Early in the war he obtained a post as legal adviser to the Ministry of Pensions in the port of Fleetwood in Lancashire. He could not bear to be a barrister while everybody else of his age was fighting and so accepted the substantial pay cut involved and moved north.
Kathleen Pugh also found an oudet for her frustrated energies. In the first war she had been a volunteer nurse. In Fleetwood she managed the Ministry of Pensions’ canteen, one of thousands of egalitarian oudets set up by the authorities to provide cheap, nutritious food at a time of shortages. In place of the house in Pilgrims Lane, which was left empty, the couple moved around from one set of unsatisfactory digs to another. When Bronwen came home in the school holidays, it was initially to the Lancashire coast.
The journey from Dolgellau to Fleetwood on trains crowded with men and women in uniform, through stations prepared for air raids, scared her. ‘I think my greatest nightmare of the war was getting lost because they removed all the signs from the stations. At first I had Gwyneth with me, but there were journeys I made on my own, changing two or three times, with no signs, clutching my gas mask and lots of smog. I was petrified of getting lost and never being found again.’ When she arrived, there was title to celebrate. ‘Fleetwood was a ghastly place,’ she remembers. ‘I have terrible memories of it. They celebrated something called Wakes Week and we were put out of our digs to make way for holiday-makers. We were literally on the pavement with nowhere to go. We ended up staying in a hotel until we could find other digs. As usual it was up a dark, dank staircase, two or three rooms at the top of a house. It was such a come-down. I remember dreaming of a big house with lots of space.’
‘Bronwen found herself in a very strange environment in Fleetwood,’ says her sister Ann. ‘We were known by the locals as southerners because we spoke with a different accent. And we felt foreign. It wasn’t meant cruelly, and because I was older, I had a great time going to the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool. But because Bronwen was younger and my parents were so busy, I think she felt abandoned.’
A greater blow than the physical hardship was the loss of the security that had hitherto surrounded her childhood. During the summer before she went off to school her father took her on a bus trip around the centre of London, pointing out monuments and buildings ‘because they will probably be bombed and this will be your last chance to see them’. The effect of such a message, when combined with being sent off to a boarding school in a strange environment and losing your home, must have been profound. And because Alun Pugh’s income fell dramatically, his youngest daughter suddenly began to notice money. Until the war she had always taken for granted the fact that the family was well-off, able to afford all the things she needed. Now the budget was squeezed, so much so that Ann Pugh had to delay going up to Oxford.
‘I couldn’t imagine there were people who had more than us,’ Bronwen says. ‘Obviously there were – the Astors for instance – but I was totally ignorant of that. Then the war came and there was no money because my father had given up his career and lived on a tiny salary in digs and we had to go and eat where my mother worked – rice puddings and awful food. They were meant for the poor. And we had been dragged down to that. I felt it as a humiliation.’ Her reaction to new hardships emphasises how little she enjoyed or even comprehended the war period. Its privations came at a difficult time in her life. She was too old to be oblivious to the greater threat. Children under ten write of seeing the whole thing as one long adventure. Yet neither was she old enough to get caught up in the war spirit, the comradeship, the sense of doing your bit in a vast community effort. She had all the worry, without enough real insight to put it into any context, and none of the excitement of broadening horizons experienced, for example, by her sister Ann, who was conscripted.
Hitler’s strategy towards Britain was two-fold – to bomb it into submission from the air and to starve it into surrender at sea. Over half of all foodstuffs in the pre-war period had come into the country by ship. If the aerial policy made relatively little impact on Bronwen’s life, the maritime blockade drove her to despair as her empty stomach ached. Rationing was the order of the day: marrow or carrot jam spread on stale bread was sometimes all that was on offer for tea at Dr Williams’.
Sleepy and safe Dolgellau managed to work itself into a fever about the war. In June 1940 the girls from Dr Williams’ took part in an air-raid practice. ‘We had to go down into the basement in single file and in silence from our forms,’ the weekly letter home detailed, ‘and the Head said that we had got to get down in four minutes – the whole school of 300 girls. It was an awfully queer siren.’ Later there were air-raid practices for boarders in the middle of the night. The drills were a sensible precaution though predictably, given the town’s location, it entirely escaped the attention of German bombers. The nearest to a raid was when an American plane crashed several miles to the north.
Sometimes the elaborate preparations for eventualities that were extremely unlikely to befall Dolgellau left Bronwen and her contemporaries fearful but bemused. In October 1942 they all went to Sunday morning service wearing their gas masks. ‘What a sight we looked,’ twelve-year-old Bronwen reported home. ‘I wish I’d got a proper gas-mask case because I’ve still got that cardboard thing and it’s all come to pieces. You see it’s all very muddling, but I’m sure G[wyneth] will explain better than me about this gas attack. There are some people who are attacking some other people somewhere and some girl guides are running messages to somewhere from somewhere.’
As the war passed Dolgellau by, the pupils of Dr Williams’ were determined to do their bit, even if they had no clear idea of what war entailed, but their active service stretched no further than evenings of knitting scarves for ‘our lads’ in the army or watching Ministry of Information films about how to disarm a German. There were collections of spare toys for ‘bombed-out children’. When Bronwen played Nerissa in a school production of The Merchant of Venice, the townsfolk were given a rare invitation over to Dr Williams’, with their ticket money raising £5 for the RAF Benevolent Fund. Town and gown for once had common purpose.
The war did change Dolgellau’s landscape. Various schools were evacuated out there and a group of children from Birkenhead, a target for the bombers because its port worked hand in hand with neighbouring Liverpool, took up residence nearby. And there were American soldiers stationed in the area who paid particular attention to the teenage girls on their doorstep. In March 1943 Bronwen, showing the first signs of impending womanhood, wrote excitedly of one of the older girls at the school being greeted by a chorus of wolf-whisdes when a military truck overtook her on her bicycle.
North-west Wales was also considered a safe place to detain prisoners of war – far away from the continental coastline and any hopes of escape or liberation. In September of the same year Bronwen recorded an encounter with the enemy while on a school walking trip at nearby Bala Lake. Her oddly neutral tones reveal a lingering bemusement about the issues at stake in the war:
We saw a very nice-looking Italian prisoner, who was working in one of the fields. By the way we