Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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and he liked Mussolini and Hitler, but hated Churchill. He was a fascist. He didn’t like Wales. He said in a very strong Italian accent ‘Wales, rain, rain, rain, but Italy sun, sun, sun!’
The mixture of childish mantras and glimpses of the conflict in the adult world is revealing. More wholeheartedly positive was her response to a British war hero and family friend who dropped in to take her to tea on his way to Barmouth. Major-General Sir Francis Tuker, a senior figure in the Gurkhas, had been at school with Alun Pugh and had visited the family home on several occasions. Thirteen-year-old Bronwen had developed something of a schoolgirl crush on him, which he played along with by calling on her at Dr Williams’ in 1943. ‘He came in a small army van, raised awfully high from the ground by big wheels,’ she told her parents. ‘There were three soldiers in the car with him, one driving.’ The link endured. In February 1946, towards the end of her time at Dr Williams’, he answered one of her letters. ‘He didn’t actually say much,’ she reported, ‘except that he would be stuck in Calcutta through the summer and that it was already “beastly hot”.’
Dr Williams’ itself certainly got caught up in the national mood of patriotism and swept Bronwen along. She described an armistice service in a letter home in November 1943. She was one of a number of guides there, but the head had refused to allow them to carry the Union Jack. ‘Everybody,’ Bronwen raged, ‘thinks it is disgusting. Not having a Union Jack on Armistice Sunday because “it isn’t done”, goodness. We all feel jolly hot about it.’
However, for Bronwen, the privations of a wartime childhood greatly outweighed any excitement. Her biggest problem was the absence of food. ‘For me the war was one long hell,’ she says. ‘It got worse and worse and worse because the food ran out, the clothes ran out, there were shortages of everything, then rationing. I was always hungry. I felt I never had enough to eat.’ And even when plates were full, it was ‘lucky dip’ or its equivalent that was on offer. ‘Dinner,’ she wrote to her parents in November 1940, ‘consisted of soup with bits of raw celery floating around and huge chunks of carrots also floating around like corks, then a pudding something like a terrible bright yellow blanc-mange with a few prunes also floating round, then two mingy little biscuits.’ The hunger pangs were so extreme at times that she felt moved to steal food from the school dining room. The headteacher caught her with her hand in the biscuit tin and stopped her sweet ration for a fortnight.
Hitler’s maritime cordon quickly affected the nation’s eating habits. Churchill’s Food Minister, Fred Marquis, later Lord Woolton, was by Christmas 1940 advocating a wholesale change in diet to meet the new circumstances. ‘It is the duty of all grown-up people to do with less milk this winter,’ he advised through the columns of the Daily Express, ‘so that children and nursing mothers can be sure of getting as much as they need. Oatmeal, one of the finest foods for giving warmth and energy, is a “must” for growing children.’ With a blithe ignorance of the eating likes and dislikes of youngsters, he continued, ‘they will probably like it as oatcakes. Encourage your children to eat baked potatoes, jacket and all. Carrots are an important protective food. Most children love carrot,’ he suggested hopefully, ‘when it has been washed, lightly scraped and grated raw into a salad or a sandwich.’
Children were encouraged to abandon their sweet tooth in favour of carrots by the example of night fighter ace, ‘Cat’s Eye’ Cunningham. His ability to dodge German anti-aircraft guns and repel the Luftwaffe’s 1940 blitz on London was put down in official propaganda to a rabbit-like love of carrots, which enabled him to see in the dark.
A taste for salad, Woolton ordered, must be inculcated at once. ‘Salads and vegetables are what [your child] needs almost more than anything else, so teach him to like them as early as you can. You will find that many children, when they can’t cope with a plateful of green salad, will enjoy it when it’s well chopped up between slices of wholemeal bread.’
With even adult rations pegged to tiny quantities – three ounces of bacon per week, two of cheese, two of tea, eight of sugar and four of chocolate and sweets – a spot of recycling was required, Woolton advised, to fill empty young tummies. Apple cores, his department proposed, could be turned into ‘delicious and very health-giving drinks’ by boiling them in water.
In this regime of bitter tastes and recycled waste, the chocolate that Bronwen and many other children craved became a rare treat. ‘For the duration of the war,’ the head of Dr Williams’ informed parents, ‘fruit and chocolate may be sent to individual girls but they must be handed in to the matron who will keep them and distribute them at the proper time. The school does still have regular, though limited, supplies of chocolate which the girls can buy, but no girl who has sweets or chocolate of her own may also buy school chocolate.’ When the pooled resources were shared out on high days and holidays, Bronwen’s joy knew no bounds. ‘It’s Freda’s birthday today,’ she wrote in February 1945. ‘We are all looking forward to this afternoon as she is having a DOUBLE birthday table with Maureen Oates. Yum, yum! We are going to stuff and stuff and stuff!!’
Sometimes she ended up caught between her patriotic duty and her rumbling stomach. In December of the same year she told her parents: ‘the head-girl of the Mount School, York, has written a letter to the head-girl of every other boarding school to ask if anybody would give up their 4 ounces of extra Christmas chocolate to send overseas to France etc. I think it is an excellent idea and everyone here who has got some is sending it.’ Goodness carries its own reward, but the following month her sacrifice of chocolate was repaid. ‘Have you had any bananas at home yet?’ she enquired in January 1946. ‘Some kids have brought a few back with them and so I have tasted them once again. It was a thrilling moment.’
If the food shortages got worse before they got better, there was some relief at the end of 1941, when the Pughs returned to London from Fleetwood. ‘What marvellous news,’ Bronwen wrote. ‘I jolly well hope that the war will be over by the Easter hols so that we can go to London.’ It wasn’t, of course, but at least holidays were once more in a familiar location, though the house in Pilgrims Lane now also provided shelter for refugees, who gave the increasingly adult Bronwen some idea of the realities of the war on the continent. ‘I remember in particular one Jewish woman, a Miss Seligman. She spent all her time in tears. And there were two Dutch refugees. They had survived on a diet of tulip bulbs.’
The return to London also brought her face to face with what war was about. ‘Later there were doodlebugs and it was horrendous. You would go up the High Street and these things would come flying over and you would be petrified. You would wait for the engines to cut out and just hope that they had passed you by. Everyone was so exhausted and bad-tempered that they got angry with you all the time.’ Hampstead is on a hill and from her bedroom window she would watch the East End of London being bombed – just the destruction that her father had predicted in 1939.
The contrast between north-west Wales, where war was experienced at second hand, and Hampstead was huge. It was as if Bronwen was dipping in and out of the conflict, almost an adult in London but still a child in the safety of Dr Williams’. She was back in Dolgellau for VE Day, 8 May 1945. The school worked itself up into a state of great excitement, with the head deciding on a special treat-two extra days’ holiday. ‘Isn’t that marvellous,’ she wrote home girlishly, adding with a note of regret, ‘anyone who can get home and back in a day is allowed. For the rest of us, she is going to try to provide something special, which will of course include the flicks.’ In the event, there was also a one-off trip to the circus.
Already by 1944 some aspects of life had begun to return to normal. Alun Pugh was appointed a county court judge of Norfolk in May. He was to prove popular with the barristers who appeared before him, a benign man with firm principles and old-fashioned values when it came to domestic disputes. In the Inns of Court they even put together a short verse to celebrate him:
Love, said His Honour Judge Pugh,
Should act on a couple like glue.
Making birds of a feather
Stay flocking together
Just as they do in the zoo.
If it restored the family’s material prosperity to pre-war standards, it did mean once again