Joyce's War (31 page)

Much to my surprise in the little time I have had to myself, I have done quite a few of the things that I knew had to be done in case I had to leave quickly. My account has been transferred to Lloyds and I’ve been to the RAF about my allotment. I quite looked forward to about Rs400, only to find they had already paid Rs315 into Lloyds Calcutta, and as it was exactly the same amount as my December pay, I have naturally concluded that the army had paid me twice over that month. Lloyds mentioned it as ‘my salary due for the month of December’ and I accepted it gratefully (not too surprised at anything the pay department does, although it is usually the other way round) and felt it was worth having it even if I did have to pay it back later. Well this was rather shattering news and I had to make up my mind that if this was my marriage allotment, then I had had it and spent it – or a good deal of it. They had just sent this month’s allowance to Lloyds Chowringhee (Rs64 or thereabouts) and it will be a while before that is transferred to Bombay, I suppose.

I’ve left my wireless in Calcutta to be disposed of and that should bring Rs500. It probably won’t but I’d be mighty glad of this at the moment. There are things I feel I must buy – towels and soap and some warm things for David. I don’t mind about things for me, although I do need shoes and other odds and ends. I went out to Mary’s flat yesterday afternoon to collect my stuff. Oh, those books: I’ll have to get a packing case for them, I’m afraid.

I am so afraid of having to leave in a hurry and without any money. I must keep some for emergencies – taxis and coolies and tips on the ship and such incidentals, and I can’t possibly arrive penniless. I wish I didn’t worry so much about money. I am not very interested in it as such, but I’ve learned only too well that we can’t be without it. I rather hope, much as I dislike having to settle amongst a new unit, and much as I badly want to get back to David, that I can have a few weeks here and by that time someone may have bought my wireless and that would relieve the situation immensely. I have been on tenterhooks for days, knowing that several ships were going and thinking that I might be pushed on one at the last moment. It’s still possible of course but I hope not as I’ve got some material being made up into grey uniforms and I’d have to leave that behind.

If I have time I must call and see the De Muires with some cheese but apart from that I’m truly thankful that I have no social obligations of any kind in Bombay these days.

February 15th 1944

The time has come – we are about to depart these shores. I have been here almost a month and now it is a matter of days. I had a day off yesterday and spent it laboriously shopping. There are so many things I feel I want to buy, not for myself but for the many others whom I have not seen for so long. I bought some food stuffs but not much as the price was beyond my purse. The packing has been done for the third time and I am hoping I shall have room for everything. I went to see Mrs De Muires a night or two ago and I must ring Niermol today and tell him that I am about to depart. Mary is coming this evening. And there was a letter from Mali last night in which she sounded so depressed. How wearily the war rages for everyone who is just at home, trying to make things as normal as possible, under trying conditions. We in the services are far better off and, quite unjustifiably, collect the laurels.

And so perhaps in a month’s time I shall be at home again. It will be March – wild winds and cold. I shudder to think of it on this bright warm day. Still spring will follow and with it the joy of seeing primroses again and cowslips and daffodils. All this will be at one with yesterday’s seven thousand years and just a memory. I wonder where David will be – still in hospital, discharged or at home. I shan’t know until I actually arrive back. No cable yet. I should be so depressed if I didn’t know that we will be together soon. But it doesn’t matter now. This is the last time I shall write herein, overseas: almost four years since I was first posted to the Middle East and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. A rich few years in many ways and I am the wiser for them. Out of all the chaos there are memories of many friendships, precious and dear. And they will outlast the war – I know that. Now I am facing the other way and the beginning of my real life. So many steps, so many curious twists and then one arrives. And now I dare to hope for some permanence at last – a real aim and a steady course – to the end of it all. It may take time but that it will come I do not doubt.

So
Vale
India!

POSTSCRIPT

So what happened after the war?

Joyce and David began their married life in the small village of Llanferres near RAF Sealand before settling in Swansea and then Cardiff from 1955. David became a journalist on South Wales newspapers and continued to pursue his love of theatre by directing plays for Eisteddfodau and amateur theatres before he was appointed as a radio producer (drama) for the BBC in Cardiff. I was the oldest child, born in 1944; Siân was born two years later and our brothers Ifor and Vaughan followed. So by 1950 Joyce, aged 42, was a full-time housewife with four small children and she was 10,500 miles from her family. She never saw her mother, father or sister Mona again and spoke only twice to them on the telephone. Compared to her life in Australia and much of her wartime experience, life after the war was hard: strict rationing, a cold and damp climate, the British diet with the absence of tropical fruit that she loved and the dreariness of the heavily bombed town of Swansea. Despite the post-war deprivations, which were shared by everyone, she was an exceptionally able manager of a large household which often included actors who needed a bed or a meal. And she was an inspiring mother who sought to nurture talents in each of her children: Siân is an illustrator and artist, Ifor a musician and photographer and Vaughan a writer and landscape gardener. She was a much-loved friend to many people and it was she who created the ballast in a rather bohemian household in which well-known actors, writers and painters came and went and where contemporary ideas, books and politics were discussed with great passion. She remained an avid reader and collector of poetry and contemporary fiction, including the emerging Australian writers.

Without our being fully aware at the time, Joyce’s war experience was all around us: our playroom had a dark green canvas bed, bucket and washbasin; her double blue tin trunk had the names of every port scrawled or plastered on it and our dressing-up clothes were silk, crêpe de chine or brocade dresses and shoes that she had had made by the dursies on the side of the road in India. And when I found and came to read the journal some sixty years later I found some of the stories that she had told us and the vivid descriptions of places that she had never forgotten.

Despite the interesting and rich family life that she had created, the strains in the marriage and the incompatibility of personalities that were hinted at in the last few months of the journal resulted in divorce after twenty years. Later, Joyce married Dewi-Prys Thomas, Professor of Architecture at Cardiff University and a passionate Welsh Nationalist. They shared a deep love of history, literature and Welsh affairs and travelled together to Greece (which she had never reached in the war), Malta and further afield. She journeyed to Australia in her mid-70s where she was reunited with her brothers, their families and old friends. And in her early 80s, after Dewi’s death in 1985, she travelled on her own to Spain, Russia and Samarkand. She lived in the home of Siân and her husband Peter in her last years, from where she took great delight in the interests and successes of her children and her four grandchildren, Catrin, Owain, Lucy and Rhianwen. Joyce died in Birkenhead in 1992 aged 83 and in her last days she was back on the slow train up to Darjeeling, smelling the guavas piled on the stations. Those ‘four rich years’, as she called her war years, were with her to the end.

Rhiannon Evans

2015

About the Editor

Professor Emeritus Rhiannon Evans was Pro-Vice Chancellor at Edge Hill University until her retirement in 2009. She received an MBE in 2008 for services to higher education, particularly for her national work on widening access. She will finish walking around the 890 miles of the Wales coastal path in 2015 and also hopes to undertake some more of her mother’s Indian train journeys. She lives in Birkenhead.

NOTES

  
1.
  Anthony Beevor,
The Second World War
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012).

  
2.
  The history of the QAIMNS(R) started some twelve years before the outbreak of the First World War during a time of relative peace in the British Empire. The Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (Reserve), named in honour of Queen Alexandra, replaced the Army Nursing Service and the Indian Nursing Service in 1902 by Royal Warrant. It became known as the QAs.

  
3.
  Where she had been in lodgings while nursing in Llandudno.

  
4.
  The War Office requested suitably trained nurses to join the QAIMNS(R) in 1938 when war was anticipated. Nurses were interviewed and given sealed packages which bore the words ‘Open only in the event of war’.

  
5.
  Millbank, next to the Tate Gallery, was the headquarters of the QAIMNS. Now it is the location of Chelsea College of Art and Design.

  
6.
  In the margin is written ‘Frequent air raid signals in the last week in Le Mans. No one took any notice of them after the first half dozen.’

  
7.
  In May the British Expeditionary Force was withdrawn from France, leading up to Dunkirk.

  
8.
  Tricolene was a white dress worn by army nurses in the tropics.

  
9.
  
The Merchant of Venice
, Act V, Scene 1.

10.
  Rupert Brooke: ‘The Dead’.

11.
  The beginning of the Blitz and the intense bombing of London and other major cities.

12.
  Battle of Britain day with the largest attacks on London by 1,500 German aircraft.

13.
  A guide or interpreter.

14.
  Saqqara is a vast burial ground serving as the necropolis for the ancient capital of Memphis.

15.
  Mereruka’s tomb is the largest and most elaborate of the non-royal tombs.

16.
  A fortified place for heavy guns.

17.
  A felucca is the traditional wooden sailing ship used along the Nile since antiquity. It has two triangular sails and can accommodate up to ten people.

18.
  It is noted in Tyrer,
Sisters in Arms
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008) that fraternising between QAs and sergeants was discouraged.

19.
  A novel by Sir Walter Scott, set in 1187 during the Third Crusade.

20.
  This refers to November 14th when 400 German bombers attacked the city: 568 people were killed and 100,000 fled the city where 60 per cent of the buildings had been damaged.

21.
  Used as a cleaning agent.

22.
  The British begin the Western Desert offensive against the Italians.

23.
  All sea ports in eastern Libya where the British and Commonwealth forces were in battle with the Italians.

24.
  A city on the coast of Eritrea.

25.
  An Arabic word which translates as ‘never mind’.

26.
  George Santayana: ‘Oh World Thou Choosest Not’.

27.
  HMHS
Karapara
was built in 1914 and became a hospital ship for the second time in 1940 with 338 beds and 123 medical staff, serving between the Red Sea and India. On her second voyage she was bombed and set fire to at Tobruk, towed back to port, repaired and successfully sailed to Alexandria from where Joyce joined her. The ship still required repairs during the next year.

28.
  The rest of this sentence is redacted with blue pencil.

29.
  In the margin is written ‘Mona’s Viennese Knight’.

30.
  By Phyllis Bentley.

31.
  Antony Beevor’s account differs, suggesting some wartime propaganda which was promulgated to the army: ‘On August 25th, Red Army troops and British forces from Iraq invaded neutral Iran, to secure its oil and ensure a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus and Kazakhstan.’ Antony Beevor,
The Second World War
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012), p. 221.

32.
  James Ellroy Flecker travelled widely in the Middle East in the consular service and was a very popular poet, who died at the age of 30. His poem ‘The Old Ships’ begins: ‘I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep.’

33.
  P.B. Shelley: ‘Ozymandias’.

34.
  Omar Khayyam: ‘Ah, Moon of my Delight who know’st no wane,/The Moon of Heav’n is rising once again:/How oft hereafter rising shall she look/Through this same Garden after me – in vain!’

35.
  Now Pune, in southern India.

36.
  An ancient Iranian people who lived in northern Iran up to 670
BC
.