What they were humming before the War

I spent a lot of yesterday re-reading A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. It hadn't struck me before, but she gave that pair of lectures in 1928 - the same year women got the vote on an equal footing with men, and ten years after the end of the Great War.

What caught my attention was not her main argument, or her plea to young women to take up their pens and write - although we are a good way through the century of determined effort she describes, and I'm curious about how well she'd think we've done. What caught my attention was an allusion to the War, or to times before and after... to what people 'hummed' under their breath at dinner before and not after.

'My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose bows are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.'
Christina Rossetti 

Women stopped humming; men stopped humming; conversations were dulled by a lack of humming; nobody's heart was 'like a singing bird'. And this touches on something I was struggling with in reading wartime letters and diaries. In the words, there is little amiss. People write cheerfully. They get on with things. They do not weep into the paper - the diaries I've read are far less mournful than mine. Their writers - mostly women working in hospitals - relish having something constructive to do and often get great satisfaction from their work. The War was a mad, horrible interlude that had to be dealt with, got through. But afterwards?

There are too many stories in this archive

They are wrapped up in many ways, these stories. Some are in brown paper boxes; others red; others are in blue or brown folders, tied up like parcels with crisscrossed white tape.

There’s Mrs Winterbottom, who, when her husband is called to the Front, offers herself and her car to the War Office. She then spends six months driving officers to the front line and wounded soldiers back from it, often under fire or in a rain of shrapnel. Then there’s Mabel St Clair Stobart who founds a hospital in Serbia and then, as the Serbian army retreats, goes with it, taking the whole setup. Her description of the three month journey includes travelling on roads full not only of holes and rocks and mud, but dead animals; horses and oxen, and dead men.

There’s the story in a hundred or more newspaper cuttings of Miss Mairi Chisholm and Mrs Elsie Knocker, who on their own initiative set up a nursing station just behind the Belgian front line, so as to nurse soldiers as swiftly as possible after they are wounded.

There’s a large, flower covered album belonging to VAD nurse Miss Sybil Reeves, purchased in Italy and full of photographs, drawings, autographs, poems and mementos of her time there and of the people she knew. And there are the small things. Requests for soap to be sent from home. Slang. Top hole. Did people really say top hole?

Brown boxes of papers

I'm very excited about going to the Imperial War Museum Archive next week. I have asked to see the records of about twenty women who travelled abroad - usually as nurses - during the First World War.

Their stories are enticing. They went to Italy, Serbia, France, Egypt, Malta, Russia, Belgium, usually as nurses or VADs. There's even a pair of sisters who seem to have worked together through the War. One record mentions witnessing a shipwreck. There are letters to their families and from their brothers, often on the front line, and there are diaries and albums.

I really hope they come in brown boxes.