Unhappy homecoming Print E-mail
Written by Julie Summers, 2008   
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Julie Summers became interested in the predicament of families separated for a long time by war after writing a book about her grandfather. Her research included some fascinating accounts from WI members

I came to write Stranger in the House after I had finished my last book, a biography of my grandfather, who had been a prisoner of war in the Far East in the Second World War. He returned a hero but his homecoming was far from happy.

My grandmother, Alex, had coped with their three children, the threat of bombing in Liverpool and rationing during six-and-a-half years of separation and she had as much of a readjustment to life post-war as did her husband. I began to think about how other women had coped with returning men after the war and what it meant to them to have a man in their lives after months or years of separation.

Alex was a lifelong member of the Women's Institute and it was through the camaraderie offered by Hooton WI that she found friendship in the difficult post-war era. When I began to do research for a book that would look at how women like my grandmother coped, I wrote to the WI who printed my letter in their membership magazine WI Life. Several interviews with members led to their stories being included in Stranger in the House.

Differing horizons

Women coped magnificently during the Second World War: that is already well documented. Many of them were thrown into a completely unknown world of work, both paid and voluntary; childcare as single mothers; and many had to move home when houses were requisitioned, bombed or just lost as lodgings.

Only 12 per cent of newly married couples in1945 had houses, so a very large number of women had to return to their parental homes. For these women their horizons were narrowed at the same time as the horizons of many of their husbands, fiancˇs and fathers were broadened by their experiences in the war. The clash of cultures after 1945 can only be imagined.

Women had almost no help or advice to hand when their men came home. The government took measures to make demobilisation easier for the servicemen than it had been after the First World War, but women were largely ignored and it was through the pages of the women's magazines that the best advice was dispensed.

Woman's Own ran a series of articles in 1945 about how to help men adjust. It was good, solid advice and must have been a great relief to women who were otherwise left high and dry by officialdom. The agony aunt pages of Woman's Own were full of questions about how to handle starved POWs, men damaged by their terrifying experiences, and about children who were not pleased to see their fathers returning.

The educational psychologist KM Catlin wrote in an article for the WI's Home and Country in June 1945: "Don't expect to pick up the threads just where you dropped them. It may be necessary to go back a bit - to get a little nearer your courting attitude when you weren't quite so sure of each other and couldn't afford to take things for granted, but rather set out to please and win the other's affection." It was good advice but would it work once the doors of the family homes were closed?

I have charted the lives of over 50 women from all walks of life and with differing situations to see how they coped. I was surprised by the variety of their experiences and in some cases saddened by the stories I heard. More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War the effects of returning men on family life are still being felt.

Vague memory

For Jean Hammond's mother, Charlotte, the shock at seeing her husband for the first time in five years was so intense that she fell down the stairs. Jean remembered her father only vaguely as she had been a toddler when he left to fight. Suddenly she was faced with a man she barely knew and he with a little girl who was completely unlike the child he thought he remembered.

The homecoming was strained and she felt that even into her teens her father never really understood her. Whenever he spoke of his past she did not think it had any relevance to her life: "Now I kick myself that I didn't listen to what he wanted to tell me and I wish I had asked him more questions so that I might better have understood his situation. I know almost nothing about his family background and even less about his war."

Mary Michael also knew very little about her father's war, but he had been in the Far East as a prisoner of the Japanese and the experiences in the camps had brutalised an otherwise good and kind man. "Before the war he enjoyed singing and playing the piano accordion, but I never saw that side of him," Mary said, "it never returned from the jungles of Thailand. His family say he was never the same person again."

For Mary the result of his experiences was disastrous: "Did my dad's POW experiences affect our family? I have to say a strong 'yes'. It was far from a peaceful family life and we children knew when to keep quiet and make ourselves invisible.

The mood swings of ex-prisoners of war is now an accepted fact, but as a child to live through it and its consequences, is a very different matter." Mary concluded that the war had never ended for her father and that he fought his demons until the end of his life. It has taken her 60 years to come to terms with her turbulent past but she now feels that he was a hero and her only sadness is that she was never able to tell him that she understands.

Anne Stamper, honorary archivist to the NFWI, did not see her father for three years during the war. When he returned, she said, he was a stranger in the house. In 1943 Anne, then eight, and her mother went to live with her maternal grandmother in Rochdale - three generations of women in a two-up two-down with no bathroom and a far cry from their home in Nottingham. Anne's father was sent out to India.

While the women lived in a comfortable matriarchy, Anne's father was confronted by a new and exciting world: "My mother had spent four years back in her childhood home; my father had had his horizons widened by his experiences.

I remember he told me years later that, had he not had a wife and child at home, he might well have stayed and gone into partnership with a Swiss chap he met in Kashmir." In the end theirs was a very happy home but the first few years after the war required readjustment on all sides.

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