A Wartime Marriage

 This is the story of a marriage.  My mother, Ella, was 18 when she met David Brown in 1938. She was a shop assistant in the dress department of Fenwick’s department store in Newcastle; he was a travelling rep. for the firm. David was five years older than her, a serious young man, the only son of the widowed mother he supported. Neither Ella nor David had had the opportunity to get higher education, but both read widely and it was books that brought them together. It was how my mother made relationships. She was shy, with very little small talk and without much self-confidence, having been bullied by her own mother.

At first, she thought, it was just friendship. They went to a church youth group together, occasionally to the cinema and once a month to a classical concert. But David was deeply in love with the lovely Ella Sutherland, with her dark Italian hair and her quiet personality. He courted her with books and poetry. They both loved Wordsworth and a small collection of his poems were David’s first gift to her. My bookshelf still contains all the birthday and Christmas gifts he gave her – The Brothers Karamasov, poems by Rupert Brooke, a novel by Mary Webb, and a small volume of Milton’s collected poems. David himself wrote poetry and had ambitions as a poet.

Soon my mother was very much in love for the first time. It was all or nothing with Ella. When she committed herself, she gave everything. Her family weren’t keen on an engagement. ‘A bit of a stuffed shirt’, my grandmother said when I asked her about David. My grandfather, a man of few words, summed him up as a ‘pompous bugger’. They didn’t think he’d make her happy. Their greatest adversary was David’s mother who didn’t want to lose her son to another woman and feared the loss of his financial support. Ella described Mrs Brown as ‘a very bitter woman’, who was too possessive towards her only son. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ella wrote in a letter, ‘but I just can’t love her,’ though she dutifully visited and drank tea out of porcelain cups in the parlour which was a shrine to her dead husband and her only son. There was also the question of where they would live. Ella couldn’t bear to live with her mother-in-law. They took out a savings account to put money aside for their future. 

But the war intervened. David was called up and Ella’s family finally relented and allowed them to be married before he went off to a training camp down south. David’s mother didn’t come to the wedding. Ella’s father took the photographs. Her brother Gordon was the best man and her younger sister Joyce was the bridesmaid. The bridegroom was in uniform, the bride in a powder blue woollen suit from Fenwick’s.  She looked radiantly happy. He looked nervous!

They honeymooned in the Lake District, a favourite place for both of them. My mother told me once that it wasn’t the passionate interlude they had hoped for. They were both virgins and she was so sore after the first time they made love it hadn’t been possible to repeat the experience. David, something of a prude, had shocked her by saying ‘I wish, now, that we hadn’t been so good.’ As soon as the precious weekend was over, David had to report for duty again and Ella went back to live with her parents. It was a marriage in limbo. Within a year David was told he was being sent abroad, to West Africa first, working on radar installations. They spent their embarkation leave in London, a city wrecked by the blitz. Newcastle too, was taking a pounding from German bombers and it wasn’t clear who was in the most danger, David or his wife.

One of David's first letters, a poem 'Keep Sweet'

Ella volunteered for the Land Army and was delighted to be sent to the Lake District. It was a safe place, away from the bombings that drove her parents into the air raid shelters almost every night and had reduced the streets around them to rubble. David sent letters and photograhs home from Africa, before being sent even further afield. He couldn’t tell her, but she thought it might have been the Far East. His letters were censored.

A postscript: 'My Sweetheart. My Darling. Always.'

In 1941, not long after he had been posted, she received a letter informing her that he was missing – that the ship he’d been on had been torpedoed. It was agony for her, but at least he wasn’t dead. The following year she received the letter she dreaded. ‘We regret to inform you . . .’  Even so, he was only presumed dead. Not knowing was terrible. By 1944 she was already in love with another man and in a torment of conflict. What if David came home at the end of the war? She made my father wait until the concentration camps were emptied in 1945. But David didn’t come home and she never had to make that choice.

The tear-stained letter every war-time wife dreaded.

After she died, I found the remnants of their relationship tucked into the corner of the wartime clutch bag she kept important documents in. Two tattered pages torn from a notebook with David’s poems written on them; a marriage certificate, a National Savings book; one love letter; a few photographs and a tear-stained War Ministry letter from David’s regiment giving her the devastating news that he was missing and now presumed dead. It was all that was left of their life together. Ella’s mother had thrown out the box containing all David’s letters and her other keepsakes when she re-married. David died for her all over again. ‘He wrote such beautiful letters,’ Mum told me. ‘And such lovely poetry.’  She never forgave her mother. Ella could recite Milton’s Lycidas by heart to us as children but cried every time she reached the lines; ‘He must not float upon his wat'ry bier/ Unwept’. When times were hard with my father (and they were) she was often tempted to think about what her life would have been like with David. I would find her crying in a dark corner, Milton’s poems, with their loving dedication, in her hands. 

Reading My Mother: A Memoir

published by The Book Mill