In a series of blog posts, Dr Lee Karen Stow has shared the story of her grandmother, Olive May Jordan (nee Bertholini). It forms part of Lee's work Visual Traces, a visual narrative exploring the wartime experiences of civilian, working-class women in her family and birthplace of Hull through the traces they left behind. Lee's previous articles Unfolding Hankies, Where Were You? and The Canister Girls shared Olive May's story during the First World War.
This final piece focuses on the family's experiences in the Second World War.
And war did come again to Hull, our vulnerable, north east coast town at the junction of two rivers. During the Second World War it became the second most bombed city outside of London, with incendiaries and high explosives falling on civilian homes and crowded public shelters. Factories, docks, railway lines, a maternity hospital, museum, department stores and the city centre burned. Out of a population of 320,000, women and children made up the majority of 1,171 civilians killed. Three thousand people were injured and half that number lost their homes when 95 per cent of the city’s housing was destroyed. Sisters, aged 15 and six, were among the first recorded deaths in August 1940. Among the last to be killed in 1945 were brothers, aged 13 and nine, and a 21-month old girl.
It is a child I see appearing in our family photos taken during the war. She is my mother, Maureen, and has not been evacuated. She holds the hand of her mother and my grandmother, Olive May Jordan, in the potato and beetroot patch of the back garden in Wingfield Road in East Hull. It is probably 1940 and both are dressed up with somewhere to go. Maybe to the train station to greet grandfather Alf who, at age 43 and serving with the British Expeditionary Force, has been evacuated from Dunkirk. Already twice-wounded in the First World War he will eventually be medically discharged to become a fire-watcher.
Beyond the photo, out of sight, is Maureen’s ‘Donald Duck’ gas mask and the air raid shelter. Also beyond the surface of this ordinary family snapshot is the reality that “We were frightened every day” - a fear that would resurface in my mother whenever the wind whistled, thunder boomed and fireworks cracked.
Recorded in 2013, by her daughter Lee Karen Stow
[Drone of aircraft approaching] That's what we used to wait for. Wait for it to stop, then the bomb would come. Doodle Bug. I'd be about five, five or six. And we all used to be frightened every day.
[imitating sound of aircraft] Rah, rah, rah, rah.
Then it would stop, and then you knew it was coming down and everybody dived for cover. Sometimes it missed you, sometimes it didn't.
I'm 77 now, but I can still remember. Still remember.
I recorded her words one afternoon as we sat in our garden. An ordinary plane flew overheard, its engine drone sparking her memory of being a child hearing war fall from the sky. I was deep into my work interviewing and documenting voices of other women survivors of war and global conflicts. I had completely overlooked the lived experiences of the women in my own family who had survived two world wars. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I said.“You never asked,” she replied.
Victory?
Among my grandmother’s few photos are two marking the end of war in Hull 80 years ago. At the Victory in Europe Parade in May 1945, women and children dressed in their best clothes, line the city streets. Peering out from the faces, looking at the camera, now me - us - is Olive May. Below her is my mother Maureen, a big, floppy bow tied in her hair. I see them now more than ever. I hear them say “we were there”. Beyond their seemingly ordinary, unremarkable roles I see the strength they and other women like them drew upon just to make it through, day after day.
The second photo was taken in their East Hull neighbourhood. On a grassy field, strewn with Union Jacks and bunting waving in the breeze, mostly women and children appear happy, relieved. Every one carries their unique story of war and many will be forgotten, unheard or lost to time. The little girl in the front right-hand row, wearing a white dress and white socks, is my mother Maureen. I am unable to comprehend, or even imagine, what she and these boys and girls have gone through. Then I turn over the photo and see, written by an unknown family hand and underscored with a determined flourish, just one word ‘Victory’.
Custodians
The wartime stories of the women in my family were forgotten, or left unsaid, while other people’s war stories grew louder. No one asked them, including me. Maybe they thought no one would be interested. That what they feared, felt and saw no longer mattered. After all, what happened to them happened to masses of other people - it was war! But it does matter, they existed.
At the very least I have connected with them through the visual traces they preserved, cherished and left behind - my grandmother’s wartime photos, a bullet pulled from grandfather’s wound, and her box of hankies, where I began to unfold her wartime past and return to one last time. I notice a shift to peacetime. A 1950’s square of white cotton is embroidered with ‘EIIR’ to mark a new queen on the throne and an unsoiled salmon pink hankie is sprayed with bold blue carnations. Like the other hankies, they are ironed into neat squares, as though she trapped within their folds the hope and promise of a new future without war.