A wife’s tears of joy as Dunkirk heroes returned
EVE’S WAR by Evelyn Shillington (Sphere £8.99)
On the evening of Sunday June 2, 1940, an anxious Army officer’s wife took a drive along the cliffs at Brighton. the summer skies were clear — ‘hitler’s weather’, they called it — allowing the Luftwaffe to fly over with ease.
She could hear the guns echoing across the Channel from France, where the British expeditionary Force was trapped on the coast. But as evelyn looked down, she was dazzled by an unexpected sight: ‘A most curious sort of golden haze over the sea, which was dotted as far as we could see with small boats of all kinds. they surely can’t be fishing.’
two days later, she found out that the motley crew of tiny vessels had been on their way to Dunkirk to rescue the stranded troops. the railway rattling that had kept her awake in edenbridge, Kent, had been trains bringing survivors home from the coast.
‘I couldn’t stay indoors while this was happening,’ she wrote in her diary, and rushed down to a field beneath a railway bridge where she stood ‘knee- deep in buttercups and daisies all day, crying with pride and joy’.
She saw the men ‘battered and torn, exhausted after their terrible ordeal’, but ‘they still had the spirit to stand in the corridors giving the thumbs-up! What a lesson for us all!’.
evelyn was the daughter of playwright Clifford Mills, whose play Where the Rainbow ends was as popular as Peter Pan in its day — a 12- year- old noel Coward appeared in the 1911 production at the Savoy theatre.
But Clifford was really evelyn’s mother, emlie, who felt she would be taken more seriously if she used a male pseudonym. her daughter’s emotional wartime journals lay forgotten in an old trunk for decades until a relative auctioned off emlie’s papers in 2012 and found the writings.
they begin in 1935, when evelyn was 42, and end in 1947 as she returns home from her husband Rex’s final foreign posting in Italy. Rex — who began the war a Major and ended it a Brigadier — was slightly older than her and the couple had no children.
the early pages provide a fascinating glimpse into middle-class life before the war: a surreal idyll of tennis and picnics. She records royal gossip with the same level of engagement as her own life.
After the death of King George V in January 1936, she ‘wept bitterly’ and booked seats on the roof of a derelict house to watch the funeral procession.
the solemn occasion takes a comic turn when she is locked into the only available toilet and nearly misses the event. In 1937, she executes a ‘tolerable curtsey’ when Queen elizabeth brings Princess elizabeth (aged 11) to a performance of Where the Rainbow ends. the future queen tells her she found it ‘thrilling!’. the war brings an end to the illusions of her privilege. She helps with the evacuation of women and children sent down from Liverpool and is horrified to witness their poverty and to learn that many need to be deloused before being housed.
Rex suffers only minor injuries while posted overseas (from a bomb blast in norway), but his wife suffers agonies of anxiety and struggles with the awkward politics of communal living in the homes where she is stationed.
Volunteering to clean the hardened beeswax from old rifles, evelyn is annoyed by a ‘glamour puss’ who doesn’t want to dirty her hands so snatches the nearly finished weapons from others to hand them over to the soldier in charge with a smirk. evelyn soon teaches her a lesson.
She observes the shifting sexual standards of the war without too much judgment, feeling sympathy for the girlfriends of married pilots who try to cheer the men through what may be their last nights on earth.
AFteRthe war, Rex is posted to Italy and evelyn is overwhelmed by her opulent new home in naples.
She spends sunbaked afternoons on the terrace, breathing in the scent of roses and gasping at the abundance of ‘nylons, soaps, perfumes and sweets’ on sale. She remembers the rationed queues back home and ‘wonders rather bitterly where is the penalty of being a conquered nation’.
evelyn stopped writing her diary after returning to england in 1947. Rex retired in 1949 and died in his early 70s, leaving her grief- stricken. She failed to sell short stories she wrote for children and died in a care home in Bournemouth in 1981.
her 21st-century editor notes the ‘ bittersweet irony’ that the literary agency which rejected her fiction is now representing her memoirs.