‘By the grace of God we may emerge from this ordeal a more admirable society’
IN THE summer of 1940, as Britain prepared for the German invasion, novelist Margaret Kennedy left her Surrey home and moved with her children to St Ives in Cornwall.
Her barrister husband David stayed in London to act as an air raid warden.
Margaret was just another wife and mother but her take on the war as seen through her diaries portrays something far darker, the sense that “the lid had been taken off hell” and nothing would ever be the same again.
Born in 1896 and educated at Cheltenham Ladies College and Somerville College Oxford, Margaret had become well-known with the publication in 1924 of her second novel The Constant Nymph. It was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and was adapted for the stage starring Noel Coward.
Two film versions had already been made and a third would be produced by Warner Brothers in 1943 starring Joan Fontaine.
Kennedy was an independent woman in the 1920s, clever, stylish and elegant.when she married David Davies, a barrister, she enjoyed a conventional upper middle-class lifestyle.
They had a son and two daughters.
Her wartime diary Where Stands a Winged Sentry (from a 17th century poem by Henryvaughan called Peace) charts the terrifying months between Dunkirk and the start of the Blitz.
It has been published in Britain for the first time.appearing in the time of Covid, with Britain again in a period of draconian government restrictions, gives this diary a special poignancy.
In that summer of 1940 there was real doubt that Britain would prevail and that fascism could be defeated.
Margaret had already lost a brother in the First World War and feared desperately for the future of her children.
“If Hitler wins they much better be dead,” she writes bluntly.
She talks about politics but also writes with equal verve about floor polish and how the certainties of ordinary life can be whisked away in an instant. Clothes for instance.
She writes: “Miss Chapman, a visiting dressmaker, asked when she could fit my black dinner dress which needs to be taken in. I wonder if it’s worth bothering. I wonder if I shall ever wear it again”. The first entry in her diary – May 1940 – notes how the BBC describes the situation (this was just weeks before Dunkirk) as one of “ever-increasing gravity”.
Margaret wrote: “These words banished the comfortable delusion that we were ‘certain to win’. It took our breath away. Never before in all its history has this nation been so profoundly and unanimously shocked as it was on that evening in May”.
Almost overnight Britain is transformed – log barriers are set up on roads, sign posts taken down, notices now tell people what to do if they see parachute troops coming down.
Just as we couldn’t quite believe that a pandemic would close down Britain she is disbelieving about what will happen when the sirens sound.
“If we all stick under cover the whole life of the country will stop.we must modify that idea.”
It is decided that Surrey is too dangerous and Margaret and the children will go to Cornwall (St Ives is called Porthmerryn in the diary).
The children go first, catching an express at Woking (not something you can do now) where they see exhausted troops who had been evacuated from Dunkirk passing through.
Margaret comments acidly on people she knows: “Anna, being very much to the Left, sees this war as a sort of sideshow in the class war.
“But she is free from the irritating complacency of the Left Intellectuals, and their habit of imputing deliberate greed and self-interest to anyone who ventures to disagree with them”.
Of Beryl: “There are people who would be jaunty in hell as long as they could run about spreading titbits of inside information.” Haven’t we all come across Covid know-alls, somehow privy to specialist knowledge?
She finds it difficult to sleep but adds: “I expect we shall learn how to, in time, when we have got used to living through history”.
Sleeping pills or “sedatives” are an option but her husband jokes that when the Spanish Armada was poised to invade in 1588 nobody took “sedatives” because people were “tougher”.
It sounds similar to the way we now criticise ourselves for feebleness in comparison with those who lived through the Secondworldwar.
She considered sending the children abroad, with Canada or America an option for well-off families.
“While Margaret sometimes regrets she didn’t, she adds: “I feel it is important they should take part in this experience which the majority of children are going through.
“Enormous changes are taking place which we don’t quite grasp yet. By the grace of God we may emerge from this ordeal a more admirable society than we were when we went in.”
Margaret remained in safety in St Ives though some historians have suggested it was considered by the Nazis as a landing site for the invasion. Margaret and her close family survived the war. She died in 1967.
‘These words banished the comfortable delusion that we were certain to win. It took our breath away’
MARGARET KENNEDY
‘We are living through history’
Where Stands A Winged Sentry by Margaret Kennedy is published by Handheld Press