A work of grace

Army Without Banners by Ann Stafford

It’s no secret that I have an absolute passion for domestic writing from the Second World War. Weighty retrospective histories such as Millions Like Us by Virginia Nicholson or Lara Feigel’s The Love-Charm of Bombs fascinate me, and the series of Mass Observation diaries compiled and edited by Simon Garfield grants excellent insight into the day-to-day experiences, outlook and aspirations of his smartly-chosen real-life cast. But what I adore are the contemporary and near-contemporary novels and memoirs of the Home Front, and especially those by women. All I ask is that this literature be well-written. Thank goodness, then, that Army Without Banners is very well-written indeed.¹

This is memoir-as-novel, recounting the experiences of Ann Stafford, here in the guise of her first-person protagonist Mildred Gibson, during her time spent driving ambulances in the London Blitz. Terrible and wonderful, deceptively light in tone, it conjures the attitude of ‘patience, endurance, and the will to serve’ which I fear has been largely lost in Britain today.² It is an arresting, page-turning read, scattered with delightful illustrations by the author, utterly human in scale, emotionally and factually significant in the message it bears.

Army Without Banners opens in October 1940, a month after the fearsome night bombing of the capital had begun. Mildred is living in the countryside, busy with knitting circles, committees (‘you can’t laugh at the work committees do’) and the village First Aid Post, sharing the general guilty mood of ‘Poor London’ and hating the bomber’s moon in all its luminous beauty, but feeling very strongly that she must maintain the cottage home from which both her husband and her son have gone into the Services — not only in a bricks-and-mortar sense, but also in the shining sense of something for them to hold onto in their minds while away; an emotional beacon to guide them until the fighting’s end. Her early explanation of her thoughts on this, coupled with her opening description of the valley in which she lives, signal exactly the kind of writer that Stafford will prove to be.

Some days, it seemed as if I could only believe in the future by keeping the past alive. I felt that if I left, their very thoughts would go astray, so that they couldn’t guide the thinkers home. So I just knew I had to stay.

Ann Stafford

But when Mildred receives a letter from her cousin Daphne, already a member of a Civil Defence ambulance squad in London — ‘the cruel knock on the door’ that shakes her from her reserve with the suggestion that she could be making herself ‘useful’ — she is forced to acknowledge that her driving skills (by no means common at that time) could be of real help.

The words of the news bulletins came flicking in and out of my mind . . . But they weren’t just casualties any more, statistics on an official form, items in a new bulletin. They were people like Daphne, men and women that Daphne and I had passed in the street, who’d kept little shops where we’d bought cigarettes and cabbages and newspapers, who’d sold us tickets for cinemas and concerts, fitted us with shoes and frocks and hats, coughed over us in buses, sat beside us in theatres and music halls and laughed at the same jokes.

Ann Stafford

To the alarm of her rusticated neighbours, she lets the cottage and travels to London, where she shares a West End basement sleeping space with Daphne and two other women — Belinda, who drives a tea-car around the capital’s anti-aircraft gun-sites and balloon-sites, and Barky, whose social work takes her to the heart of the East End. After what we might term a crash course in driving the hefty ambulances, Mildred is assigned to Daphne’s station in Paddington. At first, it is difficult for her to find her feet among this group of women who, although disparate in character and background, have come through the baptism by fire of the early raids together, but after her first night of active duty she is accepted quickly as one of them, through the camaraderie that comes from facing — and bettering — a shared ordeal.

I knew then how you could love people if you had been through the blitz with them.

Ann Stafford

Stafford’s descriptions of driving the ambulance during raids are vivid in both their jarring horrors and their quiet fortitude. The women’s calm competence and matter-of-fact courage are incredibly moving. Lovely, lyrical passages bracket the periods of action and inaction — the latter as crippling to spirit and nerves as the former — offering caresses of thought and feeling amongst the routine and the squabbles, the bloodshed and the burnt-out buildings.

When I went out, the guns were still firing; a thin, brave line of snowdrops showed dazzling against the blackened earth in the garden, and somewhere, among the grimy trees, a bird was singing its heart out — as if the pandemonium were no more than a thunderstorm heralding fine weather. Its treble made a line of light against the dark noise of the guns.

Ann Stafford

A lull in the early spring of 1941 sees Mildred casting around for alternative ways to be useful, that persistent overarching credo of the war years. Coupling this with her character’s inbuilt curiosity and compassion, Stafford created an opportunity to write about the other soldiers in her titular and predominantly female army: those in mobile canteens, tea-cars and British Restaurants, in the Auxiliary Fire Service and the ARP and plying the Thames in the ambulance boats of the River Emergency Service, the Welfare Advisers, the Women’s Voluntary Service, and the hospital library scheme.

I remembered the book girl whose Red Cross Libraries were always short of good workers, and Mrs Dove who said her Canteen Ladies were giving in to flu in a way they didn’t ought to, and Belinda whose Mobile Canteens could always use a good driver, and Barky who’d said only the other day that if people realised conditions in the East End the work wouldn’t be half-paralysed for lack of helpers.

Ann Stafford

Mildred fills an exhausting shift at Mrs Dove’s canteen and drives with Belinda to serve tea at the ack-ack posts, and then she takes up Barky’s invitation to see the East End for herself. It is sometimes difficult to remember that Army Without Banners is written as fiction. It is clearly based so closely on Stafford’s own story that author and creation become interchangeable in the reader’s mind. Stafford (who had charge of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau there at one point in her career) is particularly hot on conditions in the East End, where wretched, overpopulated streets clustering close to the prime targets of docks and warehouses bore the brunt of the bombing. Mildred is appalled by the conditions in which families are forced to live in the wake of the raids.

Our West End houses had had surgical treatment; the hopeless cases were cleared away and the habitable ones restored almost to normal. But these streets had just had a dose of first-aid, made rent-producing, and then abandoned.

They squatted there, these ugly little houses, blinded and battered, obstinately waiting for their tenants, working now in shops or factories, railways or docks, who would obstinately return to their overcrowded dingy rooms and obstinately insist on making them into a home.

Ann Stafford

She comes to see that, for many there, the Blitz has simply meant the same needs and the same support as before the war, multiplied and magnified under new and horrendous conditions, and to understand the feelings of the working class families who would rather face destruction than be taken from the area they have known all their lives, with all its familiar and reassuring community connections. Having met them face-to-face she (and we, the reader) feel even more intensely the shock and consequences of the renewed raids later that spring.

The phrase ‘Blitz spirit’ does not appear anywhere in Ann Stafford’s novel. Some modern historians would have us believe that it was never anything but a propagandist fairy tale, and we do know today that those in authority made serious blunders during the period, exacerbating — sometimes horribly — the suffering of those who spent each night under bombardment. Army Without Banners was published in 1942, when the public sensitivity and need were for a more positive tone. But my reading of Stafford’s novel is that she does in fact pay, however unknowingly, a forward nod to the revisionist histories of the Blitz which were to emerge from the 1970s onwards. This is particularly evident in Mildred’s tour of the East End, where one volunteer tells her: ‘We like to think we’re one jump ahead of the authorities all the time, we reckoned that there were three big problems: shelter-health — no one had imagined that people would have to live in shelters; shelter-feeding — emergency cooking nearly always followed the need for it; shelter boredom. So we tackled them. We had the premises, we had the staff, we had the equipment . . . It only wanted organising.’

To Mildred, each case worker, each adviser, each parish priest and district nurse, each and every person ‘who loved the people and the place and the work more than they loved their lives or their health or their nerves’ was a true embodiment of what the Blitz and simple human duty demanded. That is the spirit the Blitz could not destroy. And that is why the contemporaneous literature of the Home Front is so important to me. It bridges the gap between actual experience and history’s re-telling, colouring-in and lending life to critical analyses which, no matter how comprehensive, would otherwise remain static and grey.


Army Without Banners closes at the end of 1941, with an deeply evocative description of Midnight Mass in Westminster Abbey (placed immediately on my personal list of essential Christmas reading) and a conversation between the women of the ambulance squad in which they agree that they have learned indelibly important lessons in the course of their service.

. . . we know the things that matter now, I think. Kindness and courage and loveliness, and that queer feeling of belonging to each other, minding about each other. I’m pretty sure those are the everlasting things.

Ann Stafford

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For me, Mildred Gibson personifies a particular twentieth-century pattern of womanhood: more or less middle-class (comfortably, but not extravagantly) and more or less middle-aged; married, often with children, or else numbered among the ‘surplus’ who had, through determination and necessity, made satisfying lives for themselves; and all intimately wedded to ‘the steadfast dailiness of a life that brings its own rewards’.³ These women were frequently provincial, sometimes rural; realists whose aesthetic awareness found its outlet in the crocuses flowering by the garden gate and the catkins wagging in the lane, whose half-hearted attempts at sophistication could never veil entirely their persistent down-to-earth preoccupations or unfashionable flights of sentiment. When war came, they rose to its challenges in reality and in print. Yet it has always seemed to me that their pre-war leisure hours, bought by the presence of cook and char, had provided them with the luxury of thought, informed by the middlebrow writing of women who were in many respects their mutually-sympathetic peers. In them, gifts of philosophical and poetical imagination co-existed with a resigned awareness of life’s mundane practicalities and of their personal limitations, which they met with stoic humour. They were women of both sensibility and sense: ‘acute and balanced observers’ who were as alert to their own idiosyncrasies as to their neighbours’ and who tended to only the most self-deprecating introspection; who wore their self-knowledge lightly and for whom domestic vicissitudes in any case left vanishingly small space for egotism.⁴ Conscious of the feminist literary magazine which honoured, encouraged and influenced their tastes, I think of them as the Time and Tide generation. I like them and admire them and always want more of them, and I am thrilled that this novel has added to their ranks.

Ann Stafford’s revelatory line on the unifying effect of working alongside others in the worst of the Blitz, ‘it was almost like being part of a composite personality; their courage was your courage, their danger — yours,’ echoes the words of an unnamed Time and Tide columnist who wrote in 1930, at the moment that the quintessentially middlebrow Diary of a Provincial Lady was published in book form, that its author E.M. Delafield had achieved ‘a work of grace . . . a complete and therefore composite portrait of, not only one woman, but a type of women, a state of society, a phase of life.’

That anonymous contributor could easily have been describing Stafford’s Army Without Banners, too.

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© The Unhurried Reader 2024

1. Army Without Banners was sent to me by Handheld Press in exchange for an honest review.

2. This summation of feminine qualities is spoken by Celia Johnson’s character, Cargill, in the ATS recruitment film, We Serve (1942). The scriptwriter is uncredited. (IWM Collections, WOY 32).

3. Nicola Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39 (Persephone Books, 2008) p.8.

4. ‘Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make acute and balanced observers.’ George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’ (The New Quarterly Magazine, 1877).