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SEEKING REFUGE

Sonia • English Channel, late summer 1939

The ferry lumbered across the watery corridor connecting France to England, cutting through troubled blue-grey waves livid with movement. Its passengers were packed in so tight they swayed with the waves as one, many of them seasick, and though the conflict had yet to tangibly start, already war-sick. These hulking vessels regularly swept back and forth between Calais and the Dover Cliffs across the English Channel, a distance of about 50 kilometres; cutting through fog and foam and passing by the occasional gannet flying a well-trodden route. But on this day the wind was too violent and the climate too uncertain for such familiarity to offer the passengers any comfort.

Europe was again at the threshold of war, and people were frantically scrambling to leave the mainland. Aboard one of the last ferries to cross before hostilities would halt them indefinitely, apprehension swathed the passengers like the invisible droplets of water saturating the air.

Among this cohort of the uprooted stood Sonia Butt, all of fifteen years old, tired, dishevelled, and alone. Still, as a bit of a tomboy, being tired and dishevelled was just part of being Sonia. Being alone was second nature, too. But it hadn’t always been that way. Her older brother, Derek, had almost always been there. Back when they could spend endless sun-kissed days at the beach, she and Derek had been virtually inseparable. But on this late summer day, centuries into her young life, Sonia had boarded the ferry without Derek, without anyone or anything really, save the toothbrush tucked in the pocket of her blazer.

It was a small miracle that she’d made it on board at all. The little travel attaché case she’d started out with fell casualty to the chaos and the crowds she’d encountered on the first leg of her solo journey from the south of France to England. It took her three days just to get to Paris— “a horrendous journey.” Then, at a Gare du Nord café in Paris, she’d spent the last of her money on a coffee and a croissant served by a waiter who, at the dawn of a world war, sharply pointed out that “Mademoiselle, the bill does not include tip.”

It was 1939. And, on the other side of the agitated Channel, Britain too was in a petulant mood.

September 3 was a Sunday. At a quarter past eleven o’clock that morning, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war against Nazi Germany. Only months earlier he’d chosen, in the name of peace, to swerve in the face of Europe’s greatest threat. Yet now, in a curt announcement on BBC Radio, Chamberlain declared that Hitler could only be stopped by force. “We have a clear conscience,” he intoned. “We have done all that any country could do to establish peace. But a situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted, and no people or country could feel itself safe, had become intolerable. And now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage.”

The speech ended with a peal of Bow bells, sounding somehow more sombre and urgent than usual. A presenter then read a government decree announcing the closure of places of entertainment. It urged listeners to avoid gatherings, to stay off the streets as much as possible, and to always carry their gas masks. The reader counselled all members of each family to carry their names and addresses on their persons, even sewing them into labels on children’s clothing so that they too would never be without identification. The instructions ended with a thin instrumental rendition of “God Save the King.”

The government appealed to more than God to save the country’s children. For months the nation had been preoccupied with the threat of attack, gripped by the prospect that its cities would be the prime target. So even before its official declaration of war, the government had launched Operation Pied Piper. Hundreds of thousands of children, as well as pregnant women and some mothers, were moved out of urban areas and, the hope was, out of harm’s way in what would become the largest mass movement of people in the country’s history. At train stations all over London, parents lined up with their children, kissing them goodbye, sending them off to be billeted in the countryside with strangers whose kindness could not be guaranteed. The motive was to spare children the trauma—and possible injury—of living under bombardment. Yet the disruption would still leave countless in a generation with injury or trauma of another kind.

Sonia knew trauma early, the way one knows a longtime neighbour. She’d grown up with separation, instability, and abuse long before war upended her life. Born in England to British parents, she was only three when they separated, after which her mother moved them to the south of France. Her father lived abroad and returned only for rare, short visits. Her mother, too, occasionally disappeared. Derek, at first, was the one constant: her best friend, schoolmate, and a source of endless hand-me-downs that she gladly wore in lieu of girly dresses. Derek was always there—at least until they were pried apart and sent to boarding schools in separate towns. In those long, wet winter months, Derek and Sonia would write each other letters in which he’d enclose part of the allowance that he received and that she was, for some inexplicable reason, denied.

Now, as she swayed with the waves that carried her back to the country of her birth, there was no Derek, no letters, and no words of comfort, never mind a half-allowance. Sonia was on her own and on the move.

“You’re completely alone, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Sonia told the older gentleman who started a conversation on the ferry.
What would she do, he continued, once she arrived in London?

After disembarking from the train at Victoria Station she’d head directly to the Grosvenor, a palatial railway hotel a short walk from Buckingham Palace, where she had been with her mother many times before. “I’m going to go there and see the manager,” Sonia explained. She figured he would remember her, and she could ask him for a loan to get her on a train to Horley, near Gatwick, where her mother lived when she wasn’t in France.

The gentleman seemed satisfied with the answer. “It sounds as though you can take care of yourself,” he remarked. Still, he promised to make sure she got there safely.

After Chamberlain’s declaration of war, London was in a bewildered, cheerless state. The crowds and queues disappeared, save for those waiting for necessities or fuel. Theatres and cinemas were closed, some schools and sports venues shuttered. Blackouts were already being enforced. People were building shelters in their gardens if they had them; others were taping their windows shut against possible poison gas attacks. The city already seemed shell-shocked, prematurely grey against the perpetual green.

There was the war at hand, of course, but the country was also still reeling from the latest bomb attacks by the Irish Republican Army. The IRA had declared its own war against Britain in January of that year. The first bombings of 1939 came not from the air, but from invisible men on London’s streets. Nothing, it seemed, was immune: the attacks targeted banks, post boxes and offices, bridges, underground stations, and just recently, the cloakroom at Victoria Station, Sonia’s destination. By the time Britain declared war against Germany, the IRA had mounted the equivalent of one attack every other day somewhere in or around a major British city in an effort to end British control of Northern Ireland.

As Britain prepared for yet another world war, it was also quietly laying the groundwork for its own campaign of irregular warfare—one that would use “sabotage and subversion” to undermine Nazi Germany, inspired in part by the urban sabotage tactics of Irish nationalists after the turn of the century. And so, as early as the spring of 1939, small groups of select British civilians were training in the “elementary theory” of guerrilla warfare. But those first steps were tentative at best, taking a distant backseat as the familiar war machine ramped up.

Hundreds of thousands of men signed up to wear the uniform and fight, some for the second time in their lives. Males too old or too young for military duty joined the local defence volunteers—later the Home Guard—for defence duties at home, protecting factories and preparing for possible invasion. Women joined civil defence units too, driving ambulances or painting sidewalks to help drivers navigate the roads obscured by blackouts. Others answered the call to join the newly re-formed Women’s Land Army to replace the men in local agriculture and food production.

Women who wished to serve in uniform could choose one of the auxiliary services available to support the army, navy, and air force. Beginning in 1938, the Auxiliary Territorial Service had become the women’s branch of the army. The Women’s Royal Naval Service, disbanded after the First World War ended in 1918, was dusted off and reopened in 1939. Then there was the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, which started up in June of that year. Hundreds of thousands of women signed up and put on a uniform to do their part.

Much as she wanted to pitch in, fifteen-year-old Sonia Butt was still too young for any of it. But in her own personal war—the first of many—she was already fighting a pitched battle.