For Joan Rice’s generation, the Second World War was a salvation. They were swept out of routine jobs into the Services, and sent to unimagined parts of the world. In September 1939 Joan was 19, with a burning ambition to be a writer but otherwise a “typical middle-class unmarried daughter”, yearning to break away from her parents in a Surrey village. She earned £2 10s a week as a secretary at Shell, but how could that compare with the adventure of war and a swanky WAAF uniform? She joined up at once.
Within two years she was in North Africa, having danced her way through the arms of countless dashing young men. In Egypt she met her immensely tall, reliable RAF colleague Hugh Rice. At their first meeting, she told him she planned to write and travel after the war; he asked how marriage would fit in. They married in Cairo and by the end of 1944 the first of their three tall sons had arrived: the now famous Tim, then the writer Jonathan, followed by Andrew, an advertising guru. The story is rivetingly told through her wartime diaries (“we weren’t supposed to keep diaries so it was rather naughty,” she says, “but everyone did”), now published as Sand in My Shoes — the name of a popular song of 1942.
If the past is a foreign country, 1939-45 is an irrevocable boundary line. We think the postwar generation had all the luck. But as Joan’s son Jonathan says, after reading Sand in My Shoes, “we might feel that our parents were the lucky ones”. Most of us can only glean an image of our parents’ experiences from old newsreels and war films. But Joan’s family can re-live in detail how it felt to be young then: the excitement; the camaraderie in sparsely furnished billets; the movies; the dances; the air-raids; the nights in shelters among strangers; singing sentimental songs while bombs fell; walking through blacked-out streets; the dangers they faced and the sense of responsibility the war awakened. “This is our world: war and death and dreadfulness. We are a generation without a tomorrow, alive and beautiful in our lovely today.”
Her fellow WAAFs had wonderfully dated names: Bunty, Boompsie, Barbie, Beasle. Barbie was the first to marry, and at the wedding “after a series of champagnes, I began to love everyone present”, Joan writes. “My shyness melted and giggles replaced it.”
Joan Rice is now a widow of 87, living in rural Hertfordshire. Only once since the war had she unearthed her diaries. “In 1955, I was writing for women’s magazines, and asked an editor if she’d be interested in publishing my war diaries. ‘Not in the least, my dear,’ she replied. ‘Nobody cares tuppence about the war, we all want to forget it’.”
It was just a common memory then; at that time everyone was busy never having had it so good. But half a century on, Joan’s grandchildren were curious about what she did in the war. Eva Rice, Tim’s eldest daughter, author of the bestseller The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, read the diaries at a sitting, amazed that they reflected a girl so like herself at that age, and showed them to her agent, who at once discerned their potential.
They danced and caroused night after night because tomorrow they might die; and since many of her dancing partners were bomber pilots, several did. “We lived for the moment because we thought it was all we’d got. I could be lighthearted because, until I was engaged, I didn’t have someone to worry about.” She can barely recognise the vivacious girl (“I thought, surely I wasn’t as flighty as that!”) who wrote of “laughing abandon” and about “going to the pictures, smoking ourselves silly and then coming back, spreading a rug before the fire and eating chips and my sponge cake from home, oranges and the last of Eric’s chocolates”.
Eric was one of the RAF chaps smitten by Joan. Self-aware, she matures before the reader’s eyes. She has her “first adult kiss”, decides that the fuss over strenuously preserved virginity is “a lot of hooey” and succumbs to her first affair. She clambers into a Blenheim for her first flight, passes her exams and gets commissioned. In April 1940 she wrote that she hoped by 30 to be rid of moonlight and roses, to be “a sophisticated, sane, unsentimental adult”. (“At 30 I had three boys under 6 in a crumbling farmhouse, and was elbow deep in nappies,” she says.)
In 1940 she bridles at “the filthy Russians” as allies: “Join with the Russians? Never, never, never! Talk about trying to buddy up with a tiger!” When the Americans arrive, Joan writes: “Together we are the hope of the world and the war will unite us . . . I shall always try to remember that, though their cockiness and conceit does sometimes jar, they are unafraid to say ‘go to hell’ to those against us, and will never compromise or crawl in their dealings with their enemies.” (Today, she feels differently. “The whole Iraqi business is a disaster,” she says, crossly. “They weren’t a meek little people waiting for democracy.” And having lived for four happy years in Jordan, among Palestinian friends, she can only see, with dread, everything getting worse in the Middle East.)
By the time she sailed to North Africa with a team tracking enemy troop movements, she was nursing a broken heart. But on April 29, 1942, a hot dusty day, she records that “a boy called Hugh Rice” accompanied her to the Pyramids. An extract from Hugh’s diary describes Joan as “a wonderfully soothing and civilising influence”, alas engaged elsewhere. “I really am an exasperating woman,” Joan writes, “with this perpetual heart shilly-shallying.” But gradually she sees that Hugh — “intelligent, clear-thinking and refreshingly unsentimental; kind and sincere, with unbelievably beautiful manners” — is the man. By July she writes: “My heart is singing wildly and madly with joy . . . Here he is come at last, and he has never so much as held my hand.” But whenever he is near, she knows everything will be all right: a good definition of being in love. “Somehow, unwise, young, stupid, selfish, bewildered and unguided, I have achieved a goal I only dimly realised I was seeking . . . I stand today on the edges of adulthood and a way of living I wanted in my heart.” So the book ends, with the Cairo wedding photograph.
Though Hugh would not hear of her going out to work, Joan’s writing ambition was fulfilled: her boys recall the clatter of her typewriter as she knocked out pieces for Punch, Woman’s Hour or The Times (“A wife’s view of the Farnborough Air Display”) at home. Sometimes it was irksome that people would say “I expect Tim helped you with that”. On the contrary, it was she who caused him to meet Andrew Lloyd Webber. She had heard the agent Desmond Elliott addressing the Women’s Press Club, and told Tim, who was failing his law exams at the time, to go and see him. Tim took along his proposal for a Guinness Book of Records; Elliott turned that down, but told him about Lloyd Webber, who needed a lyricist.
She dedicates the book to the brave young Battle of Britain pilots, and to her husband. They had 46 years together, at home and abroad. “What I miss now, being on my own, is having to be careful not to bore people,” she says. “With a husband you can talk about trivial things and know he’ll be interested.”
Jonathan Rice says that it’s odd to read one’s mother’s diary of the time before you existed: “The person revealed in this diary is a stranger.” But what Eva Rice felt most of all, when she came to the last page, was gratitude. “Because she wrote everything down.”
