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 stacy gillis

expectations. As some VADs were not paid for their work, they must have had
privatemeans. They were also providing care in a way which mapped on to
traditional accounts of gender relations. Mary H. J. Henderson’s ‘An Incident’
speaks to these constructions of gender and class, recounting an evening of nursing
duty and taking care of gravely ill patients: ‘And I fed him...Mary, Mother of
God, / All women tread where thy feet have trod.’ Similarly, the canteen helper in
‘Y.M.C.A.’ references traditional mothering strategies when speaking of her duties:

Some linger for a friendly chat,

Some call me ‘Mother’—Think of that!

And often, at the magic word,

My vision grows a little blurred—

The crowd in khaki disappears,

I see them through a mist of years:

I see them in a thousand prams—

A thousand mothers’ little lambs...^29

The reference to Christian sacrifice in the last line, and the maternal overtones, are
explicit in their referencing of such female war workers as sustaining the natural
order of things and ensuring that the social fabric remains intact for a post-war
world. A similar tone runs throughout the musings of Aelfrida Tillyard’s ‘A Letter
from Ealing Broadway Station’, in which the speaker is very conscious of the role
her duties in guarding the railway station play in the overall war. Despite exhaustion
and thoughts of her comfortable rooms at Newnham College, she thinks of the
bombing of Antwerp and says:

I’d like to feel that I was helping

To send the German curs a-yelping,

Well, if I serve the Belgian nation

By guarding Ealing Broadway station,

I’ll guard it gladly, never fear.^30

The woman is here positioned as treating her wartime job as a duty and thinking
only of those whose lives she will save. Moreover, in referencing her previous life,
she is endorsing a return to that life, rather than an engagement with the new
freedoms open to women during the war. These sorts of poems can verge on the
elegiac in their appropriation of traditional understandings of female activity.
Elegiac overtones are also present in accounts of England and Englishness.
Drawing on the long history of the pastoral in English poetry, England was often
configured in war poetry—by both men and women—as a place of redemption
and healing. In Lilian M. Anderson’s ‘Leave in 1917’, the pilot on leave wends his
way across the English landscape, and initially ‘his England was no England’ as

(^29) C.A.L.T., ‘Y.M.C.A.’, inThe Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse, 108.
(^30) Aelfrida Tillyard, ‘A Letter from Ealing Broadway Station’, ibid. 114.