sweets – a spot of recycling was required, Woolton advised, to fill empty young tummies. Apple cores, his department proposed, could be turned into ‘delicious and very health-giving drinks’ by boiling them in water.
In this regime of bitter tastes and recycled waste, the chocolate that Bronwen and many other children craved became a rare treat. ‘For the duration of the war,’ the head of Dr Williams’ informed parents, ‘fruit and chocolate may be sent to individual girls but they must be handed in to the matron who will keep them and distribute them at the proper time. The school does still have regular, though limited, supplies of chocolate which the girls can buy, but no girl who has sweets or chocolate of her own may also buy school chocolate.’ When the pooled resources were shared out on high days and holidays, Bronwen’s joy knew no bounds. ‘It’s Freda’s birthday today,’ she wrote in February 1945. ‘We are all looking forward to this afternoon as she is having a DOUBLE birthday table with Maureen Oates. Yum, yum! We are going to stuff and stuff and stuff!!’
Sometimes she ended up caught between her patriotic duty and her rumbling stomach. In December of the same year she told her parents: ‘the head-girl of the Mount School, York, has written a letter to the head-girl of every other boarding school to ask if anybody would give up their 4 ounces of extra Christmas chocolate to send overseas to France etc. I think it is an excellent idea and everyone here who has got some is sending it.’ Goodness carries its own reward, but the following month her sacrifice of chocolate was repaid. ‘Have you had any bananas at home yet?’ she enquired in January 1946. ‘Some kids have brought a few back with them and so I have tasted them once again. It was a thrilling moment.’
If the food shortages got worse before they got better, there was some relief at the end of 1941, when the Pughs returned to London from Fleetwood. ‘What marvellous news,’ Bronwen wrote. ‘I jolly well hope that the war will be over by the Easter hols so that we can go to London.’ It wasn’t, of course, but at least holidays were once more in a familiar location, though the house in Pilgrims Lane now also provided shelter for refugees, who gave the increasingly adult Bronwen some idea of the realities of the war on the continent. ‘I remember in particular one Jewish woman, a Miss Seligman. She spent all her time in tears. And there were two Dutch refugees. They had survived on a diet of tulip bulbs.’
The return to London also brought her face to face with what war was about. ‘Later there were doodlebugs and it was horrendous. You would go up the High Street and these things would come flying over and you would be petrified. You would wait for the engines to cut out and just hope that they had passed you by. Everyone was so exhausted and bad-tempered that they got angry with you all the time.’ Hampstead is on a hill and from her bedroom window she would watch the East End of London being bombed – just the destruction that her father had predicted in 1939.
The contrast between north-west Wales, where war was experienced at second hand, and Hampstead was huge. It was as if Bronwen was dipping in and out of the conflict, almost an adult in London but still a child in the safety of Dr Williams’. She was back in Dolgellau for VE Day, 8 May 1945. The school worked itself up into a state of great excitement, with the head deciding on a special treat-two extra days’ holiday. ‘Isn’t that marvellous,’ she wrote home girlishly, adding with a note of regret, ‘anyone who can get home and back in a day is allowed. For the rest of us, she is going to try to provide something special, which will of course include the flicks.’ In the event, there was also a one-off trip to the circus.
Already by 1944 some aspects of life had begun to return to normal. Alun Pugh was appointed a county court judge of Norfolk in May. He was to prove popular with the barristers who appeared before him, a benign man with firm principles and old-fashioned values when it came to domestic disputes. In the Inns of Court they even put together a short verse to celebrate him:
Love, said His Honour Judge Pugh,
Should act on a couple like glue.
Making birds of a feather
Stay flocking together
Just as they do in the zoo.
If it restored the family’s material prosperity to pre-war standards, it did mean once again leaving the house in Pilgrims Lane so soon after returning to it. The Pughs kept it on, but made Norwich their main base. Bronwen was, however, full of delight. ‘Hurray! Congratulations! I haven’t seen it in the papers yet. We haven’t had The Times, only the Daily Telegraph, and I can’t find it in there. Anyway practically all the school knows and it was the topic of conversation wherever I went.’
In June 1945 she passed her basic school certificate – the equivalent of current GCSEs. Like her sisters before her, she stayed on at Dr Williams’ to study for her higher certificate – A levels – but her patience with constantly trailing in the wake of Ann and Gwyneth had reached breaking point. Like many younger children – particularly when their older siblings are of the same sex – she had long felt eclipsed. At Dr Williams’ was born her lifelong determination to chart her own course – if possible in the opposite direction to that chosen by Ann and Gwyneth. This meant that some of her natural abilities – in academic work, for instance – were cast aside, or at least marginalised, since they were shared strengths with her sisters, in favour of talents that she considered unique to her, notably her delight in performing.
Having passed her school certificate, she found herself at what, with hindsight, can be seen as a crossroads in her life, for much of what she did subsequently flowed naturally from her decision to reject the path already well-trodden by her sisters and enthusiastically advocated by her parents. ‘I think,’ she recalls, ‘they had in mind that I would go to Oxford and become a teacher. My father told me I would make a good headmistress.’
By 1947, however, she had set her heart firmly and finally against going up to Oxford. The additional term it would entail to prepare for the Oxbridge examination was not the real problem. She stayed on after her highers anyway because she was still a year younger than most of her class. In that extra year she was appointed head girl. It was meant to be for a whole year and, having said no to Oxbridge, she set about learning French and Latin but she became increasingly unhappy as her relationship with Miss Lickes broke down. The head-teacher, who had succeeded Miss Orford in September 1945, was obsessed with stamping out overly intimate friendships between girls and ordered Bronwen to devise a quasi-military campaign to achieve this end. Her head girl realised that it was a pointless exercise, doomed to failure, and that many of these illicit passions were in any case quite harmless. It was taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut.
Headteacher and head girl clashed again when Miss Lickes insisted that Bronwen sleep in the main school. All previous head girls had been allowed to sleep in the separate and more relaxed house on the hillside above Dr Williams’ with their fellow sixth formers and younger members of staff. Bronwen was outraged and lonely. After just two terms, she left.
‘If I don’t get Higher,’ she had written in January 1946, ‘and I don’t honestly see how I possibly can, with two languages at which I’m no good, I don’t think it’s much use going to Oxford because even if I got in, I would most probably be sent down or something awful.’ There is an obvious lack of self-confidence – especially since she later passed all the exams she predicted she would fail – but her reasoning was more complex. ‘It was probably a mistake,’ she now acknowledges, and she often mentions her lack of formal academic qualifications. ‘But I was so fed up with always being compared with my sisters. Although I did in the end get my Latin matric and I could have got a place, I decided to go to drama school instead.’
Towards the end of her school career Bronwen came under the influence of Margaret Braund, a young drama teacher who had just qualified from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. ‘She was a very gawky schoolgirl,’ Braund remembers, ‘very tall, quite uncoordinated and really not very attractive. She
