Letter

Last week we had a Persephone Lunch in the shop at which Juliet Gardiner, author of Wartime: Britain 1939-45, The 1940s House and many other books, discussed literature about the Home Front during the Second World War.

She started by saying that there were virtually no non-fiction books about the Home Front until the end of the 1960s (immediately after the War people did not want to talk about it – it had gone on too long, was too dreary and they were too tired). Why did Angus Calder’s magisterial The People’s War come out in 1969? At the time it appeared people had started to become very disillusioned with the Wilson government and to look back at the recent past; after that several books were published, among them Norman Longmate’s How we Lived Then in 1971, Few Eggs and No Oranges in 1976, Mrs Milburn’s Diaries in 1979 and Nella Last’s War in 1981.

But it was contemporary wartime fiction which told the most amazing and totally authentic stories about what it was like to live on the Home Front. This was, after all, a battlefield in its way: until the end of 1942 more civilians were killed than military personnel and since everyone was an armchair soldier, their voices had legitimacy. And WW2 was a time of voracious reading (‘war is 10% action and 90% boredom’) although fewer books were published: in 1939 15,000 books were published but less than half that in 1945. This was largely because of the paper shortage.

Many women writers worked for the war effort: EM Delafield for the ARP, Noel Streatfeild for the WVS, Elizabeth Bowen for the ARP, Marghanita Laski was on the Brains Trust on the radio, Mollie Panter-Downes was a journalist.  As Elizabeth Bowen said, ‘War, if you come to think of it, hasn’t started anything that wasn’t there already.’ Nevertheless, it was assumed that women should not presume to write about the war and their work was largely ignored by critics (mostly men).

The themes that link wartime women writers are, first of all, endurance, the acceptance that you had no choice but to get through your daily life.  This is described most vividly in Few Eggs and No Oranges (at the end they toast Churchill, Stalin and the greengrocer) and poignantly in Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country. Then there is class: there was a genuine concern in national political circles about morale on the Home Front and how united Britain would be given the divisive pre-war years, for example Churchill was very reluctant to introduce clothes rationing. But in fact everyone accepted it and the many other wartime privations and regulations.  The heroine of Miss Ranskill Comes Home is a democrat through and through.  Doreen is very subtle about class. And there is loss: The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen is entirely about this.  Alex in Saplings is killed, so is Edie in Doreen.  Also there is the loss of separation – parents send their children away, knowing they are doing their best for their child but with an aching heart.  Then there was the loss of future, loss of identity, loss of aspiration, people having the feeling of the world passing them by.  Younger people had jobs they might not have had without the war but older people lost things – the theme of six wasted years pervades the fiction of the war. Also there is the loss of men’s identity (eg Geoffrey in Doreen) if they are not directly part of the war effort. At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor is about all these things – endurance, class, loss, loss of Julia’s youth and opportunities, her chance to realise herself.

Lastly, there was the theme of sex in wartime. This pervades Saplings, and even short stories like ‘The Hunger of Miss Burton’, which begins, ‘Ever since food began to get a bit tight, Miss Burton had carried a wolf around with her under the neat waistband of her tweed skirt’ (and the reader senses that the wolves are not just hungry for food), or ‘The Waste of it All’ in which Frances’s anger with the puppy symbolises ‘the dreadful empty feeling in her heart’. To Bed with Grand Music, Marghanita Laski’s first novel, written under a pseudonym, is about Deborah who is very bored and gets a job but then has one lover after another – it’s a rake’s progress in wartime, a supremely moral tale.

Juliet then talked about working as a historical advisor on the film of Atonement. She pointed out that she had no power, all you can say is, ‘well, I don’t think it would have been like that.’ She was asked to do two things – firstly, to round out the characters over and above what is in the book, so she spent two days with the cast talking about the 1930s and another two days talking about Dunkirk.  (She recommended novels they could read, for example Dusty Answer and Invitation to the Waltz for Keira Knightley, James McAvoy and the other actors.)  Secondly, she went to see two days of filming, so she went to Stokesay Court in Shropshire (far grander than in the book) and to Redcar where the Dunkirk scenes were filmed, which was amazing to watch.  Once filming starts, an advisor’s role is very practical: the producers would ring up to ask questions like ‘was there Brasso?’ or if Big Ben was silenced (which it wasn’t although church bells were since they were only to be rung in the case of an invasion).

29 February 2008
Lamb’s Conduit Street