More than sixty years later, it is still 'the war'. Its popular, anti-fascist character distinguishes the Second World War from, on the one hand, the imperialist hecatomb of 1914-18, and, on the other, from the colonial and neo-colonial adventures we have been dragged into since 1945. I was born ten years after VE Day, part of a generation for whom the war, though outside our direct experience, was, through our parents and teachers, an important part of our formation. The playground question, 'what did you Dad do in the war then?' was for us an important conversational ice-breaker and an excuse for tall tales and one-upmanship. In my case, the truthful answer I would give, that he had been Medical Officer with the rank of Bimbashi, literally leader of a thousand, in the Sudan Camel Corps, was not always believed by my interrogators at the Fawcett Infants School in Trumpington. But even in the minds of generations for whom the subject of the question would be not a father, but a grandfather or even great-grandfather, it remains 'the war'.
The late Sandra Koa-Wing's collection of extracts from wartime Mass Observation diaries stresses this poplar character. The diarists are two-thirds civilians. I believe King's Regulations forbade servicemen from keeping diaries, though this did not stop five of them who served in the forces at home from recording some details of service life. Of the others, one is a conscientious objector, while others work as land girls or volunteer for the Home Guard. From fifteen diarists, Sandra has taken entries which show the impact of great events, but also the mundane. There is no better way to understand the progress of the war than through the accounts of how Dunkirk, the Blitz, the Soviet Union's entry into the war, the later entry of the Americans, the battle for Stalingrad, the struggle for a Second Front, the D-Day landings and the V1 and V2 rocket attacks affected people. One can also trace in the entries the development of the determination that post-war Britain would be different, as the foundation of the sixty year-old National Health Service exemplified
The strength of this book is the way in which these great events and the domestic detail of everyday life interact. Food is a constant preoccupation, whether for Jenny Green who tries to convince a well-meaning fellow worker that a pork pie sent to the British Expeditionary Force in France would be unlikely to survive the trip and still be safe to eat, or for Nella Last who sends her husband to do battle with a butcher who claims he has no meat, to return victorious with a leg of lamb. A chemist tells a diarist that the demand for 'tonics' has fallen sharply. Historians of Mass Observation will enjoy the episode when a star-struck Muriel Green goes to London to visit Tom Harrisson, the anthropologist co-founder of the organisation.
How much background knowledge can the editor expect from the reader? Some explanations, for example that of duodecimal, currency, pounds, shillings and pence may be useful for readers not yet born and of an age to spend money in 1971, but not for those like me who can remember being given 6d, sixpence, 2.5p pocket money per week, supplemented occasionally by 2/6, half a crown, or 12.5p from visiting uncles. Taken chronologically by year, each year's entries are prefaced by a helpful summary of the course of the war in that year. The first entries are from 3 September 1939, the day war was declared, and the book ends six years later on 3 September 1945, a month after VJ Day. I might take slight issue with the footnotes on the situation in Greece on 1944-45, which misinterpret the role of British forces in the beginnings of that country's civil war, attributing to them a more impartial role than they actually played.
The editor of this collection of material from Mass Observation diarists, Sandra Koa-Wing, died very young in 2007. Sandra worked in the University of Sussex Library's renowned Special Collections and there is a fund in her memory. Her blog, A Glimpse from the Attic, survives her,
Koa-Wing, Sandra
Our Longest Days: A People's History of the Second World War
London: Profile, 2008
A footnote: as this review was gestating, I saw Nöel Coward's In Which We Serve; there could be no greater contrast than between the realistic picture of war-time life in this book and Coward's sentimental myth-making, his rough but loyal other-ranks. decent officers and cheery civilians. I also had news of the death of Angus Calder, whose work with the Mass Observation archives did much to bring them back to attention. There's a tribute by Dorothy Sheridan on the Mass Observation website: http://www.massobs.org.uk/angus.html
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