Wartime memories

12:36pm Thursday 24th April 2008

OUR LONGEST DAYS: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Mass Observation, ed Sandra Koa Wing (Profile Books, £8.99)

Grim years in Britain of nightly blackouts and air-raids, food and petrol rationing, poor wages, frequently worse living conditions, and countless petty rules and regulations, are vividly described here by ordinary people who survived the ordeal.

This is a collection of excerpts from wartime diaries produced by volunteers for the Mass Observation project, which started in 1937. Some of the characters from previous such books reappear, but there is much new material and the subject remains as interesting as ever.

The grim realities of life between 1939-45 are becoming increasingly remote from today's affluent generation. The stress suffered by our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents in 1940-41, faced with the threat of invasion and occupation by the Nazis, should not be under-estimated.

Despite some defeatism on the home front, there can be no question that the majority of people backed Prime Minister Winston Churchill in his refusal to do a deal with Hitler. Although the worst horrors of the Nazi regime did not come to light until 1945, enough was already known to unite Britain behind its leader.

This book is full of fascinating details about daily trivia such as public transport problems, the nature of wartime meals, and what it was like to be on the receiving end of German bombs. Observations by suburban armchair pundits about the international scene are sometimes amazingly perceptive and sometimes spectacularly wrong.

The diaries bring home how savagely cold most winters were during the war, despite atmospheric pollution on an unprecedented scale. This bitter weather remained a feature of life until 1979, throughout the post-war industrial boom. Is this part of a pattern of climate change?

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