LITMIR.BIZ

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disquiet that class, and thus power relations, had been turned upside down during the war – and the implacable determination to set them to rights again. In my mother’s view – and she was not alone in this – shopkeepers had become very ‘uppity’, reserving special goods on points, keeping the occasional few oranges under the counter for favoured customers. Such retailers seemed to regard the long queues that formed outside shops as their personal supplicants. The grocer who weighed out sugar in blue paper bags, scooped biscuits from glass-topped tins, sent his delivery boy round weekly on his bicycle with my mother’s order of rashers of streaky bacon and a box of Post Toasties cereal, must have realised that as ration books disappeared, his control was ebbing. The customer was again king (or rather queen) and had a choice of shops to patronise. The half-crown or capitalist ten-shilling note became the only currency of exchange required, instead of the government-issued ration book to be stamped.

      Herbie Gates was one of the church wardens at St Mary’s Church, Hemel Hempstead, where my mother went to matins every Sunday and was a member of the Mothers’ Union. Before the war he had sometimes helped with the heavy work in our garden, but during the war he had volunteered for Civil Defence duties, becoming an ARP warden, a responsibility he had taken very seriously, even officiously. ‘Little ’itler’ was murmured as he admonished ‘Put out that light!’ to householders demonstrating inadequately observed blackout. Now that he had handed back his brassard and tin hat, he too must be cut down to size, according to my mother and her neighbours, and put to setting potatoes, scything nettles and taking the church collection plate again, rather than having his wartime authority recognised as was surely his due.

      It is not surprising that I have no memory of the war or its immediate aftermath, but what is surprising is that while I could read the signifiers of shortages and destruction, I had almost no factual knowledge until I was almost an adult about this cataclysmic event that would slice the twentieth century in two. No one I knew wanted to talk about the war that had gone on too long and too painfully and had put lives on hold for half a generation. There was no narrative of the war, though it was proffered as an explanation for many things, including the appearance one Sunday lunchtime of a neighbour who had been in a Japanese POW camp for three years, crawling on his stomach through the open French windows of his family home some months after his release, a knife clenched between his teeth as he threatened his wife and children.

      Boys played cowboys and Indians, not Tommies and Nazis; we looked at maps of the British Empire in primary school, not the world at war. The Second World War was not on the syllabus at secondary school either, and nor was it offered as a topic when, much later, I went to read history at university.

      There were soon plenty of books about the military aspects of war: battles, generals’ memoirs, discussions of causes, strategies and hardware. Cinema-goers too thrilled in time to such heroic films as The Wooden Horse and The Dam Busters. But the civilian experience remained largely unspoken. During the war, films such as Waterloo Road, Millions Like Us, Went the Day Well? and Mrs Miniver had filled cinemas with their subtle – and sometimes not so subtle – messages of propaganda and encouragement for the home front. Give your all for the war effort; pull together for victory; keep faithful and devote your energies to keeping your home happy and secure for when your fighting man returns. Immediately after the war, the dreariness of wartime sacrifice was not what cinema-goers wanted to be reminded of; the films they flocked to see were comedies, musicals, historical dramas and thrillers.

      Richard Titmuss’s volume of the official history of the civilian war, Problems of Social Policy, came out in 1950 but it was not until the late 1960s that books for the general reader began to be published. Angus Calder’s The People’s War, the first – and to date the best – book on the civilian war in Britain, much influenced by Titmuss, was published in 1969, followed in 1971 by Norman Longmate’s history of everyday life in wartime Britain, How We Lived Then. The first of the twenty-six episodes of the epic series The World at War directed by Jeremy Isaacs was shown on ITV in October 1973. ‘Home Fires Burning: Britain’, the single episode on the civilian side of the war, written by Angus Calder, was transmitted on 13 February 1974.

      There were many hard-working and courageous women who joined the forces in the war and gradually the great value of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs), the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAFs) and the Women’s Land Army (WLA) was recognised, as was the story of the heroic women recruits to the SOE (Special Operations Executive). However, the contribution of women on the home front was slower to be acknowledged. This was in no way solely a women’s domain: think firefighters, Civil Defence and Observer Corps, medical staff and many more organisations which in most cases consisted of more men than women. Nonetheless, women did ‘keep the home fires burning’, in their own houses if their meagre coal rations stretched to it, but also on the land, in banks and offices, in munitions and aircraft factories, on buses, in postal services, as porters at railway stations, and in welfare and medical services.

      Statues of Second World War generals and leaders strut on plinths throughout the country. Even the animals – horses, dogs, pigeons, mules – who served in various ways in wars had a monument erected at the edge of Hyde Park in 2004. But it was not until nearly a year later that a sombre bronze monument depicting the wartime uniforms women had worn, both military and civilian, hanging, discarded, from hooks, was unveiled in Whitehall close to the Cenotaph. Certainly I had no idea in those early postwar years of the professionalism and heroism that must have been displayed by the women around me. It was many years later, through my work as a historian, that I came to understand the texture of that time.

      Chapter Two

       Second-Hand Baby

      The sun was shining in through the net curtains, making laser-pointed parallel shafts of dust in the late summer light as I sat on the gloss-painted windowsill in the dining room, looking through a large Marshall & Snelgrove dress box full of photographs. I had been given a photograph album and a small packet of photo corners for my eighth birthday in June 1951, and on this September afternoon, the last day of the school holidays, I was sorting through the photos to choose which I wanted to stick into the album, to create a storyboard of my life so far.

      There were pictures of me aged about two, perhaps, sitting on the grass wearing a sun bonnet; one of me with a terrified-looking friend, crouching naked in a tin bath on the lawn as an unseen hand aimed a water jet from a hosepipe at us. There were also a number of photographs taken on the promenade in Paignton, Devon. One showed me sitting on a moth-eaten stuffed horse on the seafront; another with my cousin Sheila, who usually came on holiday with us so that I had someone to play with, eating candy floss on the same promenade. We always spent a fortnight there in August, staying in a boarding house owned by a Mrs Pollard, overflowing with souvenirs from various other seaside resorts she had visited. Once a week she would urge us to hurry back from the beach as there was chicken for dinner that night (in those days chicken was a rare delicacy).

      Then in the box I found a sheet of Polyfotos, each the size of a passport photograph, printed like a cine film so that each sequential frame showed a slight variation from the one before and the one after. A lurking smile might be replaced by a full-on grin; a blurred, waving hand give way to a face half turned from the camera. This was a record designed to animate the subject in a way that the frozen image of a single shot never could.

      But at the bottom of the box I encountered a photograph I could not recall having seen before – of a baby I did not recognise lying on a shawl. The rest of the sepia or black-and-white photos in this repository of my parents’ recorded life had some sort of identification pencilled on the back – ‘Chas. and Dolly’s wedding, 18 June 1927’, ‘Picnic with Hilda and Bill, Swanage, August 1951’, ‘Giddy [with a hard ‘G’, my infant attempt at the name I went by then, Gillian] feeding ponies on Dartmoor, August 1950’. However, the photograph of the baby had no identification. The back was covered with what was known as butterfly tape, a wide band of gummy white paper which, when

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