What an age to be alive in!
Some favourite middlebrow writing of WWII
I hope I shall be able to preserve my journals and my books. I only want to keep my journals because of the conceit I hold that they will be of interest to posterity.
Jean Lucey Pratt
I received a charming email from a subscriber in response to my recent review of Ann Stafford’s Army Without Banners. Would I (she asked) consider posting a short list of my favourite Time and Tide generation writers? She added: ‘learning about the world wars in history always bored me to death but these types of domestic and personal female accounts spark such interest!’
This post is my reply. I do not pretend to be comprehensive in my tastes,1 nor am I going to attempt any kind of ranking, but I would gladly read any of these Home Front heroines over and over again. (Tea and biscuits are optional.)
Vere Hodgson
Diary. Few Eggs and No Oranges, subtitled ‘A Diary showing how Unimportant People in London and Birmingham lived through the war years 1940-45 written in the Notting Hill area of London,’ is a long book, yet completely engrossing from beginning to end, crowded with incidents both epoch-making and mundane. I’ve not re-read it for years, and I hope my year of ‘reading from home’ might give me an opportunity to remedy that.
E. M. Delafield
Fiction. The Provincial Lady in Wartime is the fourth title in Delafield’s genre-defining middlebrow series, and possibly my favourite. I would recommend some familiarity with the Provincial Lady and her milieu, though, in order to get the most from all the situations described.
Spirits rather dashed until I glance up and see entire sky peppered with huge silver balloons, which look lovely. Cannot imagine why they have never been thought of before and used for purely decorative purposes.
E. M. Delafield, The Provincial Lady in Wartime
The Provincial Lady omnibus has a permanent place on my bedside table. But on my shelves, waiting to be read, is Delafield’s novel Late and Soon, set in a faded country house over the course of one week in January 1942.
Stella Gibbons
Fiction. Westwood is the novel that showed me what a wonderful writer Gibbons could be, once she stepped from the shadow of Cold Comfort Farm. Set largely around Hampstead and Highgate towards the end of the war, it captures the sense of the country’s jaded exhaustion at that time. A bookish young woman becomes enmeshed with a family of intellectuals after finding a lost ration book on the Heath; in this novel, Gibbon’s storytelling is astute and bittersweet, imbued with a keen sense of the comedic, and absolutely gorgeous.
Presently she came out on the path below Kenwood that leads directly down to Highgate. There were allotments here with giant cabbages of a rich blue-green colour; the mist, and the dim blue of the sky, and the green of the grass caught up the colour and repeated it again and again almost as far as she could see, and the leaves were huge and beaded with water, for rain had fallen that afternoon. She hurried on with her hands in her pockets, still looking about her, but the colours were quickly fading now, and the greyness of evening was creeping over the fields.
Stella Gibbons, Westwood
Frances Faviell
Memoir. Faviell was an artist who became a nursing volunteer during the war. Chelsea Concerto is her memoir of the London Blitz and has been praised widely. The wife of a diplomat, Faviell lived in Berlin for three years from 1946. The Dancing Bear: Berlin de Profundis describes her time there and the condition of the German people in the immediate aftermath of the war, and is on my ‘must read’ list.
Jan Struther
Fiction. Mrs. Miniver is another absolutely classic middlebrow piece, which started life as a column in The Times and was first published in book form in 1939. Although not strictly wartime (Struther did write some further Miniver columns in the autumn and winter of 1939), it encapsulates the sense of dread anticipation that surrounded the Munich Crisis the previous year, when slit trenches were dug in the London parks and gas masks distributed to the public.
Finally, in another room, there were the masks themselves, stacked close, covering the floor like a growth of black fungus. They took what had been ordered for them — four medium size, two small — and filed out into the street.
It was for this, thought Mrs. Miniver as they walked towards the car, that one had boiled the milk for their bottles, and washed their hands before lunch, and not let them eat with a spoon that had been dropped on the floor.
Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver
Barbara Noble
Fiction. Doreen is a moving novel about a nine-year-old girl evacuated from London’s East End to the countryside. Whilst Doreen takes to her mystifying new life remarkably well, the effect upon the grown-ups around her is far-reaching. An intense emotional focus for both her mother, who did not want to let her go and knows intimately the hard and narrow life to which she must return, and the childless middle-class couple who take her in and want her to enjoy a better life than she has had, Doreen finds herself torn between them and their competing worlds, uncertain which way to turn. Writing with great empathy, Noble shows us that good intentions are never enough.
Noble also wrote The House Opposite, another wartime novel that’s on my reading list.
Verily Anderson
Memoir. Spam Tomorrow is a light-hearted account of — among other adventures — a brief, awkward stint in the Nursing Yeomanry, marriage, setting up home in the Blitz, and giving birth in the middle of an air raid. Elizabeth Bowen (author of The Heat of the Day, one of the iconic novels of the war period) praised it for its exploration of the lives of women in wartime.
‘Long-distance call for Bruce,’ a F.A.N.Y. sergeant, soured by the years of peace between the wars, looked into the common-room and addressed me in the third person. ‘It can be taken in the office but must be short. Personal calls are not encouraged during a state of emergency.’
The state of emergency had been present for two months, at any rate in our unit, since the evacuation of Dunkirk.
I zipped up my khaki skirt, loosened after lunch, and ran to the telephone. It might be Donald. It was.
‘What size do you take in wedding rings?’ his voice asked from London.
Verily Anderson, Spam Tomorrow
Noel Streatfeild
Fiction. Like most of Streatfeild’s novels for both children and adults, Saplings is the story of a family. It explores the pressure that the war places upon each member of that family and the effect that the slow disintegration of the family itself has upon the four close-knit siblings in particular. All of Streatfeild’s novels are well-written, especially from the child’s point of view, and the children here are dealing with impossible changes in the only ways they can. The book has one of the most cruelly poignant closing lines I know in middlebrow literature.
Barbara Euphan Todd
Fiction. Miss Ranskill Comes Home is a curiosity of the best kind. It is 1943 and Miss Ranskill, lost at sea and then rescued after living on an island for years, returns to find Britain at war. Tangled in the adjustments she is forced to make, we are granted a satirical outsider’s view of wartime life. She cannot understand, for example, why small acts such as saving up each week’s butter ration and eating it all at once should prove so incredibly irritating to those around her, who have submitted themselves body and soul to wartime strictures and regulations. But behind the humour there lies a reflective story of an individual struggling to make sense of an alien society and constantly wondering, ‘Why?’
The young airman in the far corner of the carriage was asleep. It must be odd to him to be travelling like this. He and his kind were evolving into a race apart. They had seen what none but their generation could see — cities burning below them and the bowl of the stars above. How would they keep the bounds of a counter in years to come and employ their fingers to cut crêpe-de-Chine for customers?
Barbara Euphan Todd, Miss Ranskill Comes Home
D. E. Stevenson
Fiction. Falling at the cosier end of the middlebrow spectrum — which is not to say that they lack a perceptive edge when it comes to human traits and foibles — are the three ‘Miss Buncle’ novels: Miss Buncle’s Book, Miss Buncle Married, and The Two Mrs. Abbotts. Of these, the third takes place in wartime, but I would urge you to read the trilogy in order.
Stevenson was a prolific writer, and is also well-loved for her ‘Mrs. Tim’ series, of which one, Mrs. Tim Carries On, is also a war piece. On my reading list is The English Air, a stand-alone novel about the relationship between two Englishwomen, mother and daughter, and their cousin Franz from Nazi Germany, published in 1940.
Winifred Peck
Fiction. Bewildering Cares spans a week in the life of a provincial vicar’s wife, in the Lent of 1940, and is written in diary form. The plot (if plot it can be called) is driven by the fact that her husband’s curate has preached a pacifist sermon, and the novel casts light on British attitudes to the Church of England and church-going in wartime. I enjoyed it, although I found its style a little too derivative of Delafield’s Provincial Lady.
One of my want-to-read books remains Peck’s House-Bound, which describes an Edinburgh housewife’s attempts to manage without help in the home during the early part of the war.
Jocelyn Playfair
Fiction. Cressida Chance, a widow, has opened the doors of her elegant Georgian home to various paying guests. A House in the Country captures her daily activities and reflections, in contrast to the experiences of a man she loves, adrift in the North Atlantic after his ship is torpedoed. I read it many years ago and remember that the thought-provoking philosophy of a key character, an intellectual European refugee, came in heavy passages that required my full attention to negotiate. But this is a slow and pensive pastoral with a tragedy at its heart, written at a time when the war’s outcome was by no means assured. Sometimes misunderstood, and not to be confused with Ruth Adam’s altogether merrier book of the same title, I think it demands reading again today, in the face of climate crisis, conflict, and populist politics.
‘Cressida, there is war now in all the world, not only internationally and with guns and bombs, but in men’s hearts and minds with weapons more dangerous still. In each human being is their own war taking place, a war of thought, of feeling. Always, if they have, perhaps, not known it, men have fought in their hearts . . . Perhaps for so long the kindness in human hearts has been defeated by greed, selfishness, personal desires, for comfort, power, money, what you like, that can make a man forget so simple a thing as love towards his neighbour . . . The worst enemy every man must fight is himself.’
Jocelyn Playfair, A House in the Country
Margery Allingham
Memoir. The Oaken Heart, subtitled ‘The Story of an English Village at War,’ was one of the first wartime memoirs I ever read and remains one of my absolute favourites (as well as being the benchmark against which all others are measured in my mind). Originally conceived as a series of letters to her American readers by one of the great Golden Age mystery writers, it describes village life in rural Essex from July 1938 to May 1941. Allingham’s love for her fellow villagers shines throughout. I adore it.
Mollie Panter-Downes
Commentary. London War Notes is another book with its origins in wartime columns for publication in America, describing above all the national mood. The tone is jaunty and generous. In September 2019, eighty years on from the outbreak of WWII, I set myself the challenge of reading this ‘in real time,’ and I’m ashamed that I became derailed sometime during the third Covid lockdown in 2021/1941. As we have lurched out of that modern crisis and into others, it’s salutary to realise, taking up War Notes now, that there is/was still more than a year of war to be endured. It must have felt unending.
Fiction. Good Evening, Mrs Craven is a collection of Panter-Downes’s wartime short stories, built upon her close observation of the British character and day-to-day life. Her novel, One Fine Day, is about a day in the life of an ordinary, middle-class housewife and is set just after the war’s end.
Jean Lucey Pratt
Diary. Another of my favourites, and the woman whose words appear at the top of this post, Jean Lucey Pratt was introduced to the world at large under the pseudonym ‘Maggie Joy Blunt’ by Simon Garfield, in his edited three-part collection of Mass Observation diaries, We Are At War, Private Battles and Our Hidden Lives. A trainee architect who struggled to become a published writer, ‘Maggie’ proved so popular with readers of the MO collection that Garfield went on to edit a volume of her private diaries, which she kept from 1925 until just before her death in 1986, under the title A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt. Hilary Mantel called it ‘wholly absorbing and deeply entertaining.’
26 February 1940. I was working in the kitchen this afternoon — knitting and books and newspapers, letters and cigarettes, face flannels and a table cloth on a clothes horse, coke crackling in the range, kettle humming … when I saw a sprightly lady in a costume the colour of Parma violets pass this window.
[…] She asked if I had heard of the National Salvage Campaign, looking at me doubtfully as though a young woman in grubby grey slacks with untidy hair and a dirty face might very well be ignorant of it. I had heard of it. I have spoken to Fanny about it frequently, bemoaning the fact that the Scouts had grown faint of heart at the sight of my waste paper and wondering why the local council couldn’t arrange for the dustmen to collect usable salvage separately. I asked the Lady in Violet into the kitchen with due apologies.
‘Maggie Joy Blunt,’ We Are At War, edited by Simon Garfield
Virginia Graham
Poetry. Consider the Years is a collection written between 1936 and 1946. These are not war poems in the conventional sense, but are attentive and wise and often quite lovely. Graham was the closest friend and correspondent of Joyce Grenfell, and something of that relationship, the similarity in taste, humour and outlook between the two women, comes through in Graham’s verses.
Marghanita Laski
Fiction. The Village describes life in one corner of rural England immediately after VE Day, when civilians who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the Home Front suddenly found themselves on opposite sides of the class divide once more and it became clear that the old, pre-war order could not — must not — reassert itself, even in a world where a woman’s social standing could be established at a glance by the way she wore her headscarf. Examining seismic changes through the lens of commonplace concerns, the novel serves as a bridge — disconcerting, at times — leading the Time and Tide generation away from the period before the war and towards that which lay ahead.
Other Home Front titles on my shelves, but either unread or only partially read, include:
Green Hands by Barbara Whitton
Table Two by Marjorie Wilenski
Blitz Writing and There’s No Story There by Inez Holden
Tea and Hot Bombs by Lorna Lewis
Where Stands a Wingèd Sentry by Margaret Kennedy
English Climate: Wartime Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Nothing to Report and Somewhere in England by Carola Oman
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Wine of Honour by Barbara Beauchamp
To Bed with Grand Music and Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski
‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ by Rose Macaulay (a short story contained within Non-Combatants and Others: Writings Against War, 1916-1945)
I’m sure there are new favourites among them. Tell It To A Stranger, a collection of wartime short stories by Elizabeth Berridge, is certainly in that category. I’m reading her at the moment and there will be more on her writing soon.
This post — not so much a short list as a sprawling indulgence — closes with the final lines from The Oaken Heart. I can think of no better encapsulation of the spirit evoked by these books and the women in them.
What a period! What an age to be alive in!
Oh, thank God I was born when I was.
Margery Allingham
© The Unhurried Reader 2024
If this piques your interest, I recommend the authoritative Furrowed Middlebrow blog, which offers an almost exhaustive list of wartime writing, as well as Jenny Hartley’s book Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War.
I love this, sharing as I do, your love for the literature of this time. Some of these I have read (many times in the instance of the Provincial Lady) but am delighted to now have a list of To Be Read, although I was trying to reduce that ever-growing pile and list!
Thank you so much, this is an amazing resource for me as I am working on a project researching a group of women who came of age in 1939. There are some favourites of mine on your list, including The Village, but lots of new names!