How We Lived Then

Longmate's history of the Second World War isn't interested in battles, strategies, ideologies or personalities. Even the Blitz is largely ignored. Nine-tenths of British people remained civilians from 1939 to 1945, and this is their story. Longmate has painstakingly researched the ordinary by appealing for personal recollections through sources previously untapped. He makes use of Mass Observation archives, and published writings and Government reports of the time - but also of the letters page of, for example, Footwear Weekly. He unearths the unhappy evacuees who, unused to country life, had no idea what to do with fresh vegetables, and reveals the quaint animosity towards Air-Raid Wardens and even, before the Nazi bombing raids began, firemen. Descriptions of, for instance, the practicalities of gas-masks, and the glee with which children tried them on for the first time, add to a richly woven tapestry of the now extraordinary everyday. Longmate's skill is in deftly moving between broad views of the war's progress - and, in the early months, its inertia - and the tiniest details: of weddings, or the taste, texture and cheap unsatisfactory wrapping of wartime chocolate. The deprivations are striking: a poignant extract from a ten-year-old's diary reveals at Christmas she received slacks made from a blanket, and 'a whole orange'. But even this is luxurious compared to the lot of starving Channel Islanders in the war's final year, when pets went 'missing, presumed eaten'. In a fascinating appendix, Longmate describes the occupied islands' desperate state including its people's minor heroisms and despicable treacheries. This compendious book, well illustrated with black-and-white photographs, and copious reference to sources, is a welcome addition to military history. It dislodges our banal preconceptions and lets us see anew what war in the 20th century meant to the civilians who lived beneath it and within it. (Kirkus UK)