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Loading... The Oaken Heart (1941)by Margery Allingham
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Biography & Autobiography.
History.
Nonfiction.
HTML: Margery Allingham, already a successful crime writer, was living quietly in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy ('Auburn') when the Second World War broke out. Her house became an Air Raid Wardens' post and a First Aid centre, and Allingham herself became responsible for 275 East London evacuees in a rural community of just over 600. Commissioned by American publishing friends to recount what life was like, she began The Oaken Heart in the autumn of 1940, when the Battle of Britain gave way to the London Blitz. Bombs fell, even on the Essex countryside, and a German invasion was fully expected. She conceived her work as an honest letter to America. Places were given fictional names but otherwise she told it like it was, whether funny or painful. Unsentimental yet personal and rich in detail, this is an evocative first-hand account of day-to-day realities in a small community upended and terrified of the futureâ??like so many villages of the time. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.912Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.71)
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Wikipedia in English (1)
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Audio performance by Georgina Sutton
3.5 stars
Marjorie Allingham was already a well known mystery writer as England entered WW2. This memoir was commissioned by an American publisher before the United States entered the war. The intent was to give a first person account of the war’s impact on a typical English village. Although the author makes a point of saying that she is not intending to write war propaganda, (just a letter to others who may face something similar in the near future), There’s clear pro-British propaganda value in her mildly amusing anecdotes.
The tone of this memoir is very similar to the fictional Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. Day to day concerns and quirky village characters create a light tone set against the larger reality. Allingham begins in the months before the declaration of war. The book was published in 1941. She speaks mostly of the ever changing adaptations to village life; rationing, blackouts, first aid preparations, and the accommodation of hundreds of evacuees.
She has some interesting thoughts about the ambiguous position of her own generation; too young for the first war, too old for the second. Her political opinions are fairly muddled and she says more than once that many things about the war will not be understood until it’s over. The book was apparently developed from a series of letters written to her American friends. She refers to friends and family in a way that assumes a previous familiarity, and I found myself getting completely lost in the ridiculous nicknames. I have no doubt that she described actual situations but I felt the author’s touch in the depiction of Auburn citizens as ‘characters’ in a story. (