Private Battles: Our Intimate Diaries: How The War Almost Defeated Us

I read this because one of the 4 writers is my husband's great-uncle, and initially I planned to just kind of read his parts and skip over everyone else's, but I found myself getting pulled into all of the stories and ended up reading the entire book. It was surprisingly interesting - I kept reading excerpts out loud to my family. Not a book I would ever have picked up on my own, but I really ended up enjoying it.

Absolutely fascinating. Excerpts from four war-time civilian diaries kept for Mass-observation. All the writers are middle-class - though at least one distinctly lower middle class, but they strip aside the nostalgia and propaganda that has overlaid a lot of writing about WW2. They cope with poor food and tiredness, and toward the end rocket atttacks. This last is only a footnote in most histories of the war, but this book shows how stunning it was at the time to those concerned.

One passage seems worth quoting in full.

Men in the Services who have spent most of their time abroad during this war don't seem to have any idea how difficult things have become for the civilian and imply that we make an unnecessary moan about conditions. A good show more story could be written round this - husband returning after 3-4 years in the Middle East, wife doing full time war job trying to keep house together, or looking after children on her own, nerves jaded, finds husband utterly unreasonable - thinking that he has had all the hardships and so on. show less

Book 195.
Private Battles.
Simon Garfield.
My dad Geoffrey Green has been talking about this book for the past couple of years and eventually found it in his collection so I could read it.
There were quite a few similarities to how things are at the moment with Covid, panic buying of clothes when ration vouchers came in and being asked not to travel.
There's a lot about food-rationing which interested me. Strange things like McDonalds could only use treacle in their ginger biscuits for export and not for UK consumption? Interesting facts about Edinburgh Zoo being bombed, increase in illegitimate births and VD (Doubled in the first 3 yrs of war). The strange thing was though that there was hardly any talk of being a soldier/fighting/being show more in the trenches.

"Simon Garfield has interwoven the diaries of four ordinary people as they struggle to cope with the day-to-day reality of life during World War II. Maggie, a perceptive but frustrated young writer living alone; Pam Ashford, a shipping clerk in Glasgow, Edward Stebbing, a 20-year-old discharged soldier living in Essex; and Ernest Van Someren, a research chemist in Hertfordshire."
http://www.massobs.org.uk/moo
7/10 show less