The daily round, the common task
Kate Grimond
OUR HIDDEN LIVES: THE EVERYDAY DIARIES OF A FORGOTTEN BRITAIN, 1945-48 by Simon Garfield Ebuty Press, 119.99, pp. 560, ISBN 0091896959 t 116.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 0 pinion polls, it could be said, are the descendants of Mass Observation. This was a nonacademic social survey started in 1936 by three people. Tom Harrisson was an anthropologist who had turned his attention from the tribes of the South Pacific to the habits of the people at home. He employed investigators to observe the citizens of Bolton as they went about their daily business. Charles Madge, a radical poet, and Humphrey Jennings, the filmmaker, at about the same time and unknown to Harrisson were planning a scientific survey of ordinary people's lives. This was to be conducted by means of sending out detailed questionnaires to a host of volunteers about their habits and possessions, their attitudes and opinions. Recognising a similarity of purpose, the three joined forces and named the enterprise Mass Observation.
When war broke out the volunteers were asked to keep monthly diaries with details of such things as gas masks and bomb shelters and to note down their reactions to events, `keeping political discussion to a minimum'. Many did so and the millions of words so produced are now well-archived at Sussex University and provide valuable material for researchers of the second world war. Most of the diaries stopped after the war.
A few carried on. Simon Garfield has collected the writings of five of the indefatigable recorders, covering the period from 1945 to 1948, from VE Day to the dawn of the welfare state. The book consists of fullish, unannotated extracts from the diaries of a South African-born wife of a timber merchant in Sheffield, an accountant also from Sheffield, a retired electrical engineer from south London, a gay English antique dealer living in Edinburgh and a well-educated lonely woman in Burnham Beeches.
The first, Eche, holds strong left-wing opinions. The second, the accountant, is awfully dull; a dogged supporter of the Workers' Educational Association, he gives accounts of its meetings to which, typically, 500 are invited but only 13 attend which are Pooterish in the extreme. 'We spent an interesting evening watching milk bottles and jam jars being made,' he writes of one WEA outing. Herbert Brush, the engineer, is much taken with his allotment and the gay antique dealer borders on the sinister with his offers of a course in 'personality development' to the young men he meets. Maggie Joy, the single woman, struggling to make ends meet, fond of her cats and frequently run down, reminds one of a character from the novels of Barbara Pyrn.
The difficulty is that none of the diarists is very interesting and none, with the possible exception of Maggie Joy, has any talent for description or any fetching turn of phrase. The nuggets (`There was a to-do in the tripe queue this morning', 'When I went out to do the shopping, I saw a woman in trousers') are few and far between. And it is without question one of the most cheerless periods in the past century, with shortages of food and fuel and other necessities, a winter (1947) of staggering cold and the dropping of the atomic bomb. All the contributors are to a greater or lesser extent resentful, especially of the Americans and their abundance of food.
In 1946 cakes are for sale for the first time in six years, and bananas begin to arrive; Maggie Joy notices that some children are frightened of them. '1 suppose that adults have been talking about them so much that the children have the idea there is something mysterious or magical about them: Edie describes entertaining friends:
had a tin of Heinz tomato soup so we had that, lengthened with stock from pressure cooker last Sunday. Then cold beef from tin sent me from Durban, with salads. Then the tin of peaches we got on ration some weeks back, with jelly from my sister and mock cream. All very good and self highly praised.
The breaking down of the wireless in the house ('something amiss with a valve') is a severe blow, and mending is the order of the day. 'Actually had to do more handkerchief darning last night. And as for darning over darning on Husband's socks ... ugh', writes Edie while Maggie Joy complains: 'So sick of making do.' Many are smokers and admit to scrounging for Woodbines. Most are Labour supporters and ambivalent about the monarchy, and several express astonishingly anti-Semitic sentiments. None, it seems, have children and few use a car.
Dull as most of the writing is and unsympathetic as some of the writers are, the reader does, in the same way as when watching Big Brother, come to respond to each character and become familiar with the minutiae of his or her life. And yet this book feels like a missed opportunity; wonderful material but somehow not assembled in the most effective way. The following quotation gives a succinct flavour: 'Last night as we listened to the Brains Trust, sewed patches on Husband's underwear.' If you are happy to read a lot more in that vein, then this is the book for you.
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