Not with a bang but a whimper
Kate Grimond
LONDON 1945: LIFE IN THE DEBRIS OF WAR by Maureen Waller John Murray, .£20, pp. 512, ISBN 0719566002 Athoroughly battered London was forced to endure, at the beginning of 1945, not only a winter cold enough to freeze Big Ben and the ink in school inkpots, but also the nerve-shattering attacks of the new silent V2 bombs. Shortages of the necessities of life were as severe as ever. People were exhorted to use as little gas and electricity as possible, to put on extra clothes rather than turn on the electric fire, to 'go without toast for breakfast'. Coal was in short supply. Women would rush to the emergency coal dumps with their prams, gather what they could and then eke that out. but often found that going to the library or walking round the streets was warmer than staying at home. Buses were infrequent because of the lack of petrol and of rubber for tyres; to save fuel they would rest overnight in Hyde Park rather then return to their depot. To obtain what little food was available required long queuing. Clothes could only be bought with coupons and the allocation of coupons was minute (24 were to last six months and one coat might use up 18). Even paper was restricted; newspapers could only be a few pages long, books were pulped and the use of packaging strictly controlled. Almost every aspect of life was subject to enforceable regulation.
After six years of war, the undetectable, devastating V2s aimed at London which hit the ground at 3,000 mph were one weapon too many for exhausted Londoners. Morale was not helped by the fact that the government was unwilling to put out any news about them for fear it would help the Germans with their targets. The V ls which preceded the V2s and which gave some warning of their arrival had forced people back into the shelters in the underground stations. White lines were painted along the platforms four foot and eight foot from the track. Up until seven o'clock at night you could sleep behind the eight-foot line and then until 10.30 behind the four-foot line. After that, when the trains had stopped and the power was switched off, you could lie up to
the edge of the platform and even on the track. However, you needed a reservation ticket for your space.
It is details such as these on which Maureen Waller is so good in her account of 1945. She writes with a great affection for London and has assembled with skill an enormous jigsaw of statistics and reminiscences to produce a compelling picture of the life of the ordinary Londoner. Although she has drawn on the diaries of James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson, Chips Channon and others as well-heeled, she is more interested in the Balham or the Hackney dweller. And one of the points she makes is that during the war the government gained, by reason of needing people to be healthy and productive, more information about general working and living conditions than officialdom had ever had before. The long-term social effects of the destruction or damage of over a million homes become clear.
This extraordinary year includes not only the last months of war culminating in the joy and relief of YE Day, but also an election in July, the first for nine years, which was won not by the saviour Churchill, who entirely misjudged his election campaign, but by Labour with a landslide. The rest of the year, which saw the dropping of the atom bomb and the lacklustre V3 Day, was as hard as ever, and the first peacetime Christmas was one of despondency.
The difficulties and delays with demobilisation and the orchestrated return of 500,000 evacuees make some of Waller's best chapters. Although magazines were full of helpful articles on the lines of 'When your man comes home', the reality was often fraught. Couples who had married in haste at the outset of war only to be parted for several years had to get to know each other. The returning soldier expecting to be welcomed as a hero by his plump and acquiescent wife found a thin grey stranger exhausted by the privations, who wanted her sacrifices recognised. Affairs were uncovered and maybe there was another child in the house, not his. Women used to working, to earning, and to being in charge resented their husbands' attempts to usurp their new roles. And children who had forged close bonds with their mothers as they had withstood the dangers often felt displaced by their returning father.
For each child who had been evacuated it had to be established if their home address was still standing and if it was whether it was habitable. Sometimes the parents had vanished without a forwarding address. Even if all was in place, a dank, damaged home with a mother they didn't know could be hard for children returning from the country.
Nowadays, in a time of unprecedented comfort and plenty, how would we cope with a maximum of five inches of bath water once a week, with no personal use of a car, with wasting food a criminal offence (you could be fined for feeding the birds), with no long trousers for boys until the age of 12 (the banning of turn-ups was the last straw for men and caused an outcry in the House), with mashed parsnip flavoured to taste like banana, no oranges at all, and an onion a prized possession? Not without demur.
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