Voices from the Home Front

This engaging history shows that civilian life can sometimes be as dramatic as combat. Journalist Goodall, author of A Question of Conscience, culls excerpts from letters and diaries of the period, fleshing them out with her own commentary. Her subjects cope with wartime shortages and rationing, the blitz and separation from loved ones as soldiers depart overseas and London's children are evacuated to the safety of the countryside. They experienced an often surreal mixture of chaos, death and normality; people enjoyed both conviviality and sing-alongs in the bomb shelter and reveled in theater, nightlife, weddings and christenings while keeping an ear cocked for the air-raid siren. The book is mainly a story of women without men. Goodall explores their travails in maintaining a semblance of domesticity, pining for absent husbands and sweethearts, dreading the arrival of ominous telegrams and wondering how to explain embarrassingly timed pregnancies. These excerpts also describe the electrifying arrival of American GIs, whose ebullience (and free-spending habits) swept many a British lass off her feet. The recruitment of women into the war effort, and the consequent broadening of social horizons, is also a major theme, as when two prim, middle-class teashop proprietresses go to work as machinists in a munitions factory and are soon transformed into enthusiastic proletarians and trade-union militants. Their voices register plenty of British pluck and stiff upper lip--""the very worst that can happen is death, which is probably better than life,"" writes one woman to her fiance--but plenty of pathos comes through as well. B&W photos.