One of the things that has always drawn me to write historical novels is the incredible wealth of stories waiting for curious readers to discover. I’ve written extensively about some of the women of history I’ve learned about while researching my books, and while I’m on maternity leave I thought I’d dust off some of these pieces from my archives to share with you.
World War 2 wasn’t only fought on the battlefields of Europe but on the Home Front, and the stories of those who stayed behind in Britain live on in vivid detail thanks to an extraordinary project that let people tell their own stories.
Researching The Whispers of War
When I sat down to write my second historical novel, The Whispers of War, I knew that I wanted the story to feel very grounded in the day-to-day detail of every day life in London during the outset of World War 2.
The book follows three friends: Marie, a German expat working as an assistant to a university professor; Nora, an erstwhile socialite working the Home Office’s Air Raid Precautions Department; and Hazel, a matchmaker to London’s singles who is struggling with her own domestic troubles. As the war ramps up, Marie finds herself first being forced to first register as an “enemy alien” and then face the possibility that she and her extended family could find themselves interned in a camp for the duration of the war.
As much as I wanted the friendship between the three friends to feel real, I also wanted their London to be grounded in detail. I never want to write a book that feels as though it starts with a date line (in this case August 25, 1939) and then floats disconnected from what is happening in the larger world at that time. Essentially, I wasn’t satisfied with letting a few mentions of the blackout and barrage balloons serve as scene setting for this book. I knew that I needed to find the rich detail that could make the story come to life.
A great deal of the research as a historical novelist does often goes unseen. Instead, it creates a sort of underpinning or foundation on which a story can unfold and grip readers. To build that foundation for The Whispers of War, I decided to turn to the Mass Observation diaries.
What was Mass Observation?
Mass Observation was founded in January 1937 as an “anthropology of ourselves” meant to record British life across every level of class and location. The organizers did this in two ways. The first was by recruiting a team of official observers tasked with going into public situations to record people’s behavior. The second, however, was far more interesting.
The organizers invited hundreds of volunteers to fill out a series of questionnaires and make regular diary entries. The diarists wrote about the intimate, sometimes mundane details of their lives as well as their thoughts and feelings about the world around them.
“It is the personal accounts that will always fascinate us most,” said Simon Garfield, editor of the book We Are At War: The Remarkable Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times which used the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex to follow five diarists throughout the early years of World War 2.
How much of their lives those who participated in Mass Observation left behind varies wildly. Some wrote regularly, while others only kept up their entries for a few weeks. Put together, the result is an intimate portrait of British life that is also completely individual.
On the brink of war
The founders of Mass Observation couldn’t have known when they started the project that they’d soon be uniquely positioned to capture the hopes and fears of a nation going through incredible crisis. By the end of the summer of 1939, however, it was clear that Britain was on the brink of war with Germany.
With hindsight, it’s surprising that anyone though Hitler might actually back down and withdraw his troops from Poland after the September 1, 1939, invasion that sparked declarations of war in Britain and across Europe. Yet on September 3, 1939, Tilly Rice wrote, “I myself have felt all along that war would be possibly be averted at the last moment...I haven’t felt swayed by the alternate waves of pessimism and optimism that affect those around me.”
Rice, who would eventually have to evacuate her home in Surrey for Cornwall, wrote again after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s radio announcement announcing that Britain was at war. She writes that the national anthem followed Chamberlain, and her family all sat in silence before retreating to their own rooms, no doubt stunned at the news.
Ellen Porter, an evacuation officer based in London, wrote about an air raid siren that sounded over the capitol day day of the declaration: “I go to the basement, where I have previously been working with four others. Some of us try on our gas masks and adjust straps...We sit there keeping perhaps rather self-consciously calm and cheerful.”
Life during the Phoney War
Despite the initial efforts to prepare Britain for attack, the period until spring of 1940 has become known as the “Phoney War” because little seemed to happen before Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Europe. It is no surprise then that the diarists spend time detail domestic matters. We learn about the rules and regulations forcing people to carry their gas masks with them everywhere—and how many adults began to leave them behind when the feared Luftwaffe bombers didn’t immediately appear. Some diarists wrote about the difficulties of making their way in the dark of the blackout, a ban on all light pollution to try to deter those elusive air raids.
Christopher Tomlin, a paper salesman from Lancashire, wrote about the government’s short-lived attempts to shut down movie theaters at the beginning of the war. “BOREDOM!” he writes in all capitals. (This is the same man who, on April 8, 1940, wrote “Hooray, the war begins at last!” about the British navy’s attempts to push back German ships off the coast of Norway.)
Taken together, Mass Observation gives a good sense of the pendulum of public opinion. If one were to delve into the archive, held by the University of Sussex, it would be possible to track the fortunes of Britain throughout the war.
The Blitz changes everything
After a period of seeming inaction, the Blitz would change everything.
“Raids on London every night. Homes destroyed, death to hundreds. The city in flames.” —Maggie Joy Blunt
When Germany launched the months-long bombing campaign on London and other cities that would stretch from September 1940 into 1941, the freelance writer from Slough Maggie Joy Blunt wrote, “Raids on London every night. Homes destroyed, death to hundreds. The city in flames.” Yet she adds, “There is something in the Britisher when his life, his heritage or whatever is threatened which refuses to be beaten, or perhaps it’s the refusal to accept the idea of defeat.”
It was this attitude that carried people through six long years of war until Victory in Europe—or V-E—Day on May 8, 1945. With the war officially over, one diarist recorded seeing signs in shop windows advertising goods like batteries that had become particularly hard to come by during the war, and the ration on petrol began to ease.
However, some like George Taylor, an accountant in Sheffield, remained skeptical. On May 9, 1945, one day after the war officially ended, he took down his blackout curtains and packed them away in the loft “ready for the next war.
“If we do leave this house before then, they will go along with the fixtures,” Taylor wrote. “I hope, however, that we shall be able to forget their existence.”
My book The Whispers of War, a story of friendship and loyalty on the British Home Front, is available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.