Tag: Women’s choices in 1940

Courage for the Home Front Girls by Susanna Bavin – a wartime story of friendship in the challenges of wartime Manchester

June 12, 2024

Courage for the Home Front Girls by Susanna Bavin

This is a book about the courage of people in wartime, the will to pull together and to survive the most challenging of circumstances. It is also about the pressures on young women of all types to behave in certain ways. Not that this is a sad book – it is also a celebration of true friendship in the face of adversity, and how that can overcome so many problems. This is the second engaging novel in an excellent new series by Susanna – reflecting her usual skilful blending of thorough research with a gripping narrative. This is the sort of novel that kept me reading avidly to the end as I became fully engaged with the characters and their situation. While Sally and Betty appeared in the first novel, this book could be read as a stand alone if only because it features Lorna, a completely new character from a very different background, and Susanna also carefully covers enough of a backstory to help a new reader. Lorna’s story is very different from anything I have seen in wartime novels, but probably does reflect the nature of the press at the time. The element that comes through is that people, especially the main characters in this novel, must stand together to meet the challenges that war on the Home Front brings, as well as the twists and turns of true romance. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to read and review this enjoyable book.

Sally and Betty have met various challenges in their early working relationship and now friendship. Working at a salvage yard is not a glamorous job, but is essential to the war effort in Manchester, where the novel is based. The discarded items, including paper and metal, can be reused and made into munitions, and the girls have to collect and sort many types of waste, even bones from cooking. A new element of their work is introduced when the shy and kind Samuel appears who is in charge of sorting donated books for libraries, troops and others in need of reading matter. Betty spends time helping sort out boxes of books in his bookshop, but her interest is seized by  the handsome and smooth talking Eddie. Meanwhile Sally must continue to deal with the odious and bossy Mrs Lockwood who has inflated ideas of her own importance.  

Lorna is the new character who is introduced in this book from a very different background and series of events which bring her to be working in the salvage yard. She comes from a very wealthy background, but her father still wants to use her to increase his social standing and position. She feels her situation very deeply, but when the worse happens she finds herself in need of a safe and discreet place. The work and setting of the yard comes as a shock, and she has to discover much about herself and the nature of true friendship in order to settle.

This is a powerful and well written book which has much to say about the sort of life people had to live in wartime outside London. As always, the research is impeccable, but is never allowed to slow the narrative which moves along at impressive pace. The feelings of the young women, especially Betty, are very well captured, as well as the small points of clothing, food and the other details which really bring this book alive and give real depth. I recommend this as a strong wartime novel focusing on the lives of women at the time, and a really good read.   

The Midnight News by Jo Baker – a novel of a young woman in upheaval in 1940 and the London Blitz

September 6, 2023

The Midnight News by Jo Baker

This is a powerful and intense novel set in the London Blitz of the Second World War. It is enthralling, atmospheric and a little disturbing. It is narrated mainly through the point of view of Charlotte Richmond, a twenty-year-old woman with a disturbed past in 1940, when she has made a break for relative freedom in a city that is rapidly becoming accustomed to nightly bombing which is a total upheaval for many of the people left, a profound upheaval mirrored in the mind of Charlotte. As a reader I found this an unsettling, brilliantly written book, which often made me stop and admire the power of the writing.

Early in the novel the first raid is likened to an unexpected sound on the streets of London. “She can also hear a waterfall, and there are no waterfalls round here.” Charlotte does not tell her own story, but it follows her progress, her confusion and bafflement of what is happening. It explores the nature of friendship, of life experience, of contrasting family situations. Charlotte’s silent thoughts, of how despite a relatively wealthy background she is forced to count out her money that she earns for “essential war work”, is revealing of how she really lives. She finds a welcome in a boarding house, in sharp contrast to a background she has rejected, which may have rejected her. When a tragedy rocks her life, when she finds her whole view of life upset by how what is happening to everyone seems particularly awful for her, she feels threatened on every front. Her thoughts become dominated by her friends in several ways, even her remarkable godmother seems unusually preoccupied. Her typing job seems pointless, despite her being told that every piece of information is vital.

In a London being reformed on a nightly basis, where nothing is certain, Charlotte becomes convinced that she is being watched, pursued from and by a shadow man. Terrified of what is happening around her, to her, she makes decisions, attempts to make connections, but is left distressed. The only hope seems to be with a young man who she sees feeding the birds, a habit which is frowned on in a time of increasing food shortages. Tom’s gentle, non-threatening actions provide an alternative for Charlotte as she desperately seeks to silence the voices, the disturbance she feels. Tom is the only other character given his own story in the book; hesitant but supported by his family, challenged in many ways, permanently wondering.

This is a novel that twists and turns, with surprises at every turn, with challenges for every character, with real pain on many levels. It contains so many ideas, of the nature of family, of friends, of the truth in a time of upheaval in so many ways. For me it had echoes of Sarah Waters’ “Nightwatch”, where expectations are overturned, where desperate young women try to exist in a world completely changed overnight. This is a painfully honest book, with a strong inner dynamic of a disturbed and disturbing character and surprising twists and turns throughout. I really recommend it as an enthralling and significant novel of women’s experiences of the Second World War in all the messiness and unpredictability.