The Saturday Morning Post (no. 12)

This week I review two books about my favorite year and place in history; London 1940. There is something, looking back in safety and never experiencing it, that I find so romantic about that summer of the first year of World War ll as viewed from London. It was an epic time, and the people who lived in that year knew it. Reading the accounts of that time, as I have, I think it is fair to say that they knew that whatever was to be, they were living history. Unless you care to believe in reincarnation, I have this sense of the time from reading the accounts of the people of that time. There are two SF books by Connie Willis, Blackout and All Clear set in Britain in this time period, and when I started reading the first, Blackout, I found that her picture of Britain in the summer of 1940 did not seem right to me. It is hard to describe, but I didn't recognize the Britain I had come to imagine in my mine, despite the fact that I could pick out scenes and incidents in her book that I had come across in my research as well. Despite high hopes for it, I DNF'ed it. 

The primary source for my London in that eventful summer is Colin Perry's Boy in the Blitz that I discovered nearly 50 years ago in the University of Wisconsin library, and made a photo copy of it years later, which I still have. I've read at least parts of it off and on over the years. In addition to Boy in the Blitz, I will be reviewing Virily Anderson's Spam Tomorrow, an account of her life during the entire war in and about London and Britain in ebook, another book from the Furrowed Middlebrow collection by Dean Street Press that I purchased.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Boy in the Blitz by Colin Perry  A

As I said in the intro this books is composed of the journal entries and letters of the 18 year old Colin Perry, who was working in London and living south of London in Tooting. It covers the period from Monday 17 June, 1940, soon after the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation, to Tuesday 5 November 1940 when he joins the Merchant Marine. On 17 November, he sailed on the H.M.T. Strathallan, destination unknown, as a ship's writer i.e. a clerk. He was later to become a ships' purser. In often daily entries he recounts "what was going on in my mind and of the sights I saw about me. It contains, therefore, no after-thoughts only the youthful, untrained outpouring of a proud and totally insignificant Londoner."  The fact that you are reading the words of a bright, articulate young man who didn't know what tomorrow would bring as he writes his entries, brings an immediacy to the story that can not be found in accounts written looking back on an event. 

As I said, this is an unique period. Britain stand alone facing the all-conquering German army stands 10 miles from Dover. A German invasion is expected almost daily. German airplanes are flying overhead, dropping bombs, sometimes apparently at random. Increasingly the sirens sound, becoming a nightly affair as does drone of German bombers overhead, the whine and thump of bombs landing near and far, while the the searchlight probe the sky and the antiaircraft guns rattle and roar. And still, every day, Londoners go off to work in the city, heading down to bomb shelters several times a day as the raiders fly overhead. London suffers damage, people are wounded and killed, and many made homeless, but on a scale that will be dwarfed latter in the war, in such actions like the fire bombing of Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as such, I find that this first year of the war has a sort of steampunk feel to it; a brief interlude where World War l evolved into World War ll proper. Distance dulls the death and terror, but the romance of a nation a city and a people standing up and defying the triumphant Nazis remains. This book, I think, captures that perfectly.

The ebook version adds a bit of biography, some photos, and outlines Colin's adventures at sea during the war, a welcome addition.

Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson  B

This is a memoir of the author's experiences in World War ll, published 11 years after the end of the war. The book draws on her extensive diaries of the time. It begins in 1939 with her marriage. At the time she was a member of F.A.N.Y., First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a female volunteer organization dating back to World War 1 that wore military uniforms, but were not part of the military. They performed a variety of functions, Verily being a driver for various military and medical vehicles.

She performed these duties until she suffered a long term illness, and was released for medical reasons (more or less) In 1940 she had her first child, and suffered serious after affects that had her laid up ill for many months.

The story goes on to tell of the hardships of life in Britain during the blitz, and the nearly six years of war. Since her husband worked for the government, they lived in London, off and on, depending on what they could find and afford, and the effects of the constant bombing on their life, often taking in other mothers to share expenses. 

Anderson is an entertaining writer and tells an interesting story of her struggles of often ill health, raising a family, and getting by with a war raging, often overhead. It introduces many people, from her siblings, cousins, to American soldiers training in England for D Day. If you have any interest in World War 11 on the British home front, it is an authentic window into that world, written not long after the events described.