A Sense of Deja Vu?

Echoes of World War 2

I spoke to an elderly friend of my mother’s the other day. Betty had lived in Mitcham, near London, during world war two. She survived the Blitz, despite her shopkeeper father keeping his excess stock of fireworks under her bed for the duration. ‘How does the threat of the corona virus compare with your experience of the war,’ I asked her. She thought for a bit. ‘This is worse,’ she said. ‘In the war we knew who the enemy was.’ So chilling.

But people are, inevitably, labelling our fight against Covid -19 a ‘war.’ For those of us who write historical fiction, particularly novels set in World War Two, there are inevitably comparisons to be made. My father was in the R.A.F in the war, landing in Normandy a few days after D day. He was a photographer in 16 Squadron and I still have all his aerial photographs of bomb damage in the UK and Germany. My mother, a little younger than him, was at school near Croydon and recalls being told off by her teacher for staying in the playground to watch the ‘dog fights’ overhead, when she should have gone inside. So with both parents living through those times, I suppose that’s why I feel drawn to writing about them. To some extent my childhood was shaped by my parents’ experiences. Although they didn’t speak much about the war, it was evident in their frugal habits: my mother would never throw away wrapping paper; instead she would iron it and fold it away. She would always cut washing up liquid bottles in half to access the last few drops, and plastic bags were washed and hung on the washing line to dry before being reused. So when I came to research my novels, it didn’t take much imagination to imagine how women reacted to wartime restrictions. Pamela in ‘The Child on Platform One’ learns to make Lord Woolton pie, a concoction of pastry and vegetables flavoured with marmite, and Kathleen in ‘The Oceans Between Us’ stains her legs with gravy browning (stockings were hard to come by) before using the remainder for dinner!

We’ve been in self-isolation for the past two weeks, having potentially come across people with the virus on holiday (we’re fine, thankfully) so I have been trying to be creative with food whilst I can’t go to the shops. Thank goodness for all those blackberries I picked and froze last autumn – and I can make soup out of pretty much anything. Kathleen and Pamela would be impressed.

I don’t know whether this recent fear has caused people to want to read light, happy novels or ones set in harrowing times – but if you want to read about resourceful women in times of national hardship, I hope mine might appeal.