Product Description

'You know what they say about GIs and English girls' knickers,' ran the wartime joke, 'One Yank and they're off.' When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted - ciggies, sex, American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn't normally do - evil things, some of them - because she might be dead tomorrow, or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it's payback time. In her old folks' home, Gloria is forced to remember the real truth about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed, and love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12163 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Liz Jensen's new novel, War Crimes for the Home, has an unlikely heroine in Gloria Taylor, nee Winstanley, a game old bird who loves a good joke and is not afraid to call a spade a spade. Or a slut a slut.

After a minor stroke, Gloria finds herself in Sea View, an old people's home with a nice big television in the lounge, where, if you look carefully through the big picture window, you can see the sea. There's also a problem with Gloria's memory. She may have Alzheimer's, she may just have selective memory loss-- or if you talk to certain members of her family, she may not have anything wrong with her mind other than a bit of deliberate Gloria bolshiness.

Gloria's son Hank and his family come to visit regularly and one day, a woman called Jill turns up and starts asking funny questions. Gloria would rather everyone just left her alone. It's bad enough seeing that little kid sitting on her bed dripping pond weed and blood most nights. She really annoys Gloria.

Funny thing is Gloria can remember so much about the war, when she and her sister worked in a munitions factory in Bristol and she met Ron, or Raan, the GI who initiated her in the ways of the flesh. One Yank and they're off too true! She can remember her first date with Ron, going to see the Great Zedorro, a hypnotist who got her up on stage and made her feel like a rod of iron. She can remember, the full gory details, the day one of the factory girls lost her arm and half her shoulder. And the day the telegram arrived about her sister's boyfriend and how Marge went off to drive ambulances in London and Gloria got lumbered with an Irish evacuee and her snotty kids. She can even remember much later, after the war finally ended, working as a pro back in London, where her Dad had worked the meat down at Smithfield market.

But there's so much more poor old Gloria can't remember. Things her son and the Jill woman keep ranting on about. Why do they want her to rake over all that boring old stuff? Why can't they just let sleeping dogs lie? What does it all matter now?

In War Crimes for the Home, Liz Jensen has conjured up a fabulously inventive, gripping tale; a sort of modern twist on the whodunnit, or in this case, who-dunn-what, with a very real, very spiky protagonist. Gloria bristles with indignation, speaks her mind however harsh it sounds and loves to shock with her filthy jokes and even filthier suggestions--which means that War Crimes is not for the prudish. It is however a wonderfully original but painfully raw story of an era when people lived in constant fear, hearts ruled heads and everyone lived for the moment. And Gloria was no exception. Although sometimes the moment turned out to be the future and people have to learn to live with the consequences, however unpalatable they may be. --Carey Green

Review
'A dark story of the Home Front shot through with gung-ho humour' Daily Mail 'This versatile writer has given a twist of her own to the literature of the Second World War, and has produced a satisfying, moving and funny novel' Sunday Telegraph

Sunday Times
'A moving, hilarious exploration of a life lived in shadow; a story of one woman's - perhaps Everywoman's - war'

Customer Reviews

a gripping, absorbing, and very moving read.
This is the most strangely brilliant book I've read in ages. War Crimes for the Home tells a deeply poignant story of wartime love and loss on the home front, but it had me laughing too. There's real, earthy humour in there and it's peppered with jokes - most of them very tasteless and un-PC. But the real triumph is the heroine, Gloria (nee Winstanley), a crotchety old woman of `seventy-nine and three-quarters', who's holed up in a dismal old folks home called Sea View because she's losing her marbles. But just how many of them she has lost becomes less and less clear as the book progresses: is she mis-remembering things, inventing them, or deliberately forgetting? As a young woman, Gloria had a love affair with a handsome American airman called Ron, but it was to end in tears. To reveal just what kind of let-down Gloria had - and what crimes she committed to avenge her loss, and just how she had to re-write history to cope, would be to give away too much. But Jensen paces it just right, so that you're turning the pages fast and furious. She also debunks some of the myths of everyday stoicism and heroism in World War Two, and describes with a lot of relish the sort of lives ordinary women led in those savagely difficult times. But best of all, you come to admire and enjoy Gloria, despite the fact that she is in many ways a dislikeable, selfish monster, who does dislikeable, selfish, monstrous things. That's quite an achievement. This is a wonderfully haunting novel - and it tells the story of the war years in a totally new way.

Uncomfortably engrossing
If a novel is judged by its unputdownability, War Crimes would win first price. If it is judged by its quality of writing, it would also win first price. If there is a price for lifting the reader's spirit, it would not hit the top exactly. I found it often very disturbing, sometimes downright sinister, and almost throughout, unbearably sad.
The main character, Gloria, looks back on her war time experiences as a young woman. She has managed to supress the most horrific incidents, all described from the younger Gloria's point of view with chilling realism. The old Gloria is a thoroughly unlovable sort of person, which of course often happens with the beginnings of senility, and her gradual descent into dementia brings out her hidden urges. The writer knows her stuff here, it's most unpleasantly genuine. Gloria is spiteful, suspicious and even violent, and her seduction of an elderly gent in the old folk's home where she's been dumped, would make even the most liberal of reader's hair stand on end. I thought Liz Jensen is incredibly brave to tackle elderly sex with such gusto, but I guess it was the one aspect of the novel that I did not quite believe. It's incredible how deep our prejudices about it, I'm ashamed to say that I find geriatric sex-scenes disturbing and off-putting. Having said this, Gloria's lecherous behaviour is quite common in demented people.
Alongside her life during the war, the story of the elderly Gloria evolves as she has to contend with the ghosts and people in the flesh emerging from her murky past. Her two parallel stories merge towards the end and the reader comes away as from a dark cave into the sunlight.
I'm awed by Liz Jensen's sheer mastery of writing, and Gloria's voice is utterly brilliant. Jensen's grasp of the language and the attitudes of the era is both filmic and authentic, taking the reader back in time. The novel also has a lot of humour - I'd expect nothing less of the writer. Her other novels are, though quite different, similarly astonishing.

Different View of World War II
Put it this way, I wouldn't lend this to my nan. See, this book tells it like it was, no heroics, no stolen kisses at the NAAFI dance, just hard graft for women pitching in for the war effort, the horrible enevitability of war for the men and how they got through it. Not with powdered egg and Vera Lynn, but living life because it could be your last day on earth. Gloria is not your sweet little old lady. In fact, she is not a very likeable character at all (she swears, likes rude jokes and is trying to seduce a man at the nursing home!) but when you find out through her memories what she went through during wartime, you can sympathise with her. As I say, not your average wartime story but entertaining and thought provoking nonetheless.