Product Description

In "Private Battles", award-winning writer Simon Garfield has skilfully interwoven the diaries of four ordinary people as they struggle to cope with the day-to-day reality of life during the Second World War. Their voices combine to create one of the most compelling and refreshing takes on the period ever published. Meet Maggie Joy Blunt, a perceptive but frustrated young writer living alone near Slough. Pam Ashford, a shipping clerk in Glasgow who writes of office life as if it were an episode of The Archers. Edward Stebbing, a 20-year-old discharged soldier living with a stern landlady in Essex. And Ernest Van Someren, a research chemist in Hertfordshire, father of two children and proposer of several unique scientific ways to beat the Nazis. Perhaps here, for the first time, is the true story of how the ordinary people of Britain won the Second World War. And of how we almost didn't.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26413 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

About the Author
Simon Garfield is an award-winning feature writer on the Observer, and the author of eight books, including Our Hidden Lives, We Are At War, Mauve, The Wrestling, The Nation's Favourite and The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS. Our Hidden Lives, his first collection of Mass Observation diaries, became a Sunday Times bestseller and BBC drama starring Richard Briers and Sarah Parrish.

Customer Reviews

Interesting Diarists
Being a humble diarist myself, I am always fascinated by books of this genre and this is a very good one.

It gives us an insight into the lives of five very different people who kept diaries in the immediate post World War Two era. They were part of the Mass Observation project which was set up to record the lives of ordinary people in Britain. Simon Garfield weaves the five lives together.

The people featured never met, but they all lived through the same times of uncertainty when rationing continued despite the fact the war had ended. The great thing about these diaries is how they weave together discussion on national and international topics with the details of mundane private lives. By approaching the subject matter in date order it is sometimes difficult to remember previous comments made by the diarists. To achieve this I would have to go back again and read the entries from individuals in order rather than inter-twining them as the author does. That is only a small criticism. Garfield had to decide whether to use chronological or personal order and I guess he has chosen the most interesting option so that you don't get bored with a specific character.

I particularly liked Herbert Brush, the London pensioner, who showed a wit rather lacking in some of the others and Herbert wrote diabolical poetry. We get wonderful entries such as "I paid my usual visit to my bank manager for him to certify that I am still alive. I gave him a couple of large tomatoes." Dear old Herbert is completely off the wall at times: "I walked along Charing Cross Road to see whether I could find a book giving prime numbers up to five million or so... but every bookseller said No without any hesitation. Even Foyles could not help me." Later on he advocates a new calendar which begins each month on the same day of the week!

The book brilliantly evokes the times as you are taken into the lives of the five people. I detested the gay antiques dealer B Charles who came out as a self opinionated bore with dangerous views. At one point he says: "I often think that the Germans deserved to win the war. It is a constant source of amazement to me how France has got away with it for so long. A treacherous false nation.... It would be a good thing, in a great many ways, if the whole of France could be swallowed up in an earthquake, along with the entire population! They are no good."

Charles also turns on the Americans and British and seems throughout to be a Nazi sympathiser: "Goering was a very brave man and I am very glad indeed to learn that all the Nazis died very bravely. In 25 years time they will be heroes and martyrs." How wrong could he be!

Elsewhere there is plenty of anti government sentiment with Maggie Blunt from Slough, George Taylor, an accountant from Sheffield and Edie Rutherford, a South African housewife from Sheffield all pitching in.

The book is hugely informative, good fun and very illuminating about a period in our history that has often been ignored. I can thoroughly recommend it.

Fascinating insights
Sussex University holds the Mass Observation archive, survey responses and diaries submitted by civilians during the late 1930s and 1940s in particular. Simon Garfield has selected the diaries of four people to provide different perspectives on the events of 1940 to 1945. (His two other books cover 1939-40 and 1945-1948).
The fascination is the fresh insights to the mood and pre-occupations of civilians at the time, with the crucial element that they were submitted within days or weeks of having been written and hence do not benefit from the wisdom of hindsight. Some of the details are fairly predictable such as diet, morale, etc. It's also interesting to judge some of the rumours reported with the benefits of hindsight: most of them are false. There are surprises, not all of them pleasant: all the writers report hearing anti-Semitic attitudes, and few seem to challenge them - bearing in mind thousands of Jewish people were dying each day at the hands of the Nazis this seems deeply shocking from today's perspective.
Equally important, though, is the insight you have into the four diarists as people. Of course, you can overstate this: each of them knew they were writing for external consumption and possibly `for posterity' but the diaries have an unselfconscious style that suggests that over five years it is hard to maintain an image at odds with reality. However, this does mean your enjoyment of the book will be partly determined by whether you warm to the diarists or not.
Four people's diaries were included. For me, the star is Pam Ashford, an educated woman working as a secretary in a shipping company. Her experience covers the other people in her office, shopping for her brother and mother, as well as a social life. Maggie Joy Blunt, a single woman (a middle-class professional in today's terms), is also interesting but writes less often and is ground down somewhat by the demands of a job, shopping and keeping her house. The two men in the book were less interesting to me. Edward Stebbing was a soldier but was invalided out for unspecified reasons; he grows up noticeably in the course of the book. Ernest van Someren works in an engineering company in Hertfordshire and is the only one of the four to be married and with a family. The war seems to have almost no impact on him and I admit I became irritated that he seemed so detached from it.
This raises the question of the selection Simon Garfield made, both in terms of diarists and material. He explains some of his choices in the Introduction, and explains he wanted a geographical and social spread as well as being restricted to people who kept regular diaries throughout the period. Without having access to the archive (which is not freely available online) it is impossible to judge the choices he made. Were there other diarists who could have been more interesting? What did he edit out from the diarists he did select?
Overall, this is thoroughly recommended reading, having said which I think the length of period covered and limited range of diarists (and the people) chosen make it the weakest trilogy.

war diary
Enjoyed reading the entries. Selection biased towards middle class, anti-war participants. Would have liked more balanced selection.