Their accounts can be sharp, cynical, angry, poignant, and funny with a dour British humour: one of my favourite parts features an elderly gentleman out walking with his daughter in rural Surrey. The four diarists speculate about the imminent German invasion, experience the Blitz, curse both Chamberlain and Churchill, express despondency or rage at the progres of the war, but also engage in mundane activities like shopping, housework, social life, and work. None of the diarists here are as compelling and likeable as Nella Last, but I find it fascinating reading accounts of everyday life and opinions during the war, which for obvious reasons are recounted completely without hindsight.

This volume covers 1939-41 and includes Maggie Joy Blunt, a perceptive young woman who featured in Hidden Lives as well. I liked Simon Garfield's Our Hidden Lives, covering the years immediately after World War II, and absolutely loved Nella Last's War, one of the best books I read last year. I really enjoy these selections from Mass Observation diaries. And also the fact that these personal diaries aren't trying to put on a brave front or show 'the spirit of the Blitz' or anything like that.Įven though I didn't think this book was as unputdownable as it's predecessor it was still mightily interesting and I'll be on the lookout for the third volume which takes in the later years of the war. This probably shouldn't surprise me but it did and I guess it comes from the difference between reading contemporary observations and reading fiction set in the war years written with the hindsight that we would win. The thing that really surprised me was how little certainty there was that we would win the war they were genuinely waiting for Hitler to invade Britain. There's a different set of diarists-only one of the original five is featured here-and they didn't seem to be such interesting characters. I didn't find the them as compelling as the ones from after the war. The second volume of these war diaries goes back to the beginning of the Second World War.

We Are At War by Simon Garfield