Something a little bit different!

One of my "geek things" is the 1940's, or to be more specific, Britain's Home Front during World War II - the people left at home while the men went off to fight the war and all of the social history that comes with it. I've been asked why this era holds a particular fascination for me many a time, and considering that I'm so interested in it, I find the question strangely difficult to answer.

All I know is that I used to ask my grandparents about the war from a very young age (and listened to the same stories intently over and over), and I used to beg to be taken to the Imperial War museum for a day out... some of you will probably find this all very strange, but as I said, it's my "geek thing", and we all have at least one!

It is without doubt the fashions and hairstyles that I love - it was a time when civillian ladies dressed as ladies and somehow managed to look endlessly elegant, even during the tight grip of rationing when women were forced to improvise the most basic of pre-war necessities. Take tea stained legs complete with eye pencil drawn up the back of legs to give the illusion of silk stockings for example... women found ways around Austerity Britain to look and feel good.

 

Perhaps it's the sense of community that interests me, with people honestly caring for their neighbours and rallying round to help one another? Perhaps it's nostalgia for a time when (for the most part) people had respect for each other and for other people's belongings. A time when love letters were written and posted every day. When inner-city residents went to bed either in a waterlogged shelter in the back garden or under a reinforced kitchen table. Women entered the workforce and took over jobs previously taken by the fighting men and nothing was ever the same again.

 

I suspect it's simply because I cannot imagine living through the endless rationing, air-raids, gas masks, blackout, separation and sorrow. Whole schools of children marching to railway stations to be evacuated with teachers to goodness-knows-where for goodness-knows-how-long.... it's difficult to appreciate that this all happened relatively recently, in living memory. A world so far removed from 2010 and all of our luxuries, that I find it all totally fascinating.

 

I'm aware that we tend to look back on the era with rose tinted spectacles. In reality, nobody was perfect and it wasn't all as cosy as the propaganda liked us all to think. Of course there were spivs out to make a fast shilling or ten, bombsite looters, homelessness and poverty, housewives obtaining extra rations "under the counter", ill-treated evacuees, illegitimate babies, the dreaded telegram boy knocking on the door...

 

But in spite of all that people got on with everyday life in spite of the extraordinary circumstances that they found themselves in, and made sure that they lived for the moment and made the best of life.

 

And most, looking back, say that in spite of the hardship and sadness, those days were the happiest that they can remember....

Anyway, it's still my geek thing and I thought I'd indulge myself and share it with you. Normal blog service will resume shortly :)

xx

Photos from google images and hshf.co.uk (a really good website to start at if this sort of thing interests you!)