April 27, 2005
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Jerry Bauer/St. Martin’s Press
Maureen Waller
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | ‘LONDON 1945′
Amid the Rubble, After London Took It
By WILLIAM GRIMES
LONDON 1945
Life in the Debris of War
By Maureen Waller
Illustrated. 512 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $35.
In 1940, at the height of the blitz, Britain adopted a defiant slogan: “London can take it.” By 1945, the mood had changed. Germany’s V-2 rockets were wreaking horrific damage on the city and its suburbs. Years of rationing, scarcity and endless queues had taken a toll. In Croydon, a 57-year-old woman turned on the gas and left a note that read, “This war lasted too long for me; I can’t go on.” Despite the brave face, London could not take much more.
In her thoroughly engrossing “London 1945,” Maureen Waller describes a city on its last legs, hanging on desperately in the waning months of the war and looking forward, with a forlorn sort of hope, to a newer, better peacetime Britain.
Mingling statistical data with eyewitness accounts, she builds up a detailed picture of daily life in London that moves easily from the horrific (mangled flesh hanging from trees) to the mundane (the annoyance of having to wear short socks). Food, fashion and bombs all get equal treatment, for the very good reason that Londoners spent at least as much time worrying about how to get a lamb chop as they did about dodging the next rocket.
Ms. Waller, the author of “1700: Scenes From London Life” and “Ungrateful Daughters,” a study of the Glorious Revolution, begins with the bombs. The V-1, or doodlebug, had already claimed thousands of lives by late 1944, when it was supplanted by the even more frightening V-2, which approached its targets silently, prompting one London woman to call them “bombs with slippers on.”
Somehow, the idea of a pilotless bomb made the “second blitz” worse than the one at the beginning of the war. “You accepted a plane with a man in it,” one Londoner said. “You couldn’t accept something that was automatic. It was this that struck psychologically at us in such a way that it destroyed our nerves.”
It was not only the bombs that wore on nerves. Londoners also made do on food rations that Americans could not even begin to imagine. No American ever had to eat the infamous Woolton pie. Named after the minister of food, it was a vegetable pie thickened with oatmeal and commonly topped with potato. The average town dweller could expect to eat three eggs a month. Many women, who did without so that their children could eat more, took up smoking to cut their hunger pangs. Onions were so precious they were offered as raffle prizes. It came as a severe blow that after the war the food situation only grew worse.
Clothing allowances were just as severe. Trouser cuffs were banned, and young boys had to go on wearing shorts until age 12. Women could only dream of stockings, at least until the Americans began turning up in large numbers. As a makeshift, they painted their legs with gravy browning or cocoa. In February 1945, a small ray of fashion sunshine peeked through the clouds. The ban on heels higher than two inches was lifted. But shoes remained so scarce that they created a new phenomenon, the meta-queue, as women stood in line hoping to get the right to join a queue for shoes.
By and large, Ms. Waller writes, Londoners perceived the rationing system as fair and put up with it. That does not mean that the wartime economy was entirely on the up and up. With the police ranks thinned by war, and illegal guns proliferating (some sold by American G.I.’s), opportunity beckoned for a new breed of London criminal, the spiv, “distinct in his loud, garish clothing, his gait an imitation of the Chicago gangsters in Hollywood films.” In one of her more colorful chapters, Ms. Waller describes the exploits of the Elephant Boys of Bermondsey and the criminal gangs that flourished along the docks. Sometimes the heist would be jewelry, a smash and grab on Bond Street. But it might just as easily be a consignment of frozen turkeys. There was a white-hot market for anything and everything. “Sleek in their Savile Row suits, their molls dripping with furs and jewels, London’s underworld kings were having the time of their lives,” Ms. Waller writes.
It was not only the criminals who benefited from the war. Ms. Waller also finds a silver lining in the social changes brought about by it. Concern for civilian morale forced the government to pay attention to its citizens, and to listen to their fears and hopes in a way it never had before. Like the New Deal in the United States, wartime social-welfare programs in Britain laid the foundation for a different kind of postwar state, one in which government took a much more active role in such areas as health care and housing. Under pressure, class distinctions began to erode.
“The war had been a democratizing process,” Ms. Waller writes. “Rationing had succeeded in instilling in people’s minds the idea of fair shares for all: as Churchill’s daughter Sarah pointed out to him, the socialist policies that had been introduced in wartime had proved to be a force for good, not harm.”
After getting a taste of Churchill-sponsored socialism during the war, the British electorate responded by throwing their wartime leader out of office just months after V-E Day and handing the Labor Party a landslide victory. It was a vote for houses, food and jobs, for a new, more equitable Britain. But London in 1945 looked like a defeated city. Cool Britannia was a long way off.
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