What did you do in the war, Mummy?

By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy.

By tradition, ‘What did you do in the war?’ is a question children address to Daddy, not to Mummy. In this ambitious, humane and absorbing book Virginia Nicholson moves Mummy firmly to the centre of the stage as she chronicles, largely in their own words, the lives of British women during the second world war. It is dedicated to one of them, her own mother, Anne Popham, later Anne Olivier Bell, who as a young woman suffered agonising wartime loss but went on to marry and become one of the great editors of her time through her work on the diaries of her husband’s aunt (and Nicholson’s great-aunt) Virginia Woolf. Nicholson sees her as typical. ‘Along with an entire generation she awoke to her own post-war potential.’