What we did to them . . .

The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’.

The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. Scrutinising the home front, checking for evidence of low morale, accounting for that of high, measuring the effect of wartime regulations and deprivations, calculating the long-term impact of continuous bombardment and destruction on civilians, in sum, accounting for the implications of the phrase ‘total war’ to describe the second world war, has been an occupation for social historians of Britain since the late 1960s when Angus Calder’s magisterial account of life on the Home Front was published. Since then there has been a stream of accounts of various aspects, from evacuation, rationing, Civil Defence, crime, music, sport, wireless-listening, cinema-going — and of course frequent probes of the much evoked ‘Blitz spirit’.