Britain At War

So I've been reading a book recently about the history of the Underground (yes, I realise that's incredibly lame, but it makes for great bedtime reading), and have particularly been reading about the role of the Underground in WWII, as people used to sleep in the Underground stations as bomb shelters. So then it was really interesting to go to the "Britain at War Experience" today, this little private museum of artifacts from WWII.

There were old posters from the "Women's Land Army", where women were encouraged to go to Scotland to help with the harvest (as all of the men were off fighting the war). And then you realise that instead of it being a one-time thing, where they went and lived on the farm for a few months, some of these women ended up serving in the "Women's Land Army" for 10 years!

Also what blew my mind were these posters, much like any instructional pamphlet you might read on "How To Operate Your Dishwasher", that were instead entitled, "How To Disarm A Magnesium Incendiary Device (Firebomb)". I mean, the whole thing just went about the process as though having firebombs land in your living room were an everyday occurrence, and should be approached with the same calm determination that you might approach a task such as removing slugs from your garden. The poster explained the process in a quite straightforward manner, although I had to laugh when "Do not panic" was only step 5 in the process! Yet if the poster is to be believed, most everyone in London was quite good at disarming firebombs by the end of the Blitz.

And the whole thing made me realise how much it must have SUCKED to live in London during the war. After all, every night you went to bed, not sure if you would wake up in the morning, and even if you did wake up, it was to bombed out streets, strict rationing, and all of the men you knew going off to war. After a while, when your house had been bombed, you were sleeping on smelly and dirty train platforms, you couldn't even turn on your lights at night, they'd taken down all of the street signs (to confuse the Germans in case they did invade), and your kids had been shipped off to the countryside where you didn't know if they were alive or dead, it must have been really tempting to just say, "I give up! Let the Germans invade! Because then at least maybe this nightmare will be over!!" (After all, you wonder if the Parisians didn't suffer quite as much under German occupation, but then as my mother points out, all of their Jews got rounded up and killed).

So of course what was also interesting is how many things were deemed "important to morale". So while cloth was rationed, hats were not, because "hats are important to morale". As though even with bombs raining down overhead, as long as you get to wear a new hat, you'll feel bright and sunny and cheerful. Apparently alcohol and cigarettes were not rationed for the same reason, and even lipstick was not rationed (although on that point, I will conceede that wearing lipstick often DOES make you feel better). So basically during the war we had a bunch of really skinny people wearing hats and lipstick and getting drunk.

Seriously, I would have given up. Gives me a whole new level of respect for the WWII British people, to have survived the Blitz. Kind of makes me understand the whole "stiff upper lip" concept and the ethos of not complaining, because at one time they definitely had it a lot, lot worse.