Tag Archives: Second World War

Ice Cream, Gas Masks and God – the perfect summer read

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Ice Cream, Gas Masks and God
A young girl grows up in the war years

By Joyce M Lovely

PUBLICATION DATE: 22 June 2015
Mereo Books www.mereobooks.com

Gasmasks and God cover CS 19.5mm_Layout 103

A funny, touching and heart-warming portrait of war time and beyond, Ice Cream, Gas Masks and God is the author’s trip down memory lane to 1940s Liverpool, where early reminiscences include not just the hated gas mask, but also the regular night time spells in the air raid shelter as the bombs fell.

A beautifully drawn portrait of the place and its people, from Calder High School Joyce went on to work at the Eagle Star Insurance Company and the office of the Dunlop Rubber Factory. Missing out on being one of the first to see The Beatles perform at the Cavern Club (because she didn’t fancy the sound of them from her sister’s description!), she moved to London to study Nursing at St Bartholomew’s. Marriage took her on to the Shetland Islands – where life as a parson’s wife meant that prayer was sometimes relied upon to provide dinner – and then to the West Riding of Yorkshire, before finally settling in Maine, USA.

A natural storyteller, Joyce’s recollections of people, places and events are effortlessly recounted. From the exotic neighbour who had been in the German Resistance (but whose priority was now pudding) to her splendid Spirella Corsetier grandmother, Ice Cream, Gas Masks and God is a gentle, fascinating and humorous personal history, rich in colour and detail.

Gloriously nostalgic and beautifully written, this is the perfect summer read.

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Sneak preview extracts

“Jerry made one heck of a mess here, didn’t he?” said Dad. “And all my best willow pattern china has been smashed” Mum sniffed, trying not to cry again. Dad put his arm around her. “Don’t worry, love. We’ll get through this.” And we did, even though I heard a few days later that eight people had been killed in their air-raid shelters, along with many others, including some in the public shelters. Much later I learned that 2000 Liverpudlians had been killed in just that week, with thousands more injured and homeless.

I sat stunned. First I felt the pricking of tears, and then I began to laugh. There lay my ancient, despised, childhood World War II gasmask. It rested there staring at me eerily, the eyepiece still displaying the   oval sickly-brown cellophane, which wasn’t even cracked. I sat back. My eyes closed, and the memories streamed back…

I remember vividly growing up in Liverpool, amidst air raids, bombs and gasmasks. My story is from a childhood perspective, leaving the grown-ups to worry about battles and shortages. We observed strict morals as a teenager in the fifties, yet still had boyfriends, stolen kisses and fun. This memoir concludes with my marriage to a minister and our adventures in the distant Shetland Islands. Here I experienced the islanders’ expectations of ‘yon minister’s wife’ often resulting in unexpected humorous consequences…

Humour, tenacity, sharing and resourcefulness, especially by the women on the home front, kept life normal for us children. We laughed, cried, hoped and dreamed, but we never asked for more than what we knew was around us.

About the author

Born in Liverpool, Joyce M Lovely now lives in Maine, USA. She has had numerous articles and stories published in magazines and periodicals and she is a member of a writing group. Joyce worked in education for many years, as a teacher and then later in administration, working with teachers and leading workshops.

Steaming To Victory: How Britain’s Railway Won The War Michael Williams Book Review

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steamingtovictorybookreview My grandfather was a railway man for years. It left him with a lifelong love of the railway. He was also in the RAF during World War II, which veers off topic from this book, although the obvious love and respect Michael Williams has for the railwaymen and women who won the war for Britain is obvious on every page.

This books is riveting and well researched. It is a compelling book that is easy to read, full of information and yet also manages to give a brilliant overall of the war and it’s lasting effect on the people who lived through it. Another thing I learned from this book is that in 1936 a train raced from London to Glasgow in less than six hours, seventy-eight years later, it takes just under five and costs an extortionate amount of money. This book harked back to an amazing period for trains and the railway, it is sadly a long-forgotten period for the British railway industry, let’s hope it can become great again.

In the seven decades since the darkest moments of the Second World War it seems every tenebrous corner of the conflict has been laid bare, prodded and examined from every perspective of military and social history.

But there is a story that has hitherto been largely overlooked. It is a tale of quiet heroism, a story of ordinary people who fought, with enormous self-sacrifice, not with tanks and guns, but with elbow grease and determination. It is the story of the British railways and, above all, the extraordinary men and women who kept them running from 1939 to 1945.

Churchill himself certainly did not underestimate their importance to the wartime story when, in 1943, he praised ‘the unwavering courage and constant resourcefulness of railwaymen of all ranks in contributing so largely towards the final victory.’

And what a story it is.

The railway system during the Second World War was the lifeline of the nation, replacing vulnerable road transport and merchant shipping. The railways mobilised troops, transported munitions, evacuated children from cities and kept vital food supplies moving where other forms of transport failed. Railwaymen and women performed outstanding acts of heroism. Nearly 400 workers were killed at their posts and another 2,400 injured in the line of duty. Another 3,500 railwaymen and women died in action. The trains themselves played just as vital a role. The famous Flying Scotsman train delivered its passengers to safety after being pounded by German bombers and strafed with gunfire from the air. There were astonishing feats of engineering restoring tracks within hours and bridges and viaducts within days. Trains transported millions to and from work each day and sheltered them on underground platforms at night, a refuge from the bombs above. Without the railways, there would have been no Dunkirk evacuation and no D-Day.

Michael Williams, author of the celebrated book On the Slow Train, has written an important and timely book using original research and over a hundred new personal interviews.

This is their story.

Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s Railways Won the War is available here.

Have You Seen… Five Documentaries To Seek Out (Part Two)

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This is the second part of my list of five documentaries that I love and hope that you will discover and love too. The first part, in which I lurch from historical curios to sexual fetishes and underground comics, can be found here: Part One.

 

The Sorrow and The Pity (1969)

 

Perhaps due to its appearance as an anti-date movie in Annie Hall, Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and The Pity is often unfairly relegated to the punch line of jokes about gruelling and dull ways to spend an evening. It’s true that Ophuls’ film is a pretty mammoth undertaking but for those willing to persevere it can also be an immensely rewarding one. Filmed in 1969 (although not released until 1981 due to objections from the French government) and clocking in at a mammoth 251 minutes, Le chagrin et la pitié (to give it its French title) is an in-depth look at the behavior of the inhabitants of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand during Nazi occupation.

 

In a sense The Sorrow and the Pity could almost be watched as a companion piece to Albert Camus’

A striking poster for the film.

powerful1947 novel La Peste, which deals with the same subject by using disease as a metaphor for occupation and I will admit that having this book in the back of my mind certainly helped me clarify my experience of this gargantuan film. There is a famously enigmatic quote at the end of this novel, ‘What we learn in time of pestilence [is] that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.’ It is The Sorrow and The Pity’s inability to either confirm or deny this statement that makes it so compelling and the audience is forced to try (and fail) to make the moral judgments that the film so stubbornly avoids.

 

     The Sorrow and The Pity is split into two parts. The first of these, entitled The Collapse focuses on the French Resistance and particularly on Pierre Mendès-France, a Jewish political figure who was a key member of this group. The second, entitled The Choice, presents us with the other side of the coin recounting the story of Nazi collaboration particularly that of Christian de la Mazière, a member of the upper classes who fought under the banner of Fascism. As well as these key figures and other well-known persons (including British primeminister Anthony Eden), Ophuls also spoke with the ordinary townspeople who were faced with the impossible choice of collaboration or resistance. This puts a very human face on this grueling situation and by the film’s close you really do feel as if you have lived among these haggard, corrupt, heroic and deeply relatable people in their little town of Clermont-Ferrand. Perhaps the most remarkable and uncomfortable thing about the film is it’s lack of moral judgments particularly given the film’s relative proximity (just over twenty years) to the events it describes. Anthony Eden provides us with perhaps the most useful way of processing this when he states that, ‘One who has not suffered the horrors of an occupying power has no right to judge a nation that has.’ By the end of The Sorrow and The Pity it is impossible to argue with him and we realize that this is perhaps the closest we’ll get to an understanding of Camus’ inscrutable sentiment.

 

The Sorrow and the Pity is currently available on region 2 DVD and is well worth setting aside time to watch.

 

 

Capturing the Friedmans (2004)

 

The Friedmans celebrate during happier times.

Arnold and Elaine Friedman and their three sons were pretty much your archetypal middle class family living in a small town in upstate New York in the 1980s. He was an upbeat and well-liked teacher who ran a computer class out of their basement while she was a hardworking housewife whose rather serious demeanour made her the butt of her husband and three sons’ high-spirited jokes. Like many upwardly mobile families of the period, their favourite pastime was recording their mundane yet happy lives on their personal video camera (a relatively new innovation at this time).  They were content, down to earth and almost aggressively normal, like a Jewish 80s Cleavers. All this came crashing down in November 1987 when their typical suburban house was raided after Arnold was accused of molesting several children in his computer class. Extraordinarily, the family did not give up their beloved hobby and continued to record every tense discussion and blistering argument on videotape as more and more allegations were made, son Jesse was accused and their family began to disintegrate.

 

Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmansassembles this startling footage and intercuts it with interviews

The accusations tore the family apart

with the family, police and victims. What makes the films so gripping is that it is cast in the mould of a thriller with each new piece of evidence or witness testimony contradicting something that the audience had earlier been convinced was fact. The result of this is that you are never really sure of anything except the truly subjective nature of truth and, by the film’s close, it is almost impossible to make any definitive judgements about Arnold and, to a larger degree, Jesse’s guilt. This style is undoubtedly effective and makes the film breathtakingly gripping. However, its moral implications have opened it up to some justified criticism and it is hard to watch the film in the same way now that news has emerged that Jarecki (who had previously declared himself to be impartial) actually funded Jesse Friedman’s appeal.

 

What earns Capturing the Friedmans a place on this list though is it’s unique, self-documented insight into a family in turmoil; the way each family member deals with the traumatic events is a master class in psychology and it is staggering to consider why on earth they chose to film themselves going through this horrible ordeal. Elaine Friedman is perhaps the most fascinating character in this respect, the seemingly emotionally fenced-off wife who was oblivious to her husband and son’s crimes. She is also arguably the most sympathetic of the Friedmans and it is heartbreaking to watch as her family continues to favour their father, frequently taking sides against Elaine even after he is prosecuted for the most despicable crimes. A great documentarian will often start with one subject and allow it to develop organically into something entirely different. This is certainly the case with this film, which started out life when Jarecki interviewed son David Friedman, who is a clown by profession, for a documentary he was making on children’s entertainers in New York City. That this light-hearted film spawned  Capturing The Friedmans is as intriguing as it is darkly ironic.

 

Capturing The Friedman’s is currently available on Region 2 DVD and come with a wealth of special features including Jarecki’s ‘Just a Clown’, the documentary on New York clowns that introduced him to David Friedman, and a wealth of documents (including a psychologist’s assessment of the victims) which are provided as DVD-Rom content.

 

Read Part 3, in which I discuss my favourite feature length documentary.

Charles Rivington can be followed on Twitter at @crivington.