Changed utterly

Some years ago Juliet Nicolson wrote an evocative and enjoyable study of the summer of 1911. She was far too intelligent to be taken in by the vision of unruffled and sunlit splendour propagated by those who wallow in nostalgia, but the picture that emerged was still one of self-confidence, complacency and a conviction that, for better or worse, nothing much was likely to change in the state of Britain. This earlier book is worth revisiting before reading The Great Silence: it helps one comprehend the effect on the national psyche of the cataclysmic horrors which afflicted Europe during and after the first world war.

This book is about grief — ‘an iceberg of a word’, writes Nicolson. Thirty per cent of the children who had been aged between 20 and 24 in 1911 were dead by the end of the war, seven years later. Some 2.5 million Britons had been killed or seriously wounded. Translate that into bereaved fathers and mothers, wives who had lost husbands or girlfriends lovers, children robbed of a father, and it seemed that hardly a family in the land had survived without bereavement. Peace meant that there was time to stop and think. ‘I fear that it will require more courage than anything that has gone before,’ wrote Cynthia Asquith. ‘It isn’t until one leaves off spinning round that one realises how giddy one is.’

But grief was soon tinged with anger. Lloyd George promised that the soldiers would come back to a land fit for heroes. Instead they found themselves in a land where unemployment seemed more the rule than the exception, where inflation raged while wages barely maintained their pre-war levels, where in Glasgow half the population was living two to a room and a further third was crammed into a room shared by three adults.