Out of the frying pan . . .

Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers

The second world war is big business. Television, film, novels — whole industries have evolved to bring home to us the images of a ‘just’ war. Then there are the thousands of books, on politics, economics, Hitler and Churchill, Rommel and Monty. Too few of these, however, give us authentic voices, telling their own stories. Further, most end with VE or VJ Day, with happy crowds dancing down the Mall. But what came after? How did families reconnect after six years of separation, privation, horror and fear?

In Stranger in the House, Julie Summers weaves together the narratives of those on the home front, showing how the varied experiences of war created equally varied experiences of peace. How soldiers managed their return to civilian life was dependent on a vast number of factors. The POWs in the Far East, who underwent not merely captivity, but torture, starvation and complete isolation from any news, were, unsurprisingly, the least likely to settle easily to peacetime existence. Those soldiers who had been able to keep in touch with their families, who had received news of growing children, changing fortunes, were the most likely to slip smoothly back into the prewar current.

But Summers’s interest is not primarily with these men. Instead, her question is, what happened to the women and children left behind? What happened to women who had never previously worked outside the home, were forced by war to become independent wage-earners and single parents of children who knew ‘Daddy’ only as a photograph — what happened to them when the men came marching home? And what happened to those children, displaced from the centre of their mothers’ lives? How did they adjust to life with a frequently emotionally disturbed, nightmare-ridden stranger, one who had spent the previous six years living an entirely male life?

For many men had had little daily contact with women, even with the various women’s auxiliary forces.