Post-War Memories

Danny Karlin

• ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War Two by Studs Terkel
  Hamish Hamilton, 589 pp, £12.95, March 1985, ISBN 0 241 11493 4
• Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing up in the Fifties edited by Liz Heron
  Virago, 248 pp, £4.95, June 1985, ISBN 0 86068 596 9

In my first year as a graduate student, I lived in a terrace house in York Street, Cambridge – a shabby, friendly part of town which had not yet been ‘improved’. (True, the previous owners had built an ‘extension’, but it was very ramshackle, and they left the main drain in the middle of the kitchen floor.) One of my next-door neighbours was Mrs A., a bent, frail, spirited woman, about seventy years old. Her house was heated by coal and lit by gas, because when she and her husband came back after World War Two, the landlord told them the whole street was going to be demolished in six months and it wasn’t worth putting in electricity. And after her husband died she could never be bothered.