Living with Dad's Army

Buy this book online from Amazon.co.uk

Faced with a book on the "hidden history" of the home front in the Second World War, the reader may well wonder who has been hiding it. Who has been covering up our unadmitted shortcomings - the evidence, perhaps,of treasons and conspiracies,of giant profiteering rip-offs and confederacies of black-market crime? The answer is: Nobody.

Stuart Hylton wanted to correct the popular image of cockneys singing along with Vera Lynn in the ruins of their homes. Fair enough. But he has tapped no lost archives, ransacked no cabinets noirs. For sizzling revelations, look elsewhere.

Yet the known facts he critically reruns - the story of how a free nation turned virtually totalitarian overnight, to fight totalitarianism - can hardly fail to grip, and divert, a new generation.

It was the first war in which the British were taunted in their own homes by enemy voices. Sheltered elders faced the instant obliteration normally reserved for the flower of the nation's youth. Notices in bombed areas threatened death for looting. Strange laws, sumptuary and all invasive, abounded.

Motorists who failed to immobilise their cars on parking found their tyres deflated by police. Farmers were ordered what crops to grow, with the aid of chorus girls and conscientious objectors. It was an offence to spread alarm and despondency. Talking about the weather was allowed, but weather forecasts were suppressed for fear of aiding enemy bombers. Television? Mercifully, this infant prodigy was strangled two days before war began.

In our darkest (or finest?) hour, deference and reticence were never extinguished, but was it to be expected that all would behave as the patronising Whitehall spokesmen wished? That crime and fiddling would cease? That the well-off in "safe" areas would joyfully embrace the tatterdemalion, lice-ridden evacuees from the slums? That wives of servicemen posted abroad would remain celibate for the duration? That young girls would honour the recommendation not to be too friendly with American black soldiers, for fear of upsetting the white ones? That workers in war factories would forgo strikes, as workers in the First World War had conspicuously failed to do? (Fat chance.)

Careless talk might be discouraged, but the exchange of daft rumours did much for morale. In 1914 many believed that suburban tennis courts had been designed as gun platforms by enemy agents, and "screw driver parties" removed metal advertisements from walls looking for spies' messages.This time the challenge was to unmask "fifth columnists" or German paratroopers posing as traffic policemen or nuns.

Hylton says suspects were to be asked to say shibboleth words like "soothe" and "wretch". A letter-writer in Picture-Post suggested that in a land deprived of signposts and milestones the natives of,say, Coventry could fox invaders by saying: "This is Bristol".

As one who spent much of the war on anti-aircraft sites, entirely surrounded by young women, I was surprised to read that, because of outbreaks of rape, "some mixed army camps had armed guards mounted outside the female latrines with orders to shoot male intruders".

Hard to believe; and so is the tale that ATS maenads solicited sex by shouting "Paragraph Eleven" (the notorious clause governing pregnancy) outside the windows of male barracks at night. How good to read that the illegitimate birth rate in the services was lower then in civil life.

Determined to desentimentalise the past, Hylton tells how the round-up of refugees and other aliens released a wave of anti-Semitism, which was fed also by possibly selective reports of black-market offences. He cites a 1941 novel by the best-selling Warwick Deeping in which "popular detective Sexton Blake pitted his wits against a Jewish financier".