LONDON WAR NOTES - Mollie Panter-Downes
Having read Panter-Downes collection of New Yorker short stories from World War II, I went on to read this book containing her biweekly letters from London to the NYer from 1939-1945. She paints a vivid word picture of Londoners reacting with courage and down-to-earth humor to the terrors and strains of both being bombing and not being bombed (while knowing that the bombs would return).She predicts accurately that England will be changed forever by this war with a final knell being tolled for the supremacy of the aristocracy and an easily available servant class, neither perhaps gone completely, but certainly never again to rule or serve with the rigidity of pre-war England. How are you going to keep the girl back in the kitchen once she's been in the munitions factory and armed forces? The answer is clear, very few will ever go back, and most of us would say, a good thing too!
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