Stranger in the House

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

I enjoyed Home Fires so much that I promptly requested Stranger in the House, which is all about the British husbands, fathers, and boyfriends who came home when the war was over.  It could be a very difficult adjustment for everyone, and of course many men never recovered from their experiences.

Summers organizes a large number of personal stories into chapters by relationships; there are the mothers, the widows, the wives and the children.  She doesn't try to do lots of analysis, but simply presents story after story with some short comments, mostly allowing people to speak for themselves.  It's an excellent approach, because the stories are as varied as the people, and generalities are difficult.  Most families had some difficult readjusting to do, but some had an easy time.  Some families fell apart or never really recovered, though it's not always the ones you'd think.  Both men and women were sometimes unfaithful to their partners, and had to deal with guilt and forgiveness...or not.

Quite a lot of space is given to the men who were taken prisoner in the Far East.  These men had had no contact with the rest of the world for years; they had been maltreated, tortured, and starved; and they usually had several tropical diseases or health conditions.  They also had the hardest time acclimating to normal life, and carried deep scars.  Summers shows several of the children--who often feared and resented their fathers while they were still alive--learning about what they had been through and coming to realize what those ordeals had meant for the rest of their lives.

It's a fascinating book that does valuable research into a part of family life that was often glossed over at the time.  I didn't love it as much as Home Fires.  It didn't feel quite as organized, but I think that's the nature of the matter.  I still didn't want to put it down, though, and read it quickly.

Comments

  1. JoyMay 20, 2016 at 8:02 PM

    This sounds like an interesting part of the history that isn't so often told. Have you seen the film The Railway Man? It covers some of the same territory.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more