When the 'gals' went to war

Debs at War is funny, moving and inspiring, and will be a valuable addition to the many social histories already published about the Second World War.

De Courcy's interviewees were all debutantes - girls who had made their formal curtsey to the king and queen during the annual London 'season'. They came from wealthy homes, where servants were the norm.

This luxurious and privileged world had its drawbacks. Parents were often distant, emotions were suppressed, sexual ignorance was rampant and self-control was required at all times.

Marriage to a man from the same background was virtually all that was expected of a young upper-class woman. A decent education was considered unneces- sary and a career was unthinkable.

But when war arrived and threatened the nation's very existence, the debs volunteered or were conscripted into the forces, or for war work, involving tough conditions far removed from their usual milieu.

It must have been grim to live and toil alongside members of the lower classes, but the gals seem to have coped well and ultimately endeared themselves to their proletarian brothers and sisters-at-arms.

The extent to which they still managed to keep up a busy social life (with uniformed young officers of their own class) is amazing. Dining, dancing and expensive nightclubbing in London continued at a hectic pace, even while the bombs were coming down.

Today many of the ex-debs look back on the war nostalgically. Despite its tribulations, it represents for them a liberation which changed their lives for the better.

Jenny Needham

DESERT RATS by John Parker (Headline, £7.99)

FIRST-hand accounts feature strongly in this absorbing study of the 7th Armoured Brigade, the famous Desert Rats, the British Army's mailed fist from El Alamein to Basra. The famous battles of the Second World War naturally take pride of place in this history, but the role of the Brigade in the Cold War, the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia is given proper respect. But most of all, whatever the theatre of war, Parker lets you see it though the eyes of the ordinary solider. He does exactly the same in The Gurkhas (Headline, £7.99), a fitting tribute to the little soldiers with the biggest fighting hearts in the world who have carved their own unique place in British military history.

Steve Craggs

BEHIND THE LINES: Revealing And Uncensored Letters From Our War-Torn World by Andrew Carroll (Ebury Press, £19.99)

THIS collection of personal letters, written by military personnel and civilians who served or lived in theatres of war ranging from the American War of Independence to the present conflict in Iraq, makes powerful and often heart-rending reading.

Andrew Carroll spent three years searching the globe to acquire his extraordinary collection of material. The result is a remarkable social history, vividly bringing home the pathos, sacrifice and horror of war. These letters remind one that behind every individual killed lies a human being who had hopes, fears, aspirations and loved ones just like anyone else.

Carroll has included letters from people on the enemy side. These include a Japanese suicide pilot and Germans who experienced the terrible Allied air raid on Dresden.

Atrocities such as the Japanese rape of the city of Nanking in China in 1937, and the barbarities perpetrated by Saddam Hussein's forces when they invaded Kuwait in 1990, are mind-blowingly awful.

Many of the authors of these letters were subsequently killed. One such victim was a Canadian woman living in London in July 1940. In an upbeat letter to her mother across the Atlantic, a few weeks before the Blitz began, she makes light of the threat of German invasion. Nine months later she lost her life in an air raid.

Anthony Looch

WARM AND SNUG: The History of the Bed by Lawrence Wright (Sutton, £9.99)

DIVIDED into 57 short, snappy chapters - eg Murdered in Our Beds, Pickwick Slept Here, Ye Olde Four Poster, even Bedtime in Space - here is a hugely entertaining celebration of the place in which we spend almost a third of our lives. Tutankhamen's bed features, as does a Neolithic stone bed. But, taken from Odd Jobs In Bed, this is more fun:

"A gallant RAF pilot was in the habit of staying in the mess bar at night until it closed, while his lovely foreign wife languished alone in a nearby guest house, among a group of devoted younger couples, to whom, at last she cried: 'You tink my hosband neglect me, but he don't! I tell you what he do a few days ago. He love me all right. I am in bed. He comes upstairs. What you tink he do?'

"Nobody dared guess. The answer was unexpected. 'He bring my bicycle, and before he go to bed, he take it to pieces, every little bit, and he clean and oil it, every little bit, in the bedroom'..."

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE VICTORIAN SERVANT by Pamela Horn (Sutton, £8.99)

THE Victorians had "tweenies" who were nothing like the children's TV characters of today. Just about the lowest of the low, a tweeny performed the duties of both housemaid and kitchen maid. A former tweeny told Pamela Horn her job was "hell...There is far more class distinction below stairs than can be told in a letter". First published in 1975 and now revised and updated, Horn's study is the definitive account of domestic service, whose labour force of 1.5 million a century ago was the biggest single group of workers.

A tweeny earned about £200 a year, but a cook or a nursemaid could earn up to £1,000. Even more surprising, these sums remained largely unchanged between 1861 and 1901.

Harry Mead

THE ABSENT-MINDED IMPERIALISTS by Bernard Porter (Oxford University Press, £25)

ALTHOUGH a quarter of the world was painted red on maps during the heyday of the British Empire, it did not really mean much to most Britons, argues Empire historian Bernard Porter. And he argues forcefully but fairly that far from basking in imperial glory, most people, apart from a small military, diplomatic and bureaucratic elite, knew little and cared less about the Empire that supposedly made Britain great. It really is surprising to read how little the British thought of an institution that was the awe of most foreigners and how little it affected domestic life. Certainly a book to rattle more than a few cages.

Steve Craggs

Published: 26/07/2005