A Girls’ Guide to Winning the War
As the title suggests, this is not a wholly serious book, but it is far from being a satire. It is a feel-good book celebrating the courage and resilience of the civilian population of London in WW2.
The heroine, Peggy, is patriotic, loyal, hard-working, respectful of her parents and altogether correct in her opinions on equality and diversity. She is so saccharine that it comes as a relief when towards the end of the book she has a moment of disillusion when, oppressed by the apparent futility of her work at the Ministry of Information, she hands in her notice. Needless to say she is talked back into returning to her job and ‘doing her bit’ for the war effort. Peggy is a clerk at the MoI, a newly formed and highly unorthodox branch of the Civil Service, and she wins the war by writing morale-raising booklets about the British way of life.
All feel-good stories about the Home Front in WW2 tend to downplay its darker side, the cynicism, weariness, austerity and boredom (as I remember it, the brightest thing was the tales the grown-ups told us about how wonderful life was in peace time), but this story takes ‘looking on the bright side’ rather too far. Or maybe it is just that Peggy is too like the exemplary characters she writes about in her booklets.
