The sandwich was no comfort, it was a pale limp thing a long way from the déjeuner sur l’herbe of her imagination. . . . Recently she had bought a new book, by Elizabeth David — A Book of Mediterranean Food. A hopeful purchase. The only olive oil she could find was sold in her local chemist in a small bottle. ‘For softening…
I began this post in 2017. The original focus was Louis MacNeice’s’s poem “Brother Fire”. MacNeice was a fire-watcher during the London Blitz which meant that he spent nights on rooftops watching for, and reporting, fires caused by incendiary bombs. The poem expresses a human kinship with the destructive power of fire: O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire, O enemy…
Farm work is one of the best jobs for getting to know people as they really are. The First Job and the Sweetest Sylvia Plath’s first job was on a farm in the summer of 1950. I am grateful to the inestimable Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) for these extracts from her journal and from an article in which…
I’m not giving anything away by quoting the deep irony of the last lines of Saplings: Turns you over, don’t it, to think of the children? I was saying to my daughter only yesterday, we got a lot to be thankful for in this country. Our kids ‘aven’t suffered ‘o’-ever else ‘as. – (361) That last sentence translated from the…
After early mist the morning of Sunday August 18 1940 was bright with clear skies. It came to be known as the hardest day in the Battle of Britain. The detail from Diana Gardner’s wood engraving makes it seem like night but there is a figure on the bottom left looking up and shielding his eyes from the sun. It…
The land army fights in the fields. It is in the fields of Britain that the most critical battle of the present war may well be fought and won. – Lady Denman, the Director of the Women’s Land Army, WW2 Who Won the War? It wasn’t the WRENS who won the war Whatever the WRENS may say It was the…
Britain declared war on Germany just after U.A. Fanthorpe’s birthday in 1939. She was ten. Living in Kent she was familiar with the signs and sounds, fears and deprivations of wartime England. She knows the enemy – whom she calls by the popular put-down, the Hun – by “the nightly whines, searchlights, thuds, bomb-sites”. Her French teacher is distressed and distracted…
Wonderful pictures of what looks like a creative classroom in a pre-Plowden primary school. Look at the desk arrangements. From the Imperial War Museum collection.
“War is not here” “No sirens are warning us of air raids” and the last line “We wish all children could be glad and safe.” In all-school activity groups on Tuesday students wrote what they are thankful for on strips of colored paper – now displayed in the lobby. (Family, friends and pets feature strongly.) As reported by the Poughkeepsie…