Nine years after Business as Usual, author and illustrator Ann Stafford is at war. She’s driving an ambulance in London during the Blitz, terrified but determined to do what she can to help other people when the bombs rain down. She’s living at her friend Daphne’s house, sleeping in the living room alongside other women volunteers on mattresses, being cooked for by the redoubtable Mrs Dove, and working her shifts at the ambulance station. She sees the nightly destruction of London’s buildings and streets close-up and death at first hand. Ann Stafford’s memoir about her experiences in the Blitz brings the past back to life, making her writing a fascinating report from the front lines of the Home Front in the darkest days of the war. Volunteers are her focus, the work of the women (and some men) who picked up the pieces and the bodies after the bombs stopped falling. Until the next raid .... With an Introduction by Jessica Hammett, University of Bristol.

Why has the 'people's war' been such a durable and attractive myth? Creating the people's war examines how civil defence personnel engaged with this narrative during the war and in the following decades to answer this question. Civil defence was the most significant voluntary organisation of the Second World War, involving millions of men and women of every class, generation and locality in Britain. This book shows how local communities of civil defence personnel co-developed narratives about the value of their work which challenged hierarchies of war service. In their social groups volunteers wrote themselves into the 'people's war' and invested it with meaning, creating national identity from the bottom up. Community was both central to these representations and vital for their production. -- .