Nella Last's War established a housewife and mother from Barrow-in-Furness as one of the most powerful and moving voices of the Second World War, and inspired the award-winning television drama Housewife, 49. In this next instalment of her unique diaries, Nella Last describes how ordinary people re-built their lives after the war was over.
While the Allies' victory was a cause for hope and celebration, much privation and anxiety remained. 'The only peace is that there are no active hostilities, ' Nella wrote, 'but the corrosion of the war years is eating deeper into civilisation.' In her sensitive and playful account of daily life in the austerity years, written like her diaries for the Mass Observation project, Nella Last captures the thoughts and feelings of post-war Britain.
"'If the historians could see clearly enough, this could well be called the age of frustration...after all, for ordinary people, it's the little things that count, whether for good or ill.' Nella Last"

A lively diary chronicling the ups and downs of running a grocery shop in a Yorkshire town during the rationing years of the Second World War Kathleen Hey spent the war years helping her sister and brother-in-law run a grocery shop in the Yorkshire town of Dewsbury. From July 1941 to July 1946 she kept a diary for the Mass-Observation project, recording the thoughts and concerns of the people who used the shop. What makes Kathleen's account such a vivid and compelling read is the immediacy of her writing. People were pulling together on the surface ('Bert has painted the V-sign on the shop door...', she writes) but there are plenty of tensions underneath. The shortage of food and the extreme difficulty of obtaining it is a constant thread, which dominates conversation in the town, more so even than the danger of bombardment and the war itself. Sometimes events take a comic turn. A lack of onions provokes outrage among her customers, and Kathleen writes, 'I believe they think we have secret onion orgies at night and use them all up.' The Brooke Bond tea rep complains that tea need not be rationed at all if supply ships were not filled with 'useless goods' such as Corn Flakes, and there is a long-running saga about the non-arrival of Smedley's peas. Among the chorus of voices she brings us, Kathleen herself shines through as a strong and engaging woman who refuses to give in to doubts or misery and who maintains her keen sense of humour even under the most trying conditions. A vibrant addition to our records of the Second World War, the power of her diary lies in its juxtaposition of the everyday and the extraordinary, the homely and the universal, small town life and the wartime upheavals of a nation.

The Bedford Diary of Leah Aynsley, 1943-1946, provides a fascinating insight into the daily life of a working class woman during the Second World War. Edited by Patricia and Robert Malcolmson, The Bedford Diary of Leah Aynsley, 1943-1946, provides a fascinating insight into the daily life of a working class woman during the Second World War. Leah hoped that her diary, which shegave as a bequest to Bedfordshire Archives Service, would: 'often be useful to settle arguments as to what happened on such and such occasions.' She also thought that: 'being written by a working-class person among whom I suspectnot many will keep such diaries . [it] may be interesting in future centuries'. Leah moved with her parents and two brothers to live in Queens Park, Bedford, in 1921 while in her twentieth year. During the war years she worked for W. H. Allen & Sons Engineering Works and the diary includes her thoughts on her job there and the work that was undertaken by the firm. The diary also details her day to day activities, generally confined to cycling distance of her home. But she had a busy and active life - working on her allotment in Bromham, attending BBC concerts in the Corn Exchange as well as going to local lectures and folk dances. Throughout the diary Leah comments on aspects of war-time Bedford including the influx of American airmen, rationing, Home Guard duties, bombing raids, air-raid warnings and preparations for invasion. Her style - understated, measured, factual, domestic but engaging - isno better captured than in her entry on Victory Day: 'V DAY. Well, the day is nearly over now. Very quiet around here. I have not heard any victory bells. The street has blossomed out into flags, bunting and fairy lights. The local shops were open - even the fish shop - and the baker called as usual ... Churchill broadcast at 3 p.m. ... A very pleasant day in May.'

Intimate insights into the life of a woman in 1930s London, both private and public. Gladys Langford (born in 1890) was a free spirit, an aspiring writer (though not published in her lifetime), an inveterate attender of plays, concerts, and films, and an astute and sometimes acerbic observer of everyday life in 1930s London. Married in 1913 (the marriage was later annulled), and chained as she saw it to schoolteaching for most of her adult life, Gladys's days were sometimes unhappy but also full of incident, and featured a relationship with a longstanding but married lover, who was often on her mind. Gladys's writing is crisp, colourful, and often biting. Her diary, from 1936 to 1940, while frequently introspective and full of self-doubts, is also a vivid portrait of social life. She writes of her quirky friends, her family and straightened family background, her schoolboys in Hoxton, and her numerous Jewish acquaintances. She also has much to say about London's public world - the behaviour of theatre audiences, street entertainers, anti-Semitic outbursts, the roller-coaster moods of people living through 1939, and fears of evacuation with the outbreak of war. Patricia and Robert Malcolmson are social historians with a special interest in Mass Observation, women in World War Two, and English diaries written between the 1930s and the 1950s.

A vivid picture of wartime Lincolnshire, and an engagingly readable account of the life of a busy parish priest. Arthur Hopkins arrived in the Lincolnshire town of Boston in November 1942 to take up the post of Vicar of St Thomas's Church in the working-class parish of Skirbeck Quarter. He was already writing almost daily instalments of a diary for the social research organisation, Mass Observation. Generously conceived, it is written almost as if it were a series of letters to a friend abroad, providing descriptions and comments on everyday life in wartime. Little was beneath his notice. This was a man who had attended university with the King after the Great War and had prominent relations, but was also egalitarian in his leanings and sympathetic to the "common people". His is the diary ofa thoughtful and perceptive individual who had a realistic sense of himself, his society, and the fragility of life; the engagingly readable entries reveal fascinating details of wartime Lincolnshire and the life of a busy parishpriest. The diary is edited here with introduction and notes. Patricia and Robert Malcolmson are social historians with a special interest in English diaries written between the 1930s and 1950s. They have edited for publication over a dozen of these diaries.

Detailed and engaging diary entries throw new light on what it was really like to live in wartime Suffolk. Winifred Challis (1896-1990) spent most of her life in West Suffolk. Born in Newmarket, during the Second World War she was working in Bury St Edmunds for the Public Assistance Committee and was one of nearly 500 people who at some point during the war kept a diary for the social research organization, Mass Observation. From November 1942 she wrote at length about her everyday life, her feelings, and the social and political attitudes of both herself and others. Winifred, while often introspective, was also a close observer of the world around her, a free thinker, and an accomplished and penetrating writer, with a questioning mind and a quick wit. For several months in 1942-1943 she immersed herself in her diary-writing, producing on some days at least a couple of thousand words of perceptive commentary on the wartime scene - rationing, shortages, the often bleak texture of daily life, the sometimes disconcerting presence of outsiders in Bury, but with various moments of satisfaction and pleasure. Her diaries provide an unusual and fascinating record of a critical period of Suffolk's history. Robert Malcomson is Professor Emeritus of History, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario; Peter Searby was until his retirement Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

The remarkable wartime diary of nurse Kathleen Johnstone ‘Warm, chatty and endlessly absorbing, this delightful diary brims with intelligence and humour.’ Wendy Moore, author of Endell Street: The Women Who Ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital The second world war could not have been won without the bravery and selflessness of women on the Home Front. Women like Kathleen Johnstone. This first-hand story of one extraordinary but unheralded member of Britain’s ‘Greatest Generation’ brings home with extraordinary lucidity and compassion the realities of wartime Lancashire. In 1943, Kathleen, then thirty, was a nurse-in-training at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary. For the next three years she kept a meticulous diary of her day-to-day existence, leaving behind a vivid record of the real-time concerns of a busy, thoughtful woman on the frontline of the war at home. Kathleen’s days were never the same. She writes in clear and lively prose about life in the hospital: of her fellow nurses, her patients, about death and dying, and the progress of the war as wounded soldiers returned from Normandy in the summer of 1944. She muses on being working class, wartime austerity, and her anxiety about examinations. Here too are dances, Americans and a POW boyfriend in Germany. Kathleen’s observations are witty, wry and astute – but above all relatable, even today. Poignant and engrossing, Kathleen Johnstone’s tale of trauma, romance and friendship will leave a lasting impression.

Kathleen Tipper's diary, kept for Mass-Observation from July 1941 till peace in 1945 and beyond, offers a unique personal insight into one young woman's war. Kathleen Tipper was just twenty years old in September 1939. Her parents had met while making munitions in the Woolwich Arsenal during the Great War and Kathleen lived with them and her younger brother and sister at the family'scouncil house in Appleton Road. Eltham. Grammar-school educated, she worked as a clerk for a shipping company near the Strand. Like so many of the young women around her she was poised to take advantage of the new opportunities for work and leisure that London in the thirties offered as never before. But Kathleen's life - indeed, the lives of all Londoners - would change for ever in the six years after declaration of war on 3 September. This was a moment of quite extraordinary drama. And Kathleen's diary, kept for Mass-Observation from July 1941 till peace in 1945 and beyond, offers a unique personal insight into one young woman's war. We keep her company through the daily comings and goings of family, friends, work and relaxation - all played out against a backdrop of cataclysmic events brought home through cinema, radio and the daily press. We travel on buses and trains and listen tothe conversations going on about her. We hear the opinions of 'blonde glamour girls', of disgruntled civil servants, of the men and women working the barrage balloons that sway like tipsy bluebottles in the London sky. We witness the effect on her of newsreels and Information Ministry films. We hear her wishing she'd been born a boy so that she could share more fully in the risks and excitements of warfare at the front. We see her disillusionment with people in 'positions of authority', especially those there by virtue of class inheritance, and she helps us understand better some of the forces that shaped Labour's victory in 1945. It is, perhaps, the ordinariness of this extraordinary time in London's history that comes through most strongly from this fascinating document. Keeping hold of ordinary things was the best way to make sense of a world gone mad. Kathleen Tipper lays bare thesefibres of endurance in the greatest crisis to face London and the Londoner in modern times.

'I can never understand how the scribbles of such an ordinary person ... can possibly have value.' So wrote Nella Last in her diary on 2 September 1949. More than sixty years on, tens of thousands of people have read and enjoyed three volumes of her vivid and moving diaries, written during the Second World War and its aftermath as part of the Mass Observation project - and the basis for BAFTA-winning drama Housewife 49 starring Victoria Wood. The Diaries of Nella Last, brings together into a single volume the best of Nella's prolific outpourings, including a great deal of new, unpublished material from the war years. Capturing the everyday trials and horrors of wartime Britain and the nation's transition into peacetime and beyond, Nella's touching and often humorous narrative provides an invaluable historical portrait of what daily life was like for ordinary people in the 1940s and 1950s. Outwardly Nella's life was commonplace; but behind this mask were a penetrating mind and a lively pen. As David Kynaston said on Radio 4, she 'will come to be seen as one of the major twentieth century English diarists.'

Love & War in London is rooted in the extraordinary milieu of wartime London. Vibrant and engaging, Olivia Cockett's diary reveals her frustrations, fears, pleasures and self-doubts. She recorded her mood swings and tried to understand them, and wrote of her lover (a married man) and the intense relationship they had. As she and her friends and family in New Scotland Yard were swept up by the momentous events of another European war, she vividly reported on what she saw and heard in her daily life. Hers is a diary that brings together the personal and the public. It permits us to understand how one intelligent, imaginative woman struggled to make sense of her life, as the city in which she lived was drawn into the turmoil of a catastrophic war.

Insights into life in England during the second world war. Kathleen Hey's diary provides an insider's view of an industrial city in wartime Yorkshire. As a shop assistant in a working class district of Dewsbury, she documented the stresses and complex exchanges in a grocery - from both sides of the counter. Regular customers, usually close neighbours, were eager to learn what scarce and coveted items might be in stock, and sometimes went in several times a day to discover what was available, as well as to chat about the war, complain about the provisions they were getting, or seek assistance with their ration books. While the frustrations and satisfactions of shop-work are at the heart of her diary, she also wrote about leisure, popular culture, public events and political debates, civil defence, domestic tensions, and her hopes for the post-war future. Life was often unpredictable; events happened unexpectedly - and could be recorded by her immediately; one social encounter might give rise to a surprising and revealing conversation. Hers is a richly detailed, observant, wide-ranging and sometimes amusing account of wartime social life. It is presented here with full introduction and explanatory notes. PATRICIA and ROBERT MALCOLMSON are social historians with a special interest in English diaries written between the 1930s and 1950s.

From the summer of 1938, British women from all walks of life joined the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS). This disparate band of women came together for the common good - to help serve and protect their communities. By 1941 a million women had enrolled. These brave and dutiful women played a vital role in Britain's victory. The positive impact of the WVS on wartime society was universally acknowledged. They were instrumental in implementing the large-scale evacuation of children from bomb-targeted cities, in the care of the wounded, and in keeping those in war service fed. Lady Reading, founder and fearless leader, was one of the most influential women in twentieth-century Britain. The story of the WVS has never been fully told before. Social historians Patricia and Robert Malcolmson bring this vital part of the Second World War to life in a vivid and engaging way through the diaries and records of the women serving their country on the Home Front. Women at the Ready promises to be a magnificent saga of sacrifice and determination.