Civilians At War, Journals 1938-1946 By George Beardmore
Civilians At War, Journals 1938-1946 By George Beardmore
Hardcover
ISBN 0719541611
Publisher: John Murray 1984
Used - Very Good. This book is in very good condition. The DJ has some signs of age related wear and tear on the sides and spine but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover.
Golden Syrup disappearing from the grocers, 'Build Your Own Maginot Line' on sale at Hamley's toyshop in Regent Street; patrolling Broadcasting House at night with a shotgun, drilling in the day with a broomstick; finding the chassis of a London bus blown onto a rooftop, or a landmine dangling from a tree by its parachute behind your suburban semi; sparrows killed by bomb blast, a woman's face pockmarked with tiny dimples from flying glass - here are the many miseries and the few splendours of a civilian's war. Several wartime diaries by housewives have been published but surprisingly this is the first by a man who can stand, as he says, as a 'representative of a large body of middle-class people without claim to celebrity'. To outward appearances George Beardmore was an asthmatic clerk in his thirties, struggling to make a home in North London for his wife and baby. What put him apart were the two books already to his credit by 1938. His was a novelist's eye, hungry for the telling detail, chance encounter and heightened moment that could be transmuted later. He could not resist the recording impulse and the diary he has left us is vivid, honest, intelligent and compassionate. Barred from the Army by his asthma, George Beardmore started the War working as a cost clerk in the BBC. At the end of 1940 he was moved to Droitwich to help erect an emergency transmitter. In 1942 he returned to London and after a short spell writing for Picture Post, he became first a billeting officer and then an information officer at the sites of Vl and V2 bombings in North London. After the War he became a full-time writer. He died in 1979.
