How Britons saw the Nasties

In recent years, Mass Observation has become a rich source for historians and publishers. Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey (Faber £7.99), which features letters from a collection of women's magazines donated to the archive, has become an unexpected bestseller. A handful of the diarists in Our Longest Days have also featured in Observer writer Simon Garfield's trilogy on real wartime lives, Our Hidden Lives, Private Battles and We Are at War. Our Longest Days, however, is a unique attempt to tell the chronological history of the war, event by event, through the eyes of the diarists.

Our Longest Days: A People's History of the Second World War
By the writers of Mass Observation, edited by Sandra Koa Wing
Profile £8.99, pp320
The reaction of Muriel Green, an 18-year-old garage assistant from Snettisham, Norfolk, to the outbreak of war is practical: 'Sunday 3 September 1939: think through friends who will eventually be called up. Decide to think of them as killed off and then it will not be such a blow if they are and will be great joy if at the end they are not.' On the same day, she designates the downstairs bathroom as the air-raid refuge room and stocks it with 'a tin of Smith's potato crisps, three bottles lemonade, several packets of chocolate from business stock'.


It is these personal details, often emotionally revealing, sometimes eccentric, that make up the charm of Our Longest Days, a collection of diary entries from September 1939 to September 1945 by 15 Britons who volunteered for 'Mass Observation', devised in the late 1930s as an 'anthropology of our own people' at the instigation of New Statesman journalist Charles Madge. There were 500 paid observers during the Second World War who submitted written accounts that were a cross between a private diary and a public record.