WARTIME CHRISTMAS

It would be hard to imagine a more poignant and heartwarming book than this wonderful anthology of reminiscences from WWII. Merv and Bill were two schoolboys separated by evacuation, and their letters are a delight. On Christmas Day Bill goes to the pub with the men, but Aunt Ada hauls him out again. "When I'm grown up no woman's going to drag me out of a pub." Polish Tomasz Hubert remembers the outbreak of war in Lwow, when he was arrested as a political prisoner and spent Christmas so tightly packed into a cell that it was impossible to lie down. By 1942, he was training to join the RAF. Christmas dinner under rationing was a serious challenge for the housewife, with the brandy butter more likely to be brandy margarine, and the coffee made of acorns. A sugarless Christmas pud used syrup or treacle. By the middle of the war people were allowed to keep their own pig for food, and many did. In north Africa there was carol singing on both sides of the lines at Christmas, and in Palestine 30 soldiers made it to the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in a dilapidated bus. In 1944 Midnight Mass was sung in all languages in St Peter's, Rome. The war film Christmas Under Fire was instrumental in getting the US to enter the war, showing children sleeping by a Christmas tree while sheltering in an Underground station, King's College choir in the background, and a rousing claim that "Destiny has given Britain the torch of Liberty to hold". Meanwhile ENSA ("Every Night Something Awful") did a magnificent job of keeping the troops laughing. 200pp, paperback.