9: Few Eggs and No Oranges 1940-1945
So, I got sick, and then we got a hurricane, and this book is a doorstopper that I side-eyed for a while before picking it up. Sorry.
Sooo, even Persephone admits this one is pretty boring. Seriously, their suggested questions include "Most of those who thought Few Eggs ‘hard to get into’ have returned to it and found it a compelling read. What is it that make one want to keep turning the pages?" which is a nice way of saying "well you get used to reading it...."
Few Eggs and No Oranges is Vere Hodgson's London diary from 1940-1945. It isn't personal or introspective at all; it's an edited version of a diary she wrote and sent to family in Africa to keep them abreast of what was going on in the British home front. It's... kinda boring. I'm not saying the nice ladies at Persephone are wrong; there's something compelling about any diary that you've read for long enough to get to know a person. And the boredom is sort of the point; if anything, it's about how you can get used to anything in time. You start out being scared out of your mind when the air raid siren goes and in a few months you report the weather as "a little blitzy".
Vere Hodgson is a pretty businesslike no-nonsense type, except when she isn't - I love how these diarists always bust out with something bizarre when you least expect it. Dear Etty had her "yeah it's totally normal to do some mostly naked wrestling with your therapist", Vere works hard in the charity division of a church of Christian spiritualists. Like, spiritualist spiritualists. Like, the spirit guide of their leader was evidently named Zodiac. People are weird, y'all. But here she is, unmarried and in her 40's, going back and forth between her full time charity work and her fire warden post and lining up at the shops with her ration coupons, very much the Keep Calm and Carry On sort. (Except that she rushes out immediately the next day every time to see what's bombed and what's burned and how bad is it, a ghoulish little bit of tourism that you think would be discouraged but I guess everyone was doing it?)
Common to all these wartime narratives is an increasing focus on food as the war goes on - what could you find, what did you have saved up, what did somebody wink and nod and pass you, what can't be had at any price. Just give up looking for grapes, Vere. You'll never afford them, stop asking!
I just wish it weren't all so impersonal. I'd like to know her better - she's clearly a smart, capable woman. She loves Churchill and de Gaulle and listening to Brains Trust on the wireless. She works her ass off for people in need. She takes her fire warden duties incredibly seriously. (She does, eventually, have a fire to put out!) She taught in Italy at one time. She enjoys going to the movies and the flowers in nearby Kensington Gardens. She's horrified by the V1 flying bombs and thinks they're an unanswerable end to modern warfare. She thinks her trips to see her family are totally necessary travel when they are totally not omg stop bullshitting me. That's... pretty much it. Six by god hundred pages of diaries, six years of wartime hardship, and you know nothing about her internal life. It's a bit frustrating.
On the other hand, you do feel you've had six years of office watercooler chit chat. That's exactly what it feels like - everybody has to go over when the sirens went off last night, how tired they are (so it's kind of like now, adulthood is just telling people how tired you are all the time), when the All Clear sounded, where they heard was hit, who might have been killed, how was your trip, what Churchill said, did you hear of anywhere that has fish, etc. And then they do it all again the next day.
I really, really despise office chatter, particularly as performed by deeply tedious people.
I wouldn't have read this on my own - maybe dipped into it a bit, and I've read some good books on the subject (can really recommend How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War by Norman Longmate) but I'll admit that there's something that you'd miss if you didn't give into the daily tedium. At least once a week or so poor Vere will talk about when people say the war will be over, or predict a timeline, and it's never as late as 1945. And I couldn't bear to tell her, even if I could, that rationing won't be over for another nine years after that. I've got an orange in the fruit bowl at home; I'll eat it tonight thinking of her.
Thanks to Appalachian State University of Boone, NC for lending this.
Things I found out looking for pictures for this: a) they have Tiresomely Sexy Halloween Costumes in the UK too, and here I'd thought that was a particularly American affliction, and b) including Sexy Land Girl. I swear I am not making this up.
Pictured: unsexy stirrup pump action
Sooo, even Persephone admits this one is pretty boring. Seriously, their suggested questions include "Most of those who thought Few Eggs ‘hard to get into’ have returned to it and found it a compelling read. What is it that make one want to keep turning the pages?" which is a nice way of saying "well you get used to reading it...."
Few Eggs and No Oranges is Vere Hodgson's London diary from 1940-1945. It isn't personal or introspective at all; it's an edited version of a diary she wrote and sent to family in Africa to keep them abreast of what was going on in the British home front. It's... kinda boring. I'm not saying the nice ladies at Persephone are wrong; there's something compelling about any diary that you've read for long enough to get to know a person. And the boredom is sort of the point; if anything, it's about how you can get used to anything in time. You start out being scared out of your mind when the air raid siren goes and in a few months you report the weather as "a little blitzy".
Vere Hodgson is a pretty businesslike no-nonsense type, except when she isn't - I love how these diarists always bust out with something bizarre when you least expect it. Dear Etty had her "yeah it's totally normal to do some mostly naked wrestling with your therapist", Vere works hard in the charity division of a church of Christian spiritualists. Like, spiritualist spiritualists. Like, the spirit guide of their leader was evidently named Zodiac. People are weird, y'all. But here she is, unmarried and in her 40's, going back and forth between her full time charity work and her fire warden post and lining up at the shops with her ration coupons, very much the Keep Calm and Carry On sort. (Except that she rushes out immediately the next day every time to see what's bombed and what's burned and how bad is it, a ghoulish little bit of tourism that you think would be discouraged but I guess everyone was doing it?)
Common to all these wartime narratives is an increasing focus on food as the war goes on - what could you find, what did you have saved up, what did somebody wink and nod and pass you, what can't be had at any price. Just give up looking for grapes, Vere. You'll never afford them, stop asking!
I just wish it weren't all so impersonal. I'd like to know her better - she's clearly a smart, capable woman. She loves Churchill and de Gaulle and listening to Brains Trust on the wireless. She works her ass off for people in need. She takes her fire warden duties incredibly seriously. (She does, eventually, have a fire to put out!) She taught in Italy at one time. She enjoys going to the movies and the flowers in nearby Kensington Gardens. She's horrified by the V1 flying bombs and thinks they're an unanswerable end to modern warfare. She thinks her trips to see her family are totally necessary travel when they are totally not omg stop bullshitting me. That's... pretty much it. Six by god hundred pages of diaries, six years of wartime hardship, and you know nothing about her internal life. It's a bit frustrating.
On the other hand, you do feel you've had six years of office watercooler chit chat. That's exactly what it feels like - everybody has to go over when the sirens went off last night, how tired they are (so it's kind of like now, adulthood is just telling people how tired you are all the time), when the All Clear sounded, where they heard was hit, who might have been killed, how was your trip, what Churchill said, did you hear of anywhere that has fish, etc. And then they do it all again the next day.
I really, really despise office chatter, particularly as performed by deeply tedious people.
I wouldn't have read this on my own - maybe dipped into it a bit, and I've read some good books on the subject (can really recommend How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War by Norman Longmate) but I'll admit that there's something that you'd miss if you didn't give into the daily tedium. At least once a week or so poor Vere will talk about when people say the war will be over, or predict a timeline, and it's never as late as 1945. And I couldn't bear to tell her, even if I could, that rationing won't be over for another nine years after that. I've got an orange in the fruit bowl at home; I'll eat it tonight thinking of her.
Thanks to Appalachian State University of Boone, NC for lending this.
Things I found out looking for pictures for this: a) they have Tiresomely Sexy Halloween Costumes in the UK too, and here I'd thought that was a particularly American affliction, and b) including Sexy Land Girl. I swear I am not making this up.
Pictured: unsexy stirrup pump action
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