Millions Like Us (76 page)

54. Celebrating VJ-day in Aberdeen.

55. Christmas 1946: GI brides and their babies await passage to their new homes.

56. Happy holidays in the long, hot, post-war summer of 1947.

57. and 58. Frances Faviell; an old woman shovelling debris in the Russian Zone of Berlin. Faviell and her husband lived in the traumatised German capital from 1946 until 1949. She described ‘the grim streets with their huge mountains of rubble and mile upon mile of yawning open ruins’.

59. Vicar’s wife and activist Irene Lovelock (
centre
), flanked by two other leaders of the British Housewives’ League.

60. The harvest of peace, July 1948: the inauguration of the National Health Service.

61. Happy ever after? Helen Vlasto’s wedding day, 28 November 1946.

62. Peter and Phyllis Willmott in 1948, at the start of their forty-two-year marriage.

63. Laura Jesson chooses home and hearth in Noël Coward’s
Brief Encounter.

Appendix: Military and Civilian Casualties among Women 1939–1945

Women’s Auxiliary Services

Civilians
^*

*
figures include female Civil Defence workers.

Figures from: ‘Command Paper 6832 – Strength and Casualties of the Armed Forces and Auxiliary Services of the United Kingdom 1939 to 1945’, in W. Franklin Mellor, ed.,
History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Medical Series: Casualties and Medical Statistics
(Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1972), pp. 834–9.

Notes on Sources

The following notes give only principal sources consulted and are firmly aimed at the general reader rather than the academic. For all publication details please refer to the Select Bibliography on
page 480
.

At the risk of disappointing lovers of statistics, I have not credited the use of every figure throughout the book; statistical research on the Second World War is readily available. My principal statistical references derive from the following books:

Calder, Angus,
The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945
.

Halsey, A. H.,
Trends in British Society since 1900: A Guide to the Changing Social Structure of Britain
.

Howlett, Peter,
Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War
.

Kynaston, David,
Austerity Britain 1945–51
.

Longmate, Norman,
How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War
.

Noakes, Lucy,
Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex 1907–1948
.

Summerfield, Penny,
Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict
.

Winter, J. M.,
‘The Demographic Consequences of the War’
, in H. L. Smith, ed.,
War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War
.

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina,
Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–1955
.

Certain sources recur throughout the book; in such cases I have annotated them, for the sake of brevity, with abbreviations as follows: