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Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London, 1939–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Abstract

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Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2009

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References

1 Lancaster, Osbert, All Done from Memory (Boston, 1953), 3Google Scholar.

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3 See Bourke, Joanna, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History,” History Workshop Journal 55 (Spring 2003): 111–33Google Scholar; Scott, Anne and Kosso, Cynthia, eds., Fear and Its Representation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Turnhout, 2002)Google Scholar; Muir, Edward, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Taylor, Bruce, “The Enemy Within and Without: An Anatomy of Fear on the Spanish Mediterranean Littoral,” in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. Naphy, William G. and Roberts, Penny (Manchester, 1997), 7899Google Scholar; Naphy, William G., Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague-Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps, c. 1530–1640 (Manchester, 2002)Google Scholar; and Wood, Andy, “Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (March 2006): 803–26Google Scholar.

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6 See Thoms, David, “The Blitz, Civilian Morale and Regionalism, 1940–1942,” in War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two Britain, ed. Kirkham, Pat and Thoms, David (London, 1995), 3–12Google Scholar; McLaine, Ian, Ministry of Morale (Boston, 1979)Google Scholar; and McKary, Robert, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester, 2002)Google Scholar.

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10 Nineteenth-century urban dangers could be construed as physical, moral, or political. See Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1851 and 1861)Google Scholar; Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar; Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar; Brodie, Marc, “Artisans and Dossers: The 1886 West End Riots and the East End Casual Poor,” London Journal 24, no. 2 (1999): 3450Google Scholar; Dreher, Nan, “The Virtuous and the Verminous: Turn of the Century Moral Panics in London's Public Parks,” Albion 29, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 246–67Google Scholar; and Otter, Christopher, “Cleansing and Clarifying: Technology and Perception in Nineteenth-Century London,” Journal of British Studies 43, no. 1 (January 2004): 4064Google Scholar.

11 Control of Maps Order 4 July 1940, made by the secretary of state under Regulation 4C of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939, The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), MEPO 2/6336. The order was revoked on 31 January 1944, after the threat of invasion had clearly passed.

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14 25 August 1940: “I am burying another tin box, containing my diaries for the first year of the war; Mortimer the gardener is again my accomplice.” Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London, 1967), 264.

15 For more on civilian diaries during the war, see Bell, Amy, London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London Blitz (London, 2008)Google Scholar. The survival of so many British diaries is testament to war conditions and the Allied victory. Very few German civilian diaries survive, in part because of greater property damage and displacement in Germany during and after the war. Those that survive were kept by anti-Nazi resisters, such as Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Ursula von Kardorff, and Marie Vassiltchikov. The survival of ghetto diaries of European Jews, such as those of David Sierakowiak in Lodz, Adam Czernniakow, and Chaim Kaplan in Warsaw and David Kahane in Lvov, as well as Anne Frank's famous diary written in hiding in Amsterdam, are testament to the drive to record, to bear witness, and to ensure survival in the most dire circumstances.

16 Diarist 5278, 3 August 1940, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, Falmer (hereafter cited as MOA). While all diarists who wrote for Mass Observation were and are guaranteed anonymity, Olivia Cockett's family has agreed for her diary to be published and her identity to become known. See Cockett, Olivia, Love and War in London: A Woman's Diary, 1939–1942, ed. Malcolmson, Robert W. (Waterloo, 2005)Google Scholar.

17 “The Girl with the Golden Trumpet,” an ad for “kruschen,” Daily Express, 9 September 1940, back page.

18 Diarist 5278, 29 August 1940, MOA.

19 Diarist 5244, November 1940, MOA.

20 Miss V. Bawtree, 10 November 1940, diary 91/5/1, Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents, London (hereafter cited as IWM).

21 Marie Lawrence, diary, 26 August 1940, Richmond Local Studies Archive, London.

22 Even children noted the link between fear and the stomach; in 1942 three-and-a-half-year-old David said to his carers, “The sirens are eating me up.” This is quoted in Anna Freud in collaboration with Burlingham, Dorothy, The Writings of Anna Freud, vol. 3, Infants without Families: Reports on the Hampstead Nurseries, 1939–1945 (New York, 1973), 278Google Scholar.

23 M. Mogridge, 1942, memoir 85/19/1, IWM.

24 Miss Joyce Weiner, 24 November 1940, diary 77/176/1, IWM.

25 Of the four V-1s launched, only one reached London, hitting a bridge over Gore Road, Bow (Norman Longmate, The Doodlebugs: The Story of the Flying Bombs [London, 1981], 94).

26 Garlinski, Jósef, Hitler's Last Weapons: The Underground War against the V1 and V2 (London, 1978), 167Google Scholar.

27 ibid., 168.

28 ibid., 13. See also Hinsley, F. H. and Simpkins, C. A. G., British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 4, Security and Counter-Intelligence (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

29 Longmate, Norman, Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (London, 1985), 201Google Scholar.

30 S. M. S. Woodcock, 2 November 1944, diary, 87/26/1, IWM.

31 Longmate, Hitler's Rockets, 382.

33 S. M. S. Woodcock, 16 June 1944, diary, 87/36/1, IWM.

34 Miss R. E. Uttin, 14 July 1944, diary, 88/50/1, IWM.

35 Miss Caryl Brahms, 4 July 1944, diary, 2427 Con Shelf, IWM.

36 G. Inward, n.d., memoir, 97/21/1, IWM.

37 John L. Sweetland, n.d., memoir, 17/21/1, IWM.

38 D. Lord, n.d., memoir, 91/19/1, IWM.

39 Miss Florence Speed, entries written in June and July 1944, diary, 86/45/2, IWM.

40 Miss Vivienne Hall, 19–23 June 1944, diary, DS/MISC/88 and Con Shelf, IWM.

41 Miss Vivienne Hall, 27 June 1944, diary, DS/MISC/88, IWM.

42 Miss G. Thomas, 23 June 1944, diary, 90/30/1, 44, IWM.

43 Miss G. Thomas, 28 July 1944, diary, 90/30/1, IWM.

44 As she wrote in an entry of 12 December 1944, what Miss Thomas was most afraid of was not death but a “terrible death,” such as being buried alive. As a nurse, she had also seen many severe wounds, and her fears had a visual library of images to inform them.

45 See Newcombe, Nora and Lerner, Jeffrey C., “Britain between the Wars: The Historical Context of Bowlby's Theory of Attachment,” Psychiatry 45, no. 1 (February 1982): 112Google Scholar; and Richards, Graham D., “Britain on the Couch: The Popularization of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1918–1940,” Science in Context 13, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 183230Google Scholar.

46 Glover, War, Sadism and Pacifism, 106.

47 See Limentani, A., “The Psychoanalytic Movement during the Years of the War (1939–1945),” International Review of Psychoanalysis 16, no. 3 (1989): 313Google Scholar; and Holder, Alex, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and the Psychoanalysis of Children and Adolescents (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

48 Glover, War, Sadism and Pacifism. The clinic had twenty analysts on staff, including John Bowlby and Melitta Schmideberg, Melanie Klein's daughter.

49 Dicks, Henry Victor, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic (London, 1970), 99Google Scholar.

50 Miller, Edward, The Neuroses in War (London, 1940), 226–27Google Scholar.

51 Dicks, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, 95.

52 See Freud in collaboration with Burlingham, Infants without Families.

53 See his childcare guide written for the staff at the clinic: Blatz, William E., Understanding the Young Child (New York, 1944)Google Scholar; also his Hostages to Peace: Parents and the Children of Democracy (New York, 1940). See also Raymond, Jocelyn Moyter, The Nursery World of Dr. Blatz (Toronto, 1991)Google Scholar.

54 Janis, Irving L., Air War and Emotional Stress (Ann Arbor, MI, 1963)Google Scholar. See also Levitt, Martin L., “The Psychology of Children: Twisting the Hull-Birmingham Survey to Influence British Aerial Strategy in World War Two,” Psychologie und Geschichte 7, no. 1 (May 1995): 4459Google Scholar.

55 Glover, Edward, “Notes on the Psychological Effects of War Conditions on the Civilian Population,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 22 (1941): 132–46Google Scholar.

56 Phillips, Adam, “Bombs Away,” History Workshop Journal 45 (Spring 1998): 183–98, 197. See Philip Zeigler, London at War (New York, 1995) for more on the “Myth of the Blitz.”Google Scholar

57 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, “Anxiety at a Time of Crisis,” History Workshop Journal 45 (Spring 1998): 171–82, 172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Dicks, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, 114.

59 See also Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day (Londin, 1949)Google Scholar; Greene, GrahamThe End of the Affair (London, 1951)Google Scholar; and Hanley, James, No Directions (London, 1946)Google Scholar.

60 Rau, Petra, “The Common Frontier: Fictions of Alterity in Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day and Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear,” Literature and History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 3156Google Scholar. See also Glendinning, Victoria, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Bowen, Elizabeth, The Mulberry Tree, ed. Lee, Hermione (London, 1986)Google Scholar; and Greene, Graham, Ways of Escape (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

61 For other critical readings of The Ministry of Fear, see Diemert, Brian, Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s (Montreal, 1996)Google Scholar; Stewart, Victoria, “The Auditory Uncanny in Wartime London: Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear,” Textual Practice 18, no. 1 (March 2004): 6581Google Scholar; and DeCoste, Damon Marcel, “Modernism's Shell-Shocked History: Amnesia, Repetition, and the War in Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear,” Twentieth Century Literature 45, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 428–52Google Scholar.

62 Greene, Graham, The Ministry of Fear (New York, 1982), 20Google Scholar.

63 ibid., 25.

64 ibid., 17.

65 ibid., 205.

66 ibid., 259–60.

67 ibid., 72, 38.

68 ibid., 66.

69 ibid., 93.

70 ibid., 105, 188.

71 ibid., 182.

72 Diarist 5443, 13 October 1944, MOA.

73 Greene, Ministry of Fear, 68.

74 ibid., 73

75 This quotation is from the preface to the American version of The Demon Lover and Other Stories (London, 1945), retitled as Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories (New York, 1946). This preface was later republished in Lee's collection, The Mulberry Tree, 95, 97.

76 Bowen, Elizabeth, “The Demon Lover,” republished in Look at All Those Roses: Short Stories (London, 1951), 80Google Scholar.

77 ibid., 81–82.

78 ibid., 83.

79 ibid., 84.

80 ibid., 84.

81 ibid., 86.

82 ibid., 87.

83 Calder, Robert L., “‘A More Sinister Troth’: Elizabeth Bowen's ‘The Demon Lover’ as Allegory,” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 9197Google Scholar, 96. Other interpretations have interpreted the demon lover to be a figment of Mrs. Drover's imagination or the story as a conventional murder mystery. See Hughes, Douglas A., “Cracks in the Psyche: Elizabeth Bowen's `The Demon Lover,’” Studies in Short Fiction 10, no. 4 (Fall 1973): 411–13Google Scholar; Fraustino, Daniel V., “The Demon Lover: Psychosis or Seduction?Studies in Short Fiction 17, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 483–87Google Scholar; and Parsons, Deborah, “Souls Astray: Elizabeth Bowen's Landscape of War,” Women: A Cultural Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 2432Google Scholar.