Julie Summers' "Our Univited Guests" by Janie Hampton

Trainee agents on the rope bridge across the muddy River Cam 
at Audley End, Essex. ©Polish Underground Movement 

Oxford writer Julie Summers has written another extraordinary book about the realities of life in Britain during the Second World War. ‘Our Uninvited Guests’ focuses on the people who had to leave their homes and start new lives in places where Hitler's Blitz could not reach them. Oxfordshire coped with over 37,000 evacuees moved from more vulnerable areas of southern England. Nobody then had heard the rumour that Hitler would never bomb Oxford, when Blenheim Palace, about 12 miles up the road from Oxford, was colonised by schoolboys.
When in September 1939, Malvern College in Worcestershire was requisitioned for civil servants, the private school was moved into Blenheim Palace. They brought with them 55 van loads of books, iron bedsteads and musical instruments, including 20 pianos. The laundry was converted into physics and biology laboratories, while the riding school became the gymnasium. The windows of all 187 rooms had to be blacked out so that no chink of light could be seen by the Luftwaffe. The boys slept in the state rooms where valuable artworks were covered with board to protect them from stray darts and ink bombs.

Items transported from Malvern College, Worcestershire to Blenheim Palace, 
Oxford shire, included twenty pianos and 400 beds. © Country Life

Pregnant women from the East End of London were evacuated to Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire to give birth to their babies. Still a splendid house, it had been the home of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite British Prime Minister. Lady Melbourne had decorated the principal rooms for her lover, the future George IV. Mothers recovering from childbirth slept in hospital beds in the lavish surroundings of the Prince Regent’s suite, stripped of its red and gold pagoda double bed, but not its beautiful Chinese wallpaper. The new born babies were bathed next to the wine cellar in the basement.

In Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, mothers recover from childbirth in the Prince 
Regent’s suite, decorated in early 19th century Chinese wallpaper. 
© Imperial War Museum 

Summers toured round England and Scotland, finding out the role of Britain's stately homes and country houses. Using extensive research and interviews, she describes in rich detail, life in some of Britain’s greatest country houses which were occupied by people who would otherwise never have seen such opulent surroundings. People from all walks of life often found the splendour and opulence at odds with their needs. The Rothschilds’ magnificent French chateau-inspired Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, housed one hundred children under the age of five evacuated from London. They ate lobster, rabbit curry, and Woolton Pie - a vegetable recipe named after the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton. Over in Warwickshire, Lord Bearsted moved his bank ‘Samuel & Co’ from London to his country home Upton House. There his 23 employees were provided with wellington boots and ate rook pie.
Coleshill House in Oxfordshire was a 17th Century mansion with no heating, no electricity and water pumped by hand. Recruits to the ‘Auxillary Units’ – a secret band of saboteurs preparing for invasion by Germans - lived in the stables. They each received a crash course in unarmed combat, petrol bombs, booby traps and explosives to attack the invading army’s supplies and transport. At night they roamed the surrounding countryside to practice this art of ungentlemanly guerrilla warfare. Over 600 underground operation bases were constructed all over England for the stay-behind saboteurs to attack from behind. Their whereabouts was top secret. Had there been in invasion in 1940, the life expectancy of saboteurs was estimated to be about 15 days.

Operation bases for saboteurs were constructed
underground and their locations kept top secret. 

‘Our Uninvited Guests’ captures the spirit of upheaval when thousands of houses were requisitioned by the government for the armed forces, secret services and government offices as well as vulnerable children, the sick and the elderly, all of whom needed to be housed safely, or secretly. In Essex, Polish special agents were trained in the grounds of Audley End House, a royal palace in the 17th century. In the old nursery and the extensive woods, they learned the skills needed to make their way back into occupied Europe and carry out sabotage and subterfuge.
I have to confess that Summers and I are friends: we go on regular walks with our dogs on the Thames towpath. We support each other in the trials and tribulations of writing social history – the excitement of new discoveries; the brain exhaustion of writing it into a readable book; and the joy of publication. Our books cover similar periods in European history, so we often share ideas and swap contacts. Once we went to interview the same person together - an elderly woman who was both a WWII evacuee (Julie’s interest) and a Brownie Guide (mine). It was fascinating to witness how we extracted quite different stories from the same person. But I’m not the only person who has enjoyed this book, which has been well reviewed. Craig Brown wrote in The Mail On Sunday, 'Julie Summers has an amazing instinct for unearthing good stories and telling quotes.' 'Summers is a good and knowledgeable writer…powerful, emotional stuff' stated The Independent newspaper, while BBC History Magazine said the books is 'A poignant, lingering account. ' 

A student midwife bathes a new born baby next to the wine cellar
at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire. © Imperial War Museum 

 Summers is a former History Girl blogger, and her most well-known book is ‘Jambusters’ a history of the Women’s Institute during the Second World War. This inspired the ITV television series ‘Home Fires’ which ran for two exciting seasons. Sadly, we were all left wondering who had died in the final scene of a plane crashing into a house. We had to content ourselves with the knowledge that the people inside were fictional, and not the real members of a rural Women’s Institute. Summers’ latest thought-provoking and evocative narrative captures a crucial period in the social history of Britain.

‘Our Uninvited Guests- the Secret lives of Britain’s country houses 1939-45',

 published by Simon & Schuster, 2018. 

                 Janie Hampton            Julie Summers

Great-aunts, grandmothers, and women's history, by Gillian Polack

It’s Women’s History Month in Australia (and in the US) and I meant to write a delightful piece about something entirely different, but on Wednesday I took my regular students to see an exhibition on British women’s suffrage. It struck me that, although most women were given the vote in Australia at Federation, women’s lives from that generation that saw all the Suffrage debates – from the moment Australian women got the vote to 1920s when US women could vote and learned how to use it, show that it was only a partial victory.

I could focus on politics for this, or talk about income levels and glass ceilings, but today I’m thinking of grandmothers. Not all grandmothers. Women who took care of spouse, children and households born from the 1890s to the 1910s. Those who were part of these big changes the way I was part of another wave of big changes in the 1960 – they were the first generation expected to blossom. We often think of this period as changing women’s lives. And it did, in many countries in some very important ways. The truth of the everyday wasn’t as glamorous for many, many women.

I often talk about two of my great-aunts, who ran their own business. They were the ultimate glamorous working women in Melbourne, in some ways, for they ran an exclusive shop on an exclusive street and were regularly consulted by the papers about incoming fashion. They were fashionable … and they were hit by the Great Depression. A wonderful roller-coaster set of lives that doesn’t make most books. I put this picture of the arcade their shop was in up on Redbubble the other day, to celebrate them. They can't get books, but they can have t-shirts and journals.

Also, an influential pair of sisters, during their lives. They were forgotten by the press immediately after, however, for women are not expected to leave lasting legacies. A generation later their niece ran a successful business when life proved less than supportive. That was what she did during the day. Her spare time was devoted to arts and crafts, at which she had a real talent. She had to (she told me) work all this out for herself: the family career tradition was not quite that. It was more that women didn’t get much support when things went wrong. My great-aunts’ problem was that they had never married and my aunt’s that she was a widow. All three of them were born during this critical moment in women’s history. All three of them voted.

Popular literature during this period often contains the message that women’s lives were not complicated, that women’s main purpose was to support the men in their lives. The reality is that the vast majority of women’s lives in Britain, Australia, the US and other similar countries were reported to look the way popular literature described them, but they were not. My grandmother divorced and was not given any money to support herself that I know of. She took her cooking talent and made sweets for a living. 

Three sisters of that family earned their way through life. In my generation we were expected to go to university and then earn our way through life, but decades earlier, few women were given that privilege. They were literate (which has been typical of Australia for a fair while now) but left school when it was legal. Some of the males of that same generation went to university and some did not, but it wasn’t until my mother finished school that university was open to women. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that it became open to anyone bright enough and with a good enough high school result. Women who had the vote weren’t allowed to be equal in all things. Not in public image, not in decorum, not in education, and not in work.

When I talk about this to a live audience, there is always someone who says “Men missed out on stuff, too.” This is true. However, the public narratives gave them more choices. If a teenage boy was very bright and wanted to go to university, he could, for instance. For the women in the family, even though the local universities were accepting women into degrees by the time they were old enough to apply… they weren’t encouraged to apply. In fact, quite the opposite. My mother was the first woman (in an educated family) to get a university degree. That wasn’t until the 1950s.

Simple narratives are wonderful. That women got the vote was great. That –  in Australia – Indigenous women were not equal to other women until much later is forgotten in the triumphal account. The everyday life is where we find out whether that simple, triumphant narrative is accurate.

Private lives tell us so much about what actually happened to women and help explain and refine our understanding of those magnificent narratives. For me it’s the difference between those who decided on the suffragette colours and marched with them, and the smaller realty of most of our lives. The big history is important, but it’s not the whole story.

A conference! Australia and historical fiction, by Gillian Polack

My special event for September was the Historical Novel Society of Australasia’s conference. Every two years it happens and every two years it’s very special. I had to skip the evening events, because my life is just a bit fast-paced right now. Over coffee the following mornings I found out how splendid they were. The round table was particularly good, I heard, with people talking about diaspora and change. This set much of the conference up for how fiction and how history fed into the society we know. They’re not independent from our lives. 

Opening ceremony, HNSA, Photo courtesy HNSA

During my first masterclass, this approach came up a lot. We talked about silencing and about what responsibilities writers had and how to be ethical and still write the amazing fiction one dreams of. I seem to be teaching this a lot recently, which is good. 

I love it that so many writers care about living in a better world and don’t just say “This is my dream novel – I’m not interested in finding out how it affects others.” These days more and more writers are asking “How can I know what goes into my fiction. How do I understand what baggage I’m carrying and how do I make active choices to write responsibly?”

It wasn’t just my masterclasses. It was most of the panels I attended, and it was one of the academic sessions, and it was one of the subjects that many people chatted about during breaks and over drinks in the evening. Being a fiction writer has cultural consequences and so many writers are saying “I can write my best work and still be aware of those consequences.” This is one of the reasons I respect writers so very much. Not all writers. Some are still shuttered in a closed world. But so many of the ones I’m working with admit that fiction is an active part of creating culture and that we all have a part to play in the way the world works.

Over the weekend there was a lot of attention paid to developing good writing. Some people donned mail and helmets. Some checked out costume (and Rachel Nightingale wore one of the costumes, for she was the one doing the teaching). There were craft workshops and subject-matter workshops, and manuscript assessments. I brought in some of my teaching objects and we used them in my masterclasses and even in one panel. 

I delivered a paper, photo courtesy HNSA

Linking up the physical world with story is a complex business and it was fascinating to see how different writers reacted to different objects. A group of audience members for that panel were romance writers. When we sat round after the conference had finished and they said “We would’ve reacted differently.” I brought the items out again, and we explored them from a new angle and it was fascinating to see how each writer had perfectly useful approaches to transmuting an object into a part of a story: all of them were valid. For one writer a potsherd wasn’t useful at all, and for another it became a whole story.

What was really interesting was the number of non-writers attending panels that I’d mentally assumed were mainly for writers. Someone asked a question of my panel from the audience and prefaced it with “As a reader…” Australian readers love finding out how writers think and what techniques writers can use.

Discovering history over food, photo courtesy HNSA

We’re living in a difficult historical moment. This kind of thought and questioning give me hope. This conference was very good for my sense of what the future might be if everyone keeps the levels of inquiry and questioning this high. What’s particularly important to me is that novelists and their readers (both!) are taking on this understanding that history is not static. That we interpret the past all the time. That not all interpretations are equally safe for all of us. The interpretation we each choose matters.

This is where organisations like the HNSA make a difference. 

They’re publishing most of the academic papers in November or December, by the way, so you’ll be able to explore some of the topics for yourselves. All the best of the discussion was ad hoc, so my recommendation is that you have a dinner party. I would say that, for I’m back into historical food. Pity my friends…

Miss Fisher and Melbourne, by Gillian Polack

If Phryne Fisher had not been fictional, she probably knew two of my great-aunts. 

Today my thoughts keep returning to Phryne Fisher. I’m just discovering how very popular she is outside Australia. What brought these thoughts to me was not her popularity. It was Table Talk. Table Talk was a Melbourne magazine published from 1885-1939. Wikipedia tells me it absorbed Punch for its last decade or so of its existence. 

Table Talk appears (sort of) in Kerry Greenwood’s Life of Phryne (normally described as detective novels, roughly translated into a TV series) and it appeared in the Polack Saga (my family’s unwritten history). 

Let’s begin with the Sisters Polack. They were spinsters and ran a very exclusive shop in 17-19 Royal Arcade, Melbourne. That’s the arcade looked after by Gog and Magog. I go to the Arcade these days mainly for hot chocolate. It’s still full of the kind of style one associates with Greenwood’s novels. You can see why Phryne would have known the shops there, just by walking down the ground floor, admiring the shop windows. 

Royal Arcade, Melbourne Picture: Gillian Polack 2013

Table Talk consulted with my great-aunts about what styles and fabrics were about to emerge from Europe and somesociety women ordered their tennis dresses there. Possibly not Miss Fisher or her ilk. She might have known them, however, because it was a good place to buy accessories, get changes made to a garment, and possibly to hang out.

This amuses me, for my family is Jewish. So very Jewish that I borrowed from the Polack sisters’ lives (just a smidgeon) to create a scene in The Wizardry of Jewish Women. Which now has a new cover, so let me share that with you. (Today is the Day of the Pictures and the Day of Unexpected Capital Letters and most certainly the Day of Bracketed Thoughts.)

Why is the family near-link amusing? It’s not only because my great-aunts dressed Melbourne so beautifully and I myself am not a sartorical treat. One of Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novels used the Melbourne Jewish community of that time as a setting. 

The lives of her characters are very far removed from the lives of my great-aunts. The Misses Polack spoke no Yiddish and used their raisins to make fruit cake. They ate the family Christmas pudding. No Yiddish, no raisins. Afternoon tea with a silver service. Very Anglo-Australian in their Judaism. Very educated, but not in most of the matters that Greenwood uses in the novel. Their niece was a pianist and Gilbert and Sullivan was more important than Kabbalah. 

I talk about this side of the family a lot and I put it into a novel, because it doesn’t get talked about or written about much in fiction. Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds fits what people think of Australian Judaism much more closely. The Jewish community in Melbourne during that time was mixed and complex and could easily fit both groups, and more.

Images of Melbourne flood my mind whenever I read the Miss Fisher books or watch the TV series. I've lived in Canberra for years, but my childhood included time in Phryne's part of Melbourne, for I lived in a south-eastern suburb. 

An important location for filing Phryne is Ripponlea. Even this building overlaps with my life. Mainly, let me admit, the sort of overlap you get with school excursions. My old school friend (who’s not old, but we’ve known each other for most of our lives) took me there for a recent birthday, in memory of all those times we wandered round the building. 

In the Phryne Fisher series, that single building is used to represent more than one location. I’ve been tested by this ever since the series was first released. Every episode I wanted to ask why this staircase was not considered to be in the same house as the room a scene took place in ten minutes earlier. This means that when I visited last year, I took photographs of all kinds of corners and angles, so that I could anchor myself and not be led astray by filming. Pictures like this.

Picture: Gillian Polack

And this.

Picture: Gillian Polack

It all comes together, though. The past and the present. The film and the reality. I hinted at this in the last picture. The reason we were in Ripponlea that day was to see an exhibition of the costumes from the latest season of Miss Fisher. This means you can decide for yourself if Phryne would have bought a tennis dress from a Polack.

Picture: Gillian Polack

Picture: Gillian Polack

Picture: Gillian Polack