Roger Atkinson - Blackout, Austerity and Pride

Blackout, Austerity and Pride
Life in the 1940s
is a memoir, written primarily
from actual experience. It tells
how an alert and intelligent boy,
effectively orphaned at the age
of 13, sets out to gain a foothold
in life. Aided by some resourceful
women, he unites a thirst for
knowledge with a growing passion
for places and buses and a
strong sense of duty.
The autobiographical elements
are deftly woven into a
more general background narrative
of wartime and post-war
life. The work gives valuable
and thoughtful insights into a
wide range of topics, including,
evacuation, life in the blackout
and popular songs, the universal
use of bus services, the absolute
overall authority of government,
yet a strong presence
of municipal pride. It embraces
some long-lived consequences
of the Great War, in the form
of cripples, spinsters and unemployment,
as a background to
his childhood; then in his teens,
service in the army, GIs in Britain,
ammunition dump clearance,
all-in wrestling, courtship
and attitudes to sex as well as the
thrill of holidays in France when
the Continent had been for years
unknown save as a battlefield.
The narrative takes the reader
to many parts of Britain: Yorkshire,
Lancashire, Norwich,
Aldershot, Edinburgh, Doune
and Aberdeen, Birmingham,
Wolverhampton, Letchworth
and post-war London. Finally it
introduces the impressive functioning
of a government department
using methods that now
seem antediluvian.
ISBN 978-0-9933007-0-7
www.memoir1940s.org.uk