The contents of this
book might be of interest to a wider readership than it is going to
get, due to the title and marketing.
This is a compilation
of letters from a young woman to her young man, mostly in wartime,
and ordinarily that would relegate it to the “social document” or
romance shelves. But Miss Alexander tells her beloved, Gershon
Ellenbogen, all sorts of anecdotes from a social circle that included
cabinet ministers, senior military officers and captains of industry,
as well as important academic figures. Having got a first in English
at Cambridge University, Miss Alexander has an endless supply of
quotes (often very funny indeed), not only for her letters, but for
everyday conversation. Although it was the air raid precautions
minister, Sir John Anderson, rather than her studies, who supplied
her with “shut that book, Mary and pay attention to the air-raid.”
She admires the
Labour politician Arthur Greenwood, who “spoke for England” in
September 1939 when urged to do so by Conservative backbencher Leo
Amery. (Less publicly, it was Greenwood, too, who swung Churchill’s
cabinet behind Churchill and fighting on after the disasters of 1940.
Greenwood’s position being that Britain did not have any choice
other than fighting on, because any deal done with Hitler at that
stage would be hugely disadvantageous from the outset and very easily
broken at any moment that suited the Nazis. As Vichy France soon
found out, on both counts.)
Her first wartime
job is to work as third PA (which she translates as “Public
Adorer”) to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha,
another historical figure who perhaps deserves more attention than he
gets. There is an irony here, because the book opens with Miss
Alexander in hospital recovering from a road traffic accident, in
which Gershon was driving -and the law he fell foul of was probably
introduced by Leslie when he was Transport Secretary.
She is less fond of
Michael Foot, who was still a prominent politician in my own
lifetime, with a habit of rubbing an awful lot of people up the wrong
way but occasionally putting into words what the nation thought and
felt, as at the outbreak of the Falklands War. When, as editor of the
Evening Standard, Foot responds to the King of Denmark’s
announcement that he and the Royal Family would all proudly wear the
Star of David (in response to the German occupiers imposing this on
Danish Jews), Miss Alexander is impressed and thinks that Foot’s
call for the world to show their appreciation of the Jewish
contribution to world culture, came from deep conviction.
She also makes
friends with Orde and Lorna Wingate, telling Gershon that Captain
Wingate is a genius who will either be court-martialled or promoted
to general (in a later letter she substitutes “Field Marshal”)
and that would equate with what many people expected of him at the
time. But she also shows great empathy with Lorna Wingate, who shares
her own anguish at not being with the man she loves, only it’s
worse for Lorna because her man is famously leading prolonged
operations deep behind Japanese lines. To study Miss Alexander’s
social circle is to study history in the making, so this collection
of letters is not just a love story.
To some in the 21st
century, Miss Alexander’s standards of sexual conduct will seem
antiquated if not absurd, but she sees a reality here: that women who
try to exercise unusual sexual or social freedom are at risk of
ending up in the hands of predatory men best described in modern
idiom as “sociopaths”. This happens several times in her own
1940s social circle and I’ve known it to happen to several 21st
century women of my acquaintance. Some of the abusive conduct she
describes would be outrageous and indeed criminal, even now, and it
might provide some food for thought. (Modern studies suggest that as
many as 9% of the male population are sociopaths and that proportion
is not inconsistent with the number of Miss Alexander’s female
friends who come to grief.)
Love in the Blitz is
published by William Collins on the 30th of April 2020
