Book Review of Steel Girls at War by Michelle Rawlins

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(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

A city, workplace community and families under the stress of war.

If the previous titles in this series seemed a bit rose-tinted, it’s perhaps because the opening months of WW2 actually were a bit rose-tinted. Dire pre-war predictions of massive civilian casualties hadn’t yet come to pass (and in the UK they never quite did) but the phoney war lulled many people into no longer expecting anything really bad to happen -and then, of course, it did. This book in the series covers the summer of 1940 when the really bad stuff happened and it didn’t look as if Hitler would ever be stopped in his tracks. (NB: even winning the battle of Britain didn’t immediately change this perception, no matter how it’s presented in the feature film of that campaign.)

This story is about what it was like for real people on the receiving end of both real bombing raids and the more shapeless threat of invasion and conquest that lay behind them. And it’s well told:

A woman already driven to the point of collapse with worry about the fate of her husband, missing in France, learns that he’s now in hospital in Portsmouth: one of the cities now being bombed. The psychological impact on the man in question of his frying-pan to fire experience being well described. Another woman and her daughter are coping with a husband and father still traumatised by his experiences in the first world war. Food is short, unless you have somewhere (and the time) to grow your own.

Other characters are still loving and hoping and to some extent this is what allows those in a worse situation to feel a bit of hope themselves.

The author sets out to show how destructive selfishness, even excusable selfishness, can be in high stress, high-risk situations and that, I fear, is a lesson we all need to learn, because the coping mechanisms of nineteen-forties British society have largely been suppressed and dismantled in the present day.

If, in the earlier books in this series, the levels of neighbourly love and community spirit seemed absurdly high to the modern reader, the summer of 1940 was when those “absurdly” high levels of neighbourly love proved to be just barely enough.

Steel Girls at War is published in the UK by HQ on the 31^st of August 2023

Book Review of Steel Girls on the Home Front by Michelle Rawlins

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The war in 1940 without the benefit of any hindsight or strategic overview.

 

This is well-researched historical fiction, but the author has done a good job of finding out (and imagining) what her characters would have known and thought about the early stages of the second world war rather than conducting detailed research into the big picture at any particular stage. Everything is changing because of how the war is going in Norway, but this is all about working class people in Sheffield and they had only the vaguest idea just what it was that was happening in Norway. (Non-fiction works that I have read suggest that in early 1940 the British War Cabinet didn’t really know either. It was only after the surviving Norwegian forces were based on British soil that cooperation and information-sharing really began to happen.)

When the same disaster happens in France, then the Cabinet does know, because British forces have been there in strength for long enough to establish proper communications and the distances are shorter. This magnifies the shock when the public are actually told the worst because their new Prime Minister actually knows how bad things are.

Most of this book is about how the women who work for Vickers in Sheffield cope with not knowing where most of their menfolk are and how much danger they are in. They cope by unselfishly looking after each other and the few men they have left as best they can -and by keeping as busy as they can, not only to “do their bit” and help the war effort, but also to stop themselves thinking about what might happen. (Incidentally, in both NAZI Germany and the Soviet Union the ruling party took control of neighbourliness and social cohesion at every level through national party organisations or local party committees. Britain may have benefited from not having a ruling party as such during the second world war because it ruled out an entire category of fatal mistakes.)

But then there is the question of how such brave and kind women, mostly quite young, make the transition from coping with the unknown to coping with the worst. And that appears to be a question for the next book in this series.

Steel Girls on the Home Front by Michelle Rawlins is published in the UK by HQ on the 18^th of August 2022.