LAURENCE REES: The second area I wanted to talk about was the huge social effect of conscription. Was there any systematic understanding of how women and children would cope with the sudden disappearance of their father or their husband?

JULIET GARDINER: There was no work whatsoever done on that or the effect it had. There was some retrospective work was done, but I think it was almost the same as with the evacuation; people hadn’t given thought to that, it was regarded as something that was a physical, mechanical, necessity. The psychological effects on both children and families was really disregarded and there was very, very little help. It got a bit better during the war, though there was very little help either for the soldiers or for the families left behind and, of course, for families it was often very tough not only emotionally and psychologically but also practically, because if your husband was conscripted into the army his pay would often have been a lot less than it had been in peacetime. Now, if he was lucky, if he was a civil servant or worked for a very large or munificent company, they might make up his wages, but if he worked in a small grocers shop or something they couldn’t do that. So there was a lot of poverty and again the problem was that a lot of schools shut down, so if your child hadn’t been evacuated for whatever reason it might be running pretty much wild on the street.

A lot of women were having to go out to work, partly for patriotic reasons, but much more because they needed more income. So children were often not being properly parented, the father would be away, the mother might be at work, and virtually no provision was made for them. There were some local initiatives, so the WVS might arrange something possibly, or the local scout master or the vicar. But there was nothing coherent, and as for studies, absolutely nothing.

LAURENCE REES: What about the effects of conscription on the relationship between husbands and wives?

JULIET GARDINER: I think there are enormous problems. I think men and women didn’t understand each other’s war. Men felt that women didn’t understand their war, they didn’t understand what it was like to fight and the dangers and this sort of thing, and women thought that men thought that they were just leading their lives just as they always had, and of course they weren’t. There were all the dangers of bombing, and there was rationing and blackout and there were all the deprivations and hardships of war which I think a lot of men didn’t understand and, as I say, they felt that women didn’t either. And there was a bit of work done in the army because the authorities got increasingly worried about things like VD rates but also about marriage break-ups. A man in the Far East would get a 'Dear John' letter saying the marriage was over.

So they did begin to think about this a bit more then and I think somebody made a report, a medical officer in the Middle East, saying that they reckoned that two years was about as much separation as a marriage could take, and after that the woman left at home was likely to sort of start to drift and the commitment would become elastic - it just seemed more unreal somehow. And also, of course, a lot of couples married in haste at the beginning of the war and they married quite young, and then they hardly knew the person, and they’d come home on leave and it would be very, very difficult and very, very fraught. I don’t think I’ve spoken to anybody ever who hasn’t said what a strain the war put on their marriage. A lot of them survived, I’m sure some grew stronger as a result, but it put tremendous strain on people’s marriages and relationships generally.

LAURENCE REES: And there was no attempt made by the army to say, well, this is a married man, we’ve got to make sure that they at least get home every six months or so?

JULIET GARDINER: No, there really wasn’t. I mean, to be fair, I’m sure that if they were stationed in England they would get leave. But leave was often very insensitively handled. I mean somebody would get 48 hours leave at the last moment, when they hadn’t got time to get home, or the wife would be working and wouldn’t have enough notice and all this sort of thing. I mean, there really was very little thought on the whole about the family. Towards the end of the war it got easier to get divorced. There were some sort of legal systems about this, but I think the support systems for the family during the war were absolutely minimal, partly just through ignorance, and partly because people were not so sensitive to emotions and psychological effects as they are now, and I think partly because there was the feeling that there’s a war on, we’ll put all that to one side and we’ll get on with it and we’ll win the war and then we’ll sort it out when it’s all over.

LAURENCE REES: And that report you quote saying the women left behind can stand two years of absence; how could they work that out?

JULIET GARDINER: Don’t forget all mail was censored, so they’d been reading a lot of letters. I’m not saying it’s absolutely scientific, but I’m prepared to accept that it was pretty informed, and after all if you had a good commanding officer who might be somebody a man can go and talk to, or to his chaplain or someone like that. In an odd way the army was more likely to know about the problems in a family than the home front. Again, the WVS would sometimes make reports about how difficult it was for women and I think it was also somehow the idea that if a man went away and he was at war then there was a slightly wild oats feeling. For the women there was absolutely not that, you know there was the idea that you had to keep the home fire burning, whatever, and so I think it was actually, in an odd way, harder for women, the sort of psychological, emotional, difficulties that they went through. And obviously they probably had family and friends around them, but there probably wasn’t the understanding. There was a great deal of censure of women. Whereas with men somehow….. they were issued with condoms and, you know, it was a war and soldiers will be soldiers and when you get back home it would all be different.