We Are At War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times

We Are At War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times by Garfield, Simon. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780091903879.

The highly-acclaimed diaries of ordinary people’s lives in WWII. Of all the accounts of the Second World War, none are more compelling than the personal diaries of those who lived through it. We Are at War is the story of five everyday folk who, at the brink of chaos, recorded privately on paper their most intimate hopes and fears. Pam Ashford, a woman who keeps her head when all around are losing theirs, writes with comic genius about life in her Glasgow shipping office. Christopher Tomlin, a writing-paper salesman for whom business if booming, longs to be called up like his brother. Eileen Potter organizes evacuations for flea-ridden children, while mother-of-three Tilly Rice is frustrated to be sent to Cornwall. And Maggie Joy Blunt tries day-by-day to keep a semblance of her ordinary life. Entering their world as they lived it, each diary entry is poignantly engrossing. Amid the tumultuous start to the war, these ordinary British people are by turns apprehensive and despairing, spirited and cheerful — and always fascinatingly, vividly real.