Doodlebugs, Gas Masks and Gum. Children's Voices from the Second World War, Christina Rex, Amberley, 2012, paperback, 192 pp. ISBN 9781445607023

This paperback edition of a well-received hardback edition published in 2009 presents wartime Britain ‘through the eyes of children who were there'. The author, who was two years old when war broke out and eight when VE Day was celebrated, has collected the reminiscences of her own childhood friends, supplemented by researching published memoirs and contemporary newspapers. The blurb on the cover of the book is predominantly upbeat suggesting that for children the era of the Second World War was ‘a time of great excitement' with ‘the thrill' of seeing ‘soldiers and tanks in the streets, Anderson shelters built in back gardens and barbed-wire sprouting on beaches ... spectacular dogfights ... the blitz and masses of shrapnel to collect, searchlights lighting up the night sky' and the ‘arrival of American servicemen and their inexhaustible supplies of chewing gum', concluding that ‘From Dunkirk to D-Day, through Doodlebugs to Victory, there was hardly a dull moment and remarkably little fear for children as they learned, collected and played under these bizarre circumstances'. However the author's introduction offers a more balanced appraisal  of  some of the hazards and realities of war recalling that ‘we were bombed, shot at, some of us suffered occupation; we lost our homes to high explosive; sometimes horrifyingly, we lost family members or neighbours to fighting or to bombing; we were participants in the huge social upheaval of mass evacuation' recognizing that her own childhood may not have been typical of every child's experience but concluding nonetheless that ‘above all we were children and those included in these pages were happy despite everything'.

The book is well structured moving broadly chronologically from ‘Declaration and Preparation' through two chapters on ‘Evacuation' ‘Education', ‘Health and Medical Care' and even ‘A Hedgehog Called Doodlebug and Other Snippets of Daily Life in Wartime' to ‘Victory, Defeat and Homecoming', rounded off with a chapter focusing on ‘Aftermath' and an ‘Epilogue'. The detailed text is enhanced by over eighty illustrations, many from private collections and predominantly from family albums, published here for the first time, and a selection of personal recommendations for further reading ‘from the writer's own library'. It fulfils its worthy intention ‘to leave for my grandsons a true account of what life was like' specifically for children, if circumscribed by the parameters of the experiences of those represented, who are perhaps drawn disproportionately from the south and east of England, despite occasional testimonies from Coventry, Doncaster, Hull, Liverpool and even some testimonies from central Europe such as that of Anna Piper (Anne Giesser, born 1937, Stuttgart) who recalled ‘listening to Hitler making a speech on the radio, the voice never since being forgotten' on the Sunday Britain declared war on Germany. In a year commemorating the centenary of the First World War it is salutary to remind children of its most obvious outcome two decades after the signing of the peace treaties at the end of the war in its sequel, the Second World War, which one contributor's testimony cited in the chapter entitled ‘Aftermath' recalled left her ‘for decades' after 1945 having ‘nightmares about Germans' and being frightened by ‘the sound of planes at night'.