Good books about domestic life in Britain during & after WWII?

I’m becoming very interested in the domestic aspects of life in Britain during and after WWII–particularly in the ration system and in the evacuation of children to the countryside, but just because those are the two issues I have heard the most about. Can anyone recommend some good *non-fiction * books on this subject?

Bump. I’m kind of interested myself.

For one aspect of British life at that time I highly recommend An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War .

I can recommend Our Hidden Lives, a book compiled from the diaries that four ordinary people kept for the Mass Observation Project.

I see from that link that the author has other books on the same lines.

Anything by Juliet Gardiner.

Well, not quite, as she’s written on other subjects as well, but she’s the big name in the field, well-regarded by professional historians but who nevertheless writes for a wider audience.

I take my pupils on an annual school trip which includes visiting a WW2 museum.
Obviously I don’t have anything like the wealth of information in a well researched book, but the exhibits included Andersen shelters built in gardens to use during bombing raids.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/categories/c54690/index.shtml

(N.B. the BBC has a section devoted to people’s memories - undoubtedly a reliable source)

Once the class had an impromptu chat with a couple of elderly lady pensioners. During the war, they worked in an ammunition factory, checking for quality. The food was very basic and they had to use some ingenuity as even basic ingredients were in short supply.

Seconding aldiboronti’s recommendation of An Underworld at War, which I think is an excellent read, and adding this one.

I know the OP asked for non-fiction, but… my MIL read “Land Girls” by Angela Huth and really liked it; it’s about a novel about city girls who were sent out into the countryside to do agricultural work while the farmers went to war. PBS’s “The 1940 House” is an interesting look at domestic life in the UK, with a modern British family trying to live as a family would in the early years of World War II. John Boorman had a pretty good movie about his childhood during the Blitz - “Hope and Glory,” IIRC? And PBS’s “Foyle’s War” series is an interesting look at life on the homefront, as seen through the eyes of a world-weary police detective in Hastings; his son is an RAF pilot.

More fiction: The Machine Gunners, a children’s book, and Small Island, which is a superb novel about the interaction between whites and Jamaican servicemen in the UK during the war, with lots of well-researched domestic detail.

the 1940’s House based on the TV series.

Some part of my brain is telling me that our very own Eve wrote a book about Britian during WWII. You might want to ask her.

My East End is a good read. Obviously it’s really a history of the East End, but there’s quite a lot about WWII and the evacuations, and it does concentrate on domestic life. Very enjoyable!

Oh, here’s a long shot: a children’s novel. Dawn of fear, by Susan Cooper, is about a little boy during the war; there’s lots of domestic detail, and the story is really autobiographical–the author just changed herself into a boy and wrote down her own memories. Just in case…

If you’re open to fiction, check out Good Night, Mr. Tom, by Michelle Magorian. It’s about an 11-year-old boy evacuated to the English countryside on the eve of WWII. Wonderful and touching story.

Oh, snap. I just saw that you’d specified non-fiction. Still, for others reading this thread, it’s a damn fine book I recommended!

Wrong thread.

Keeping in mind the family is out to lunch, Mary Lovell’s biography of the Mitford sisters covers a large stretch of time, and pays a lot of attention to the war years and just after. I think the most bizarre thing about the Mitford bunch is that their experiences were a blend of typical things that happened to many folks during the war years, as well as stuff that is stranger than fiction.

Someone recently recommended Nella Last’s War which is another of the published diaries that came out of the Mass Observation Project that WotNot mentioned, although I haven’t read it yet myself.

Nella Last’s War has just been made into a very successful TV Drama. Look out for that, if you haven’t seen it already. It goes under the title Housewife 49

Oooooooh…this is driving me crazy. 'Cause I can’t remember the name. But they’re a very interesting book (acually a couple) about the deportation of English kids out of England to keep them out from under the bombs. Some of them came here. My sort of FIL came here. (New England). That’s why my SO came here 40 years later. Anyway I got my sort of FIL the book for xmas. Google it. it’s an interesting story.

Persephone Books has a great catalog full of awesome books that they love, and a lot of them are from that time period from a female perspective and have tons of domestic stuff in them. There are some diaries as well. www.persephonebooks.co.uk