The War Between and Beyond the Wars

Offers an intimate social biography of a London childhood between the World Wars, intertwining personal trauma, cultural denial, and collective memory to reveal how individual lives are inseparable from historical and social upheaval.

This book explores a social biography of a London childhood growing up in a turbulent middle-class London household between World War I and World War II. Based on extensive interviews, the book weaves together how the world in which the child grew up was both created by and mirrors the social and political turmoil of her times, inviting readers to recognize the inseparability of our lives from their contexts. Central to the book’s theme are the contradictory and multifaceted ways in which personal and cultural denial, in the face of layers of violence, enables individuals and entire societies to simultaneously tolerate the intolerable as an act of self-preservation, while also perpetuating unspeakable sufferings. This individual and collective denial is also linked to intergenerational trauma and the complex ways in which what we experience is inseparable from how we learn to remember (and forget) to interpret and then speak about, or not as is so often the case, what we have experienced. In addition, the book challenges the traditional division between the biographer and their subject, in that this author is both a sociologist and the daughter of the child, who at the time of being interviewed was at the end of her life and is now deceased. Thus, the book offers an unprecedented level of intimacy into the protagonist’s life and gives new insights into not only England’s most challenging period but also the prices paid by all during that time, including even her youngest inhabitants. It also achieves this intimacy by including short memoirs by the protagonist about her childhood and in so doing adds to the complexity and layering of memories, as well as the ways and means in which we choose to share them. Finally, questions are explored as to the complex interplay between personal and collective memory, including memories of trauma and their ongoing roles in individual and collective identity construction and maintenance, as well as exploring pathways for individual and collective healing.