Love and War

I check the bookshelves in our town's four charity shops most weeks. Not that I have need or space for more books but because bibliophilia is an incurable disease. Now and again something seizes my attention and I have to buy it. The books only cost a pound, or less.

Love & War in London (published in 2008 at £20, pristine condition) was one such. It's the Mass Observation Wartime Diary of Olivia Cockett. Mass Observation was a research project initiated by the anthropologist, Tom Harrisson, that recruited 'ordinary people' to record the experience of civilians in World War Two. Mostly women (for obvious reasons) the participants submitted diaries of their daily lives and thoughts, whether at home bringing up families and trying to make ends meet, or employed in war work, shops, factories and so on. 

Olivia Cockett was living at home with her parents in SE London and working as a clerk in Central London when the war started.   Aged 27, she had been romantically involved with an older, married man for several years and parts her diary are astonishingly frank about their sexual relationship. She was a highly intelligent,  observant and reflective person (and later in life reached a senior position in the Civil Service.)

As I started to read I became enthralled with Olivia's daily life and observations of London's descent into wartime austerity, destruction and horror.  They so much echoed my mother's letters written to my father on her visits home. I started to find uncanny parallels between my mother and Olivia: they were only 3 years apart in age, both were in love with older married men (my father, like Olivia's Bill, was 17 years my mother's senior although, unlike Bill, separated from his wife), and both had a knack for descriptive writing and candid personal insight. Then I read  that Olivia's first job had been at The Times Book Club in Central London; I audibly gasped - my mother had worked there too. The Times Book Club was a posh lending library and shop for readers able to pay a yearly subscription to order books of their choice to be sent out on the day of publication. Virginia Woolf and other of her ilk were members, and books were also sent overseas to  print-hungry intellectuals in distant colonial outposts. It was a genteel place for well-read young ladies to enter the world of employment -  although neither my mother nor Olivia Cockett were particularly genteel in their private lives. 

I don't know whether Olivia and my mother actually overlapped at 'The Times' but if they did they would have called each other by  their surnames as was the custom: Cockett and King. The work involved  dealing with the customers and their orders and posting out the books. My mother left in 1940 and, married by then,  moved out of London with my father to Wales. Olivia Cockett's career soared but although she did end up living with Bill as man and wife she never felt able to have the family she so much wanted.

Pictured alongside the book is something I suspect may be very rare (none on the 'net). It's one of the stout canvas envelopes, a precursor of the padded jiffy bag, that the Book Club used to dispatch books to subscribers. Instructions on the back explain how the envelope can also be used to return the book - The eyelet hole must be tied tightly to the zip fastener. After 80 years it's still perfectly serviceable. (If only the same could be said of postal packaging today.) It may have passed through the hands of both Olivia Cockett and my mother; perhaps Virginia Woolf's too - who knows?