Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ in Hertfordshire. A colleague asked her if she would volunteer for Spain: ‘I said I knew nothing about Spain – I didn’t know anything. She said I wanted educating, so she told me all about Spain, how the nuns were taking Franco’s side, and of course, it grabbed my heart – I was young and very emotional.’

      Penny soon found herself in a field hospital on the front line, treating terrible injuries and teaching Spanish nurses to do the same. When bombs first fell near her operating theatre, it was invaded by civilians desperate for shelter. One man collided with her in the dark, and as she pushed him away, her fingers became sticky. When the lights were back on, she saw that half of the flesh on the man’s face had been blown away. Long before Hermann Goering launched the Luftwaffe’s raids against London in September 1940, Penny Fiewel was experiencing the brutality of area bombing. The Spanish Civil War – as illustrated by Pablo Picasso – was teaching the world to dread the bomber.

      Months later, Penny was badly wounded during a raid. Waking up in a barn, naked except for bandages wound tightly around her chest and abdomen, she was in terrible pain. And as she lay recovering in hospital, the raids continued. ‘These were nightmare days,’ she says.

      The war was ultimately won by Franco’s nationalists, with help from the Germans. This was a clear violation of a non-intervention agreement signed by Germany – and a warning of the dangers of trusting Hitler. But just as Britain’s leaders were tentative in their handling of the economy, so they were tentative in their handling of the Führer.

      This was understandable. Britain had won the First World War – but her economy had been badly damaged. (As of 2017, astonishingly, the country still owed a large amount of First World War bond debt.) The greatest loss, however, was human. Much of Britain’s young male generation had been killed, wounded or traumatised, and the nation’s leaders were desperate to consign the war to history. They wanted to believe in a new peaceful world order based on the League of Nations – and were reluctant to focus too closely on events in Germany. Equally, they did not want to impose the high taxes that would be needed to rearm. Overall, therefore, it was easier for collective heads to remain in the sand where they could ignore the war cries of men such as Winston Churchill.

      And although Britain’s politicians disapproved of Hitler’s methods, they did not initially identify him as an existential threat. As future United States President John F. Kennedy explained in his 1940 book, Why England Slept, ‘It is only fear, violent fear, for one’s own security … that results in a nation-wide demand for armaments.’ Such fear did not exist in Britain until it was almost too late.

      Germany, by contrast, could hardly rearm quickly enough. And the two nations’ respective pre-war attitudes, one conservative and placatory, the other radical and ruthless, would come to a head in the events of May and June 1940.

      But for all the difficulties Britain and her people faced in the years leading up to war, there was another – more positive – story emerging. Just as in America, and, in its own dark way, Germany, a distinct youth culture was forming. ‘Youth has broken out like a rash,’ stated a Picture Post leader in early 1939. Everybody, it claimed, was talking about ‘youth’, from journalists to politicians to church leaders: ‘What causes all this present chatter about “youth”? It is partly that we are in an age of transition, and older people are stamped by the institutions in which we have lost faith. We hope that youth will do better!’

      Here is a striking similarity between our three nations. The depression and the apparent failure of the previous generation were allowing the young to forge a new identity. But in Britain, this new identity was being exercised by single wage-earners, aged fourteen to twenty-four, who had more expendable income than any other sector of society. The nation’s burgeoning youth culture would not have grown so quickly had it not offered such a boost to the economy.

      A survey conducted in 1937 in a deprived area of Manchester concluded that working children from even the poorest families ‘would have holidays and outings and new clothes, while probably the parents, the mother certainly, stayed at home and wore old clothes’. We are witnessing the birth of the teenager – before the word was even coined. For, by keeping a considerable amount of their earnings to themselves, these young people had a far superior standard of living to the older members of their family.

      Much of their money was spent watching (mainly American) films. Most young people watched at least one film a week, some watched many more. And not only did they watch films, they learned from them. They copied fashions and hairstyles, accents and attitudes. Boys wore slouched fedoras, girls delivered Scarlett O’Hara-style putdowns. According to the diary of a girl from a working-class Manchester suburb, an average 1938 Monday evening was spent watching a George Formby film with a friend, discussing the film (as well as boys and clothes), and then returning home to listen to dance music and talk to her family – about films.

      Plenty of teen money was spent in dance halls. George Wagner (a sapper who would be evacuated from La Panne in May 1940) was sixteen in 1936, when he became a regular dance hall attendee. Despite being a shy boy, dancing was his chief hobby. ‘It was a place where you met all the girls,’ George says, ‘that was the main thing.’

      Wearing suit, tie and waistcoat, bought by his mother (he had only graduated to long trousers at fourteen), George would walk a few miles to the Palace Ballroom in Erdington with three of his closest friends. The dances were run by Harry Phillips, who would walk around the floor, partnering boys and girls. No alcohol was served, so any of George’s friends who wanted a drink would have to go to a local pub and lie about their age. A five-piece dance band played popular American music – George’s favourite song was ‘Deep Purple’ – as young men plucked up their courage to approach young women. George says:

      You used to chat them up, see if you could take them home. I didn’t have a particular girlfriend, not in them days, I was too young. I would walk them home and probably have a little snog when you got up to the gate. But they were very looked after in them days. Sometimes parents would be watching out of the window in the lamplight. ‘Come on! You’re late!’

      So what were the differences between young wage-earners of this period and those of previous generations? Their instincts had not changed, but their behaviour had. They were now keeping far more of their wages to spend on themselves, and they had their own interests and pursuits. Before the First World War, there were very few – if any – pursuits that appealed only to the young. The music halls and cheap theatres were equally popular with all ages. It is hard to overestimate the growing independence and importance of youth at this period – and without the depression, it is hard to imagine how such developments could have taken place.

      But at the same time, we should be careful not to ascribe our own modern attitudes to 1930s teens. We may want to imagine that they were ‘just like us’, but the truth is more nuanced. At the same time as he was learning about girls, George was very much a boy of his own time. He and his friends loved nothing more than pitching a tent in a field, pinching a bit of coal from the railway to start a fire, and cooking whatever they found in the fields. George would find an acorn, poke a straw into it, fill it with cigarette ends, and use it as a pipe. ‘If my mother had known,’ he says, ‘I would have got a thick ear.’ Youth attitudes may have been changing, but most young people remained innocent by today’s standards.

      And we should also remember that young people were not alone in experiencing new pleasures and entertainments. Entirely British in flavour, accessible to all ages, a popular culture was also developing. It took the form of cheap luxuries and diversions available to people who could not afford the essentials. This, according to Orwell, was the logical result of the depression, as the manufacturer’s need for a market coincided with the half-starved populace’s need for cheap distractions:

      A luxury nowadays is almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain СКАЧАТЬ