ABSTRACT
A girl born in 1918 at the end of one holocaust would have been 21 at the start of the next, assuming that she survived the flu epidemic of 1918, the slump of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s. Her experiences of those years would have been heavily influenced by the niche in society into which she was born. Class was still important in inter-war Britain, even though its precise economic boundaries were becoming harder to define. This was especially so as far as women were concerned. The occupational class of increasing numbers of women, such as clerks, typists or teachers, was different from that of their fathers or husbands, many of whom were manual workers of various kinds, yet a woman's class position was recorded in the Census as that of the (male) head of her household. In spite of the blurring of economic boundaries, however, British society was still scored by social divides, as Mary Lee Settle, a young American volunteer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, discovered in 1942 on meeting her fellow recruits:
It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows. 1
