ABSTRACT
On 4 September 1939, the day after the declaration of war, in his nightly CBS broadcast to the USA, the London-based American journalist Ed Murrow reflected on how the city was changing as it prepared itself for battle. This chapter looks at the workplace in Inez Holden's Night Shift , depictions of tube shelters and West End glamour, and the importance of possessions in Rose Macaulay's 'Miss Anstruther's Letters', and shows how, and why, writing was resisting the wartime pull of the group. A London fire-watcher quoted in Constantine Fitz Gibbon's history The Blitz explained how the bombing resulted in 'numbness and disregard'. Winifred Eden-Green, Vera Brittain's secretary, noted how Brittain struggled with just this sense of class distance in wartime London. Anti-Semitism was certainly widespread enough in wartime Britain for the Ministry of Information's Home Intelligence Unit to analyse the matter in its special reports.
