Love in Time of War

By Deborah Montgomerie, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005, 146 pages, paperback, NZ$34.99. Reviewed by Catie Gilchrist in the July 2005 issue.

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Love in Time of War is the first in a series of new social and cultural histories, written by experts for the general market. According to the press release, this series will 'have a popular format, modest but authoritative text and will be lavishly illustrated'. With over sixty marvellous illustrations (mostly original photographs) in a volume that is only 146 pages long the written content is indeed modest, albeit accessible. The absence of a bibliography is disappointing. As a general reader my mum loved it but academics might be left unsatisfied.

Introduction and conclusion aside, the book consists of three chapters that concentrate on Bob Wilson's war, Gay Grey's war and Jack Lewis' war through the letters they sent and received. Montgomerie has extensively quoted from their letters to flesh out a wider cultural analysis. The author is attuned to wartime censorship and acknowledges the problems of presences and absences in her sources. Some historians will question how generally representative these correspondents and their attitudes were, but this issue of typicality is not the point of the book. Montgomerie has taken emotion, and love in particular, as the entry point into the social and cultural history of New Zealand at war. She argues that wartime letters have largely been ignored by historians and her book seeks to redress this because letters 'remind us of the fragility of human relationships and the way in which historical knowledge is built on fragmentary and scattered sources'. (p 5)

In the first chapter we meet Bob Wilson, single and thirty one years of age, through the six letters he sent to his farming parents. Wilson's letters contain stories of army routine, descriptions of North African landscapes and farming practices and gossip and news about family and friends. At times his homesickness is palpable, he missed his dog and he constantly asked for news from home whilst offering his parents advice on daily affairs such as his mother's health and the management of their farm. His letters brought together his memories of home and his new experiences overseas and this cross referencing helped 'soldiers to integrate their military and non-military experiences and keep themselves psychologically whole'. (p 39) Montgomerie admits that 'on the face of it they do not tell us much about the history of the Second World War'. (p 23) However the author uses the mundane and the ordinary to suggest that 1940s masculinity 'was not always hard edged and rooted in a separate male culture'. Rather, Wilson's heartfelt desire to stay connected to home despite distance reveals that young single men 'valued domesticity and family connections'. (p 25) Other soldiers' letters and diaries are incorporated into the text to suggest that Wilson's ongoing and insistent interest in home affairs, his idealisation of home and family and his longing for a home-centred future, was shared by many soldiers. Revising the 'hard man' thesis of New Zealand masculine historiography through the emotion expressed in war letters is insightful and refreshing but it has its limitations. What was idealised and longed for during the hardships of overseas service and the realities of POW camps did not necessarily come to fruition. In the aftermath of war, when thousands of men returned to New Zealand, blissful domesticity was unobtainable for many too damaged and disabled, traumatised and shell-shocked by their military experiences. The longings penned to loved ones in letters did not necessarily reflect the lived realities of post war society.

Chapter two analyses Gay Grey's war through the letters she sent to her husband Duncan Grey. Civilian letters are a comparatively rare resource as few kept handwritten copies, yet Grey did and fifteen of her letters were donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library after her death in 1974. Gay Grey was not a typical Kiwi woman. A childless career woman she was part of Wellington 'society' where fashionable weddings, race meets and hotel dinners regularly informed her world. She was also Lady Editor of Wellington's Evening Post and used her columns to urge women to take up letter writing as a patriotic duty. Her readers were warned that 'judgements could be made about the state of a soldier's marriage on the basis of the amount of mail he received'. She urged women to put the 'best complexion on the home news' and condemned women who sent 'Dear John' letters. (p 66) In her own letters to her husband she repeatedly wrote of past shared memories and her hopes for the future, her anxieties for Duncan's welfare and the sense of danger felt in Wellington by the threat of the Japanese. The letters in this chapter uncover a sense of what the war and separation meant to young married women left at home, but it is far from exhaustive. Grey comes across as naïve, spoilt and snobbish and ultimately the reader shares little joy in the chocolate-box ending. Following three and a half years as a POW, Duncan was liberated in 1945, after which 'the couple had a long and happy life together. Gay died in 1974, Duncan in 1977'. (p 89)

Jack Lewis is a far more engaging character and the thirty six letters he sent home to his wife Molly and their two daughters, twelve year old Fay and eight year old Jean reveal the complexities of being a soldier, father, husband and son. Other men who wrote letters to their young children are also included in the chapter and Montgomerie uses these sources to argue that relationships between fathers and their children by the 1940's were 'modern'. Lewis certainly missed his wife and girls. In one letter he wrote that he was well and 'the only three things lacking are Fatbum, Freckles and McNuisance'. (p 106) Humour and teasing, questions about school and music lessons and sentences such as 'I hope you kids are doing the dishes. Have you had any fights lately?' pepper father's letters. Descriptions of bed time routines, of soldiers at play and food were common and 'conveyed a reassuring sense of continuity with the past and a way for his children to visualise his experience'. (p 103) Some fathers drew pictures of their tents or the desert to 'better communicate with their kids' and 'lots of love from Daddy' was a common signature. (p 109) It is this chapter that is most convincing and Montgomerie has used these letters to alert us to 'the intricate histories of men in this period' and that 'soldier Jack was a loving husband and devoted daddy too'. (p 130) There is one important omission however. Unlike Wilson and Grey who had volunteered to go to war, Lewis was conscripted in 1942, under the National Service Emergency Regulations of June 1940. There is a brief discussion of conscription in New Zealand and the reasons why some men volunteered and others waited to be conscripted, yet the author leaves the reader wondering why Maori men were not 'compelled to serve with the armed forces'. (p 94)

Overall the book does open up new ground in revealing the importance of hearing individual voices that too often slip through the gaps in broad narrative accounts. War histories are often written on a grand scale and, as Montgomerie argues 'the everydayness of war and the intimacy of individual lives can get lost'. (p 6) The book suggests that it is high time that the myth of mateship and popular nationalist narratives of New Zealand masculinity a la Jock Phillips's A Man's Country is in need of nuanced revision. As a result, this book points towards new and particular ways for future cultural research on war and society, masculinity and familial relations in the 1940s and beyond.

Citation

• Catie Gilchrist. 'Review: Love in Time of War by Deborah Montgomerie' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 25 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• During the second world war letters were a vital link between New Zealand soldiers serving overseas and their parents, sweethearts, wives and children. In the weeks leading up to Christmas 1941 the NZEF Base Post Office in Egypt received 15,000 bags of mail from home. Using letters between soldiers and their loved ones this book traces the emotional and psychological ways New Zealanders separated by distance and by danger made sense of the upheavals of war.
  
  Love in Time of War tells three stories brought to life by wartime correspondence. Bob Wilson, a Northland man serving in the Middle East, writes to his parents about route marches, desert camps and army food; Gay Gray, yearning for her absent soldier husband, describes Wellington during the invasion scare of December 1941; Jack Lewis stays in touch with his Auckland wife and daughters with jokes about scabby kids and fellow soldiers who pinch silk undies from Italian ladies. Behind all the stories lurk the anxieties of war. We too wait to find out what the future is going to bring, and gain a powerful sense of what wartime, with its dramas and uncertainties, actually felt like for those who lived through it.

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