Some pain is so terrible, it never heals. And it can run so deep the next generation, sometimes unconsciously, feels it too. We have recently had all the VE day celebrations and the picture presented to us has been very black and white: ‘joy and laughter and peace ever after.’ But this was far from the reality of life when war ended in 1945. 

Historians may see this as a pivotal moment of change. Concentrating on policy and politics, they focus on the new Labour government, the development of the welfare state and the NHS; and internationally on the fall of Empire and the rise of the Cold War.  

As one of the characters in my novel The Walled Garden thinks back to everyone dancing deliriously in the streets on VE Day: ‘It seemed as if they’d been caged creatures allowed their one day of freedom who, the moment their euphoria was exhausted, sank straight back down into all-consuming drabness’. Even the apparently revolutionary NHS, was overloaded right from the start and unable to meet demand.

The VE day celebrations may have been a wonderful party but in Britain the hangover lasted for years. And years. 1945 was not so much a moment of pivotal change but one of cynicism and rage. Once the politicians signed the peace treaties, hope was sky-high.  Winston Churchill lost the election to voters desperate for ‘change’, whatever that might mean. But hope was followed almost immediately by crashing disappointment. Soldiers came home, not to a land fit for heroes, but a land desperately damaged, facing a whole set of new problems, for which there were no quick solutions.

In the immediate post-war years, social deprivation grew worse. Rationing was extended – so much so even potatoes were included. There was a shortage of jobs, of housing, of clothing, of teachers …of money. The country had been bankrupted by war – not till Tony Blair’s government was the Second World War debt to the USA finally paid. There may have been new expectations but there were no resources to finance them. 

In the USA, its shores untouched by war, soldiers returned to a booming economy; in the Soviet Union, Stalin was colonising a cowering Eastern Europe; and Germany – with American money pouring in – was rebuilding. (America’s fear of Communism advancing to fill the fear left by Hitler’s defeat.) But in Britain those post-war years were marked by deprivation and distrust. Change came, but desperately slowly. 

But the damage done by war isn’t, of course, always visible. Former soldiers had seen and done things that turned them into strangers to their families. The women at home – living through bombing, evacuations and rationing – had found a new independence that could mean having a man around the house again was, at best, a nuisance.  At worst, dangerous.

It is this that I explore in The Walled Garden: the hidden casualties of war, the marriages, families and relationships. What was it like when your sweet gentle husband returned to you taciturn and hostile? If he had killed abroad, might he turn that violence upon you?  From where did a man who had witnessed death upon death, had known what it was to cut a throat, find the resources to return to civilian life – get a job in an office and not get the floor muddy with his boots? How did children learn to love the father whom they had barely seen for five years and who had suddenly reappeared in their home, their mother’s bedroom, and who ordered them about as if he was a sergeant-major?

For many, the moment the returning soldier walked through the door, 1945 was a pivotal moment. And for all too many, family would never again be the bedrock it had once been.  

Sarah Hardy, author of The Walled Garden 

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