Blitz Writing

Night Shift has much in common with other published documentary accounts of wartime factory life.6 During the early 1940s, when paper shortages made print publication increasingly difficult, Holden, like many other writers, was trying to get her documentary accounts of everyday life in wartime London onto BBC radio programmes.

We stood in front of the street of houses watching the battle; the sights and sounds of air bombardment were constantly changing, the people near us tried to interpret them now. ‘We don’t hear so much of that gunfire these days, do you remember the old days when the barrage first started, that was something like a row, that was.’ The few months ago

I remembered again two clear sounds, the penny whistle at the beginning of the bombardment, the bird singing at the end of it. Between these two sounds there showed a chink of light through which I could see the start of a more hopeful life, a future in which the courage of people could also be used for their greater happiness and well-being. The n

Comparing the latter chapters of It Was Different to the pages of Holden’s unpublished diary, we can retrace her steps as she lifted out paragraphs and moved around, edited, pruned, and adjusted sentences originally written at the time of the experiences described. Some of the most powerful Blitz scenes in her private diary serve double duty, appea

Between September and mid-November 1940, ‘an average of 160 bombers dropped an average of 200 tons of high explosives and 182 canisters of incendiaries nightly’ on London (194). Yet amid all the destruction, workers reported for their shifts and managers to their desks. In factories such as the one Holden represents in Night Shift, there was little

There was no lull from news bulletins coming through the radio; the French stations told how the English people were digging trenches in Hyde Park, and the English stations told how the French were calm and ready for anything.

The letters which ‘continually came to me’ yesterday were of the kind which are sent out alphabetically. Some from the deathly sweet centres of charity printed on shiny paper, gold-edged — a ball was to be given in aid of this or that, So-and-so’s well-known band would blare out, and some of the balance from the evening’s high boredom would finally