With Wings Like Eagles by Michael Korda

With Wings Like Eagles was first published in 2009 and it’s a history of the Battle of Britain. I’m not a stranger to reading history but I haven’t read much about World War 2. It was Sandy McLendon a commentor on ‘Pining’ who recommended this book, and I’m glad she did as it’s very interesting and is so readable, and very far from being a dry and dusty history. Luckily I was able to borrow it from my library.

I didn’t know a lot about the details of the Battle of Britain or the men involved in the decision making so it was all new to me. As is my wont I was reading out what I found to be interesting snippets of it to Jack, such as the fact that one cabinet member, Sir Howard Kingsley Wood, pointed out that a German company which was mooted as a possible bomb target was private property meaning it shouldn’t be bombed! but Jack has read a lot about the subject and so I gave up on that as annoyingly he was finishing off what I was reading out to him before I could! I think that even he would find some new details in this history though.

One thing which we have all always known is that history is written by the winners and of course Winston Churchill wrote his well known Second World War series which is mainly why he received a Nobel prize for Literature in 1953. According to With Wings Like Eagles Churchill did a fair bit of rewriting of history to put himself in a better light during this period of the war, when he was less than supportive of Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding, whose plans and decisions led to us winning the Battle of Britain and consequently the war.

This book points out that it wasn’t only the air crews who were heroes there were also merchant seamen on tankers (my father being one of them) and the young women of the WAAF who continued to call in radar positions whilst bombs rained down all around them.

The RAF was riddled with jealousy and spite amongst those near the top, so much so that when the official history of the Battle of Britain was published, of which 6 million copies were sold, Dowding didn’t even get a mention. That led Churchill to complain that: the jealousies and cliquism which have led to the committing of this offence are a discredit to the Air Ministry.

An Academic Question by Barbara Pym

An Academic Question

I read quite a few books by Barbara Pym way back in the 1970s but not this one. Barbara Pym died in 1980 and this book was published posthumously in 1986. She wrote to the poet Philip Larkin about the book in 1971 and was still tinkering with it in 1972 when she started writing her better known book Quartet in Autumn and An Academic Question was abandoned.

Generally her books were set in small villages and were about the lives of the inhabitants, sort of updated Jane Austen, vicars and all.

As you would expect from the title, An Academic Question is set in a university, not a lofty prestigious one but one of the then new ‘red brick’ universities founded in the late 60s and generally thought of as jumped up techs at the time. It’s the 70s so the students are revolting!

Caroline Grimstone is the wife of a young lecturer who is hoping that the research paper he is about to publish will make his name in the realms of ethnohistory. Caroline isn’t in love with her husband Alan but after seven years of marriage she is just getting on with it whilst worrying about being a good enough mother to her small daughter and how she can help further Alan’s career. Caroline is aware of how disappointed her own mother is by her choice of husband. You know what Larkin said ‘They f*** you up, your mum and dad.

This is an interesting read although not as good as I remember Quartet in Autumn or Excellent Women to have been. There is some wit, I enjoyed the characters of Coco and Kitty especially as I knew a mother and son combination exactly like them, but the book has a very dated feeling for some reason. I’m certainly no stranger to older books and I was a young thing in the 70s and started working then but I had half forgotten how things were for women in the workplace then, very much second class!

The blurb on the back says ‘Will be read in decades hence for its good writing as much as for its offbeat sociological interest’ TIME OUT

And they were so right. I had completely forgotten about cigarette coupons and people collecting them, having to smoke thousands of fags to exchange the coupons in the packets for pyrex dishes and such, things that they could have bought for about the price of two packets of ciggies – crazy!

Anyway the setting was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, back to the 1970s of university and the library and it was a very quick read at just 182 pages.