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Juliet Nicolson, in The Great Silence 1918 – 1929, Living in the Shadow of the Great War, brings to life a brief period of history that we have all heard about but probably never visited in such fine detail. My own father was a child in that post war period and spoke of the war wounded who were everywhere, the violent anti-German feeling, the cars and the penury.

Juliet Nicolson quotes hundreds of similar voices, some famous, some insignificant but all affected by the Great War. We meet the serving class who had experienced comradeship on the battlefields with their employers and were unwilling to return to the grim drudgery of the prewar period.

We hear of families reduced to extreme circumstances by the loss of menfolk, the desperately slow demobilisation, serious war injuries and the lack of employment.

We hear how grief was suppressed, finding no voice that could express the depth of suffering in all the social classes, even those who had continued, throughout the war to enjoy their aristocratic way of life.

One moving chapter recounts the way the unknown soldier was chosen and the creation of the Cenotaph. As one small boy bent to lay a posy among the mass of flowers already there he cried for all to hear, ‘Oh Mummy, what a lovely garden Daddy has got.’

Finally, when, in 1920 Winifred Holtby is one of the first women to be awarded her Oxford degree, we approach a kind of acceptance of a changed world, a world where there is one female member of parliament and where some women have the vote.

This is social history that reads almost like a novel. I warmly recommend it.

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