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Title: A Pacifist's War

Author: Frances Partridge

Narrator: Judith Boyd

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-24-17

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

When war is declared, Frances and Ralph, both pacifists, turn their house into a sanctuary for friends more materially involved. Invasion seems imminent as one by one the countries of Europe fall to the Nazis. People are even told to immobilise their car engines at night in case the Germans parachute into Britain. All Allied and German manoeuvres are here recorded as they happened and the feelings of those who can only wait anxiously for news.

Yet although war looms persistently over the Partridges, only a few power cuts affect them, leaving them feeling oddly isolated from it. As life goes on, Frances' diary not only chronicles events important to Britain; it also reveals an utterly different life in which conversation, observation and literature are the driving forces, along with her husband and small son.

Members Reviews:

Five Stars

Loved it!

"Nasty Hitler! Stop this terrible war and go right away altogether."

So said Burgo Partridge, the author's 4-year-old son.

Florence Partridge was the 'nice' member of the famed Bloomsbury Group. During World War Two, the Partridges lived at Ham Spray House in Wiltshire. In 1978, Florence published her excerpted diary of the war years. Florence and husband Ralph were pacifists, which gives the book a quite different context than many wartime recollections. Their beliefs gave them no special shelter from the war's terrors and privations.

Florence records her experiences living with Ralph and their 4-year-old son Burgo and a seemingly continual parade of visitors and lodgers with acute insight and self-awareness. Not all of their friends shared their political or moral views and that creates an interesting tension throughout. Ralph's application for C.O. status hangs around the background of the diary, but seldom takes center stage (as she explains in the foreword, she felt little need to describe her thoughts about Ralph in her diary because he was central to her life).

The course of the war overwhelmed their daily lives in a way that is nearly unimaginable. With the invasion seemed like a foregone conclusion during much of 1940, Florence and her friends were plunged into depths of depression. Otherwise sane people seriously discussed the means and modes of committing suicide in the event the Germans did cross the Channel. They adjust to sleeping - or at least lying in bed - while planes drone overhead and learn the sounds and patterns of bombs being dropped. Even when the threat of invasion fades, the knowledge grows that the only possible outcomes are a German victory or a very long war indeed.

While the larger end is known, being a diary, the eventual outcome for specific individuals is not. In one instance, however, Partridge describes how Burgo was excited over meeting a young RAF pilot. She then reflects that `we are asking this young man to lose his life' at which point she added a powerful two-word footnote: "He did."

I came across this book from the historical endnotes in a work of historical detective fictionSecond Violin: An Inspector Troy Thrillerby John Lawton and temporarily rescued it from the lower stacks of our public library system. I highly recommended that you do the same.