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Title: The View from the Corner Shop
Subtitle: Diary of a Wartime Shop Assistant
Author: Kathleen Hey, Patricia Malcolmson - editor, Robert Malcolmson - editor
Narrator: Rebecca Courtney
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
Language: English
Release date: 08-09-16
Publisher: Lamplight Audio
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
Kathleen Hey spent the war years helping her sister and brother-in-law run a grocery shop in the Yorkshire town of Dewsbury. From July 1941 to July 1946, she kept a diary for the Mass Observation Project, recording the thoughts and concerns of the people who used the shop.
Among the chorus of voices she brings us, Kathleen herself shines through as a strong and engaging woman who refuses to give in to doubts or misery and who maintains her keen sense of humour, even under the most trying conditions.
Members Reviews:
Fantastic.. Unique in that is from the perspective ...
Fantastic.. Unique in that is from the perspective of a small business, so you get more of the money aspect and how politics impacted. Also, insight into what people were buying versus the typical housewife or soldier point of view.
One of the best books I've read in a while
One of the best books I have read this year is one that was never intended to become a book: "The View from the Corner Shop" by Kathleen Hey is a collection of the real-life diary entries of a woman in her 30s, written in the years 1941 to 1946.
Kathleen Hey worked with her sister and brother-in-law at their grocery shop in Dewsbury (Yorkshire). She did not keep a journal for her own amusement, but wrote as one of hundreds of volunteers participating in the Mass Observation Project.
In case you are not familiar with the MO project (I wasn't, and had to look it up on wikipedia): It was a social research organisation founded in 1937 by an anthropologist, a poet and a filmmaker, aimed at recording everyday life in Britain by the means of diaries and questionnaires from around 500 untrained volunteers.
Through Kathleen Hey's writing - supplemented with plenty of useful historic background information by the editors -, the reader gets to know her and her world rather well. Kathleen goes through life with eyes and ears wide open, and a mind that is capable of thinking beyond what is of her immediate concern. While she does not fail to see the humour in some of the goings-on in her family, at the shop or in town, she understands the seriousness of political decisions and their impact on a large scale.
As the years - and the war with all the restrictions it imposes on everyone's daily lives - go on, she seems to be losing some of her humour, and a dull, grey tiredness (not only in the physical sense) begins to dominate.
Even when the war ends (the diary spans another year after the war), she can not seem to get her former energy and enthusiasm back. I won't tell you too much here, because I'd really like for you to read this book for yourself; therefore, let me just say that I was deeply touched by the thoughts and feelings Kathleen expresses.
Apart from that, I learned a lot from this book. For instance, the rationing system (which, I understand, was still in use in the UK for several years after the war) is explained.
What surprised me was how people behaved towards each other.
