The Midnight News by Jo Baker

published 2023

Possibly my favourite book about WW2 is The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen - I’m astonished to find I have never directly featured any of Bowen's books on the blog, though Heat of the Day is listed here. Today's author, Jo Baker, makes it clear that she knows and loves this book too, and in fact studied it for a PhD. Not many books are up there with Heat of the Day, but this one is.

There’s more at the end of this post about Home Front books I have loved (looking at you Lissa Evans). I have read so many that I could draw up a league table – and this one would be in the higher reaches of the Premier League.

It’s one of those books where I am helpfully going to say that it’s better to read it without having a clear idea where it is going, or even what genre it is: that’s part of what made it so compelling for me. I was neutral to start with, but it reeled me in, and by the end I sat unmoving and entranced,  unable to put it aside till I found out how it was going to turn out.

It starts out like many another book set in that era: young heroine Charlotte is wandering round the streets of London. She has a boring and seemingly-pointless job, lives in lodgings, and is plainly trying to get away from a rich but difficult family. She has an old schoolfriend on the scene, and is getting to know a work colleague, vicar’s wife Janet. She visits her bohemian and difficult godmother Saskia. The Blitz is just starting, and the face of London is changing.

Then people start dying, and she becomes increasingly wary (they can’t all have been bombed…) and thinks she is being followed. But this isn’t a detective story, and it’s hard to say what category it does fall into. The word that keeps coming to mind is ‘unsettling’ – Charlotte is unsettled, she is worried, she is hearing dead people’s voice, though plainly is perfectly sane. Her past with her hideous family is hinted at but not spelled out. The young man she meets, an undertaker called Tom, is beautifully drawn. There are moments of kindness in contrast to other goings-on.

The story takes a most unexpected turn – things do not always go well for her - and then circles back and comes into a satisfying but still unsettling ending. The final third or so is as good as anything I’ve read this year: Baker completely captured and captivated me.

The book is crying out to be televised or filmed…

It has witty moments:

Francesca’s husband had enlisted with what Charlotte had uncharitably thought of as indecent haste, and so is currently crunching on sand and swatting flies in Africa. Which, Charlotte imagines, may in many ways be more comfortable than being married to her sister.

But on the whole a melancholy, worrying, unsettling tour de  force, but allowing you something to be pleased about at the end.

Charlotte ends up in male clothing for part of the time, and relishes the freedom and ease they give her.

There’s a lot about knitting and jumpers – along with a character who is alleged to ‘boil her cardigans’

The Imperial War Museum always has wonderful pictures of the Home Front – the top picture shows utility fashion at its finest – and this time I also found a short film about Make do and Mend, the policy of trying to re-use and recycle old clothes

MAKE DO AND MEND [Main Title] | Imperial War Museums (iwm.org.uk)

That’s a big feature these days too, but I would suggest watching the film for entertainment rather than instruction. It is distinctly amateurish, and I kept hoping they would show some of the results of the patching together of clothes, but they don’t bother. Tchah. 

Lissa Evans wrote about wartime filming in Their Finest, one of my other favourite Home Front books - see below - and they plainly needed her screenwriter heroine Catrin, who would have done a slicker job.

There’s more about Make Do and Mend in the splendid Pamela Hansford Johnson book An Avenue of Stone, and the blogpost has some more fabulous pictures, mostly from IWM. 

I have read many many books set in the UK during World War 2, Home Front novels. I love them all  - contemporary accounts such as Stella Gibbons’ Westwood, and Dorothy Bowers’ Deed Without a Name. I’ve also loved books by Rosamond Lehmann, Graham Greene and Eva Ibbotson, and the Henrietta books by Joyce Dennis.

I absolutely love Lissa Evans’ three wartime novels, Their Finest, and Crooked Heart and V for Victory.

There are even a couple of lists of Homefront books on the blog.

Woman in trousers from the Library of Congress – wartime workers in the US.

Knitting pattern from 1941.