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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 May 2000 Issue No. 481 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 May 2000 Issue No. 481
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Features Interview Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
I cannot imagine that one can write a regular column without reading what others write. Not, by all means, to lift their writings, but simply that a writer can always find inspiration from his reading. Prior to jotting down the first word in my weekly English column or my Arabic bi-weekly half page I have to peruse the latest papers and magazines.
Take this week's column: I was going through Open Eye, the monthly magazine of the Open University Alumni Community, when I came across two interesting articles. The first has the intriguing title "A Novel Way with War Diaries," the other "Culture and the Masses."
I am a great believer in the concept of an open university, whose birth in England I happened to witnessed. My concept of the open university, however, is different from what is happening in Egypt. I don't look upon it as a degree-giving institution, but as a means of furthering people's knowledge. This is why I was happy to read about the increasing number of housewives in England who are regular users of the institution.
The first article is about a new book by Linda James, a graduate of the Open University which deals with the Second World War, but from a completely new angle, that of women, especially housewives. One of the book's main themes is that the "ancestry of modern womanhood can be traced directly back to the cataclysmic effects of war on women's lives."
As the men were recruited, deserting village England to join the army or the Royal Air Force, the heroines of Out of Shaking Air abandoned their traditional roles, while the bombs that levelled London "had the same effects on social and class structures."
Class barriers were wiped out, says the author, and there emerged a new interaction between working and middle class women. The book introduces a character, Mary, who is middle class. She had a maid who joined the Women's Voluntary Service, and as a result Mary had to do all the household chores. The maid, as a result of her new work, came to realise her own value, and refuses, at the end of war, to go back to serving others, her husband included.
To write her book Linda had to go through the invaluable archives of the Imperial War Museum. She discovered from the available documents that "there were so many people, especially women, with undiscovered talents, and the war brought them out."
I, personally, can vouchsafe for this. Going through the war anthologies of poetry Oasis and Return to Oasis, one cannot help but be impressed by the fine poetry produced by ordinary soldiers. I also witnessed the new role women assumed as a result of the war when I arrived in England in the middle of 1945, just after VE day.
Linda's book, in the end, is a rather emotional account of the war. Her father having been in the RAF, she makes the hero of her book a fighter pilot, who is used as a symbol of what came to be called the Battle of Britain. She gives considerable space to the fliers who were able to stem the might of Germany.
"I think a lot of military history books are so dry ... I came across a letter of a Spitfire pilot, written to his parents as if he knew he was going to die. He told them he was doing what he wanted to do, that he had enjoyed his life so much that they should celebrate it and not grieve. It was very moving," says the author, "and that was when I decided that my hero had to be a Spitfire pilot."
And so he is. Yet despite the more obvious heroics of the men in uniform, the memory that lingers is of the oft unspoken heroism of the women, without which the entire war effort in Britain would have come to naught.
