Caroline Taggart 
Christmas at War – True Stories of How Britain Came Together on the Home Front 
True Stories of How Britain Came Together on the Home Front

No turkey. No fruit to make a decent pudding. No money for presents. Your children away from home to keep them safe from bombing; your husband, father and brothers off fighting goodness knows where. How in the world does one celebrate Christmas?

That was the situation facing the people of Britain for six long years during the Second World War. For some of them, Christmas was an ordinary day: they couldn’t afford merrymaking – and had little to be merry about. Others, particularly those with children, did what little they could.

These first-hand reminiscences tell of making crackers with no crack in them and shouting ‘Bang!’ when they were pulled; of carol-singing in the blackout, torches carefully covered so that no passing bombers could see the light, and of the excitement of receiving a comic, a few nuts and an apple in your Christmas stocking. They recount the resourcefulness that went into makeshift dinners and hand-made presents, and the generosity of spirit that made having a happy Christmas possible in appalling conditions.

From the family whose dog ate the entire Christmas roast, leaving them to enjoy ‘Spam with all the trimmings’, to the exhibition of hand-made toys for children in a Singapore prison camp, the stories are by turns tragic, poignant and funny. Between them, they paint an intriguing picture of a world that was in many ways kinder, less self-centred, more stoical than ours. Even if – or perhaps because – there was a war on.

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Caroline Taggart worked in publishing as an editor of popular non-fiction for 30 years before being asked by Michael O’Mara Books to write I USED TO KNOW THAT, which became a Sunday Times bestseller. Following that she co-wrote MY GRAMMAR AND I (OR SHOULD THAT BE ‘ME’?) As a result of these books and HER LADYSHIP’S GUIDE TO THE QUEEN’S ENGLISH, published by Batsford, she has appeared frequently on BBC Breakfast and on national and regional radio, talking about language, grammar and Pythagoras’s theorem. Her record is 16 radio interviews in one day on the subject of exclamation marks. Her other books include THE BOOK OF ENGLISH PLACE NAMES, THE BOOK OF LONDON PLACE NAMES, HOW TO GREET THE QUEEN (AND OTHER QUESTIONS OF MODERN ETIQUETTE) and A SLICE OF BRITAIN: AROUND THE COUNTRY BY CAKE which The Sunday Times described as ‘engaging, greedy and droll’. Since then she has reverted to words, with 500 WORDS YOU SHOULD KNOW, NEW WORDS FOR OLD and her current project, MISADVENTURES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, due in autumn 2016. The latest in her ‘Her Ladyship’ series for Batsford is HER LADYSHIP’S GUIDE TO THE ART OF CONVERSATION. Her website is carolinetaggart.co.uk and you can follow her on Twitter @citaggart.