War Crimes for the Home - Tapa dura

The author of Egg Dancing and Ark Baby has produced a highly original if dark novel about that twilight zone between lucidity and stroke-affected memory, observed disjointedly by the affected inmate of an old people's home. Out of her fuzz of fragments of memory, of jitterbugging and jokes and frantic sex in World War II, the old lady emerges slowly as a casualty of war - but on the home front. Disconcerting images of a baby and extraordinary recollections of a war-time romance with a GI Joe are muddled in with insinuations of a buried past, a son who wants the truth about who he is, and startling perspectives of what it is like to be young during the war against Hitler and old in a wheelchair. An uncomfortable but praiseworthy read.

'You know what they say about GIs and English girls' knickers,' ran the wartime joke, 'One Yank and they're off.' When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted. Ciggies. Sex. American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn't normally do - evil things, some of them - because she might be dead tomorrow. Or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it's payback time. In her old folks home, Gloria is forced to remember the real truth about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed, and love.