Lead Review

• Book: How to Keep Well in Wartime
• Location: France, London, Norfolk
• Author: Jody Cooksley

Review Author: Tina Hartas

How to Keep Well in Wartime is a very well crafted saga of the life of one UK family through from the First World War to the early 1990s. It is sensitively written and an excellent account of how life in the country changed over the course of the century. The device on which the storytelling hangs is not a complicated one. An old and reclusive man is badly injured when, as a pedestrian, he is knocked over by a car. He is taken to hospital. A daughter staying in her parents’ house while they are in Spain, picks up a call from the nurses. They have traced her parents as being relatives of the man. Emily decides to visit Jim in hospital – and to do her best to find out more about him.

The book is written from two perspectives and with two time lines. In the first time line, we learn that Jim enlisted to fight in the first World War, and was injured in France. The descriptions of the fighting seem particularly authentic. He returned to the UK and, not strong enough to work again on the family farm in Norfolk, was sent off to London to live with relatives and – courtesy of his uncle – get a job in the Ministry of Information where he spent many a year. First chronicling all those who had died in the first war and then writing propaganda leaflets (hence the title of the book) for the second World War. His was a worthy, but mundane, desk job.

The second time line focuses on Emily and 1993. She is about to get married, but is having serious second thoughts. She decides to make it a mission to find out who Jim is – what relation is he to her? She finds a box of old photos in his house, and begins to piece the past together. She slowly makes progress until the two stories, hers and Jim’s, converge.

How to Keep Well in Wartime is a book about family relationships, fallings out, grief and mournings, and how families adjust to circumstance. It is a powerful insight into the changing times and patterns of behaviour that the 80 years the book covers. A great social documentary.

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