This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.
"Many married couples separated by the war have come together again with sympathy and joy," comments Sally Andrew in today's Womansense column in the Daily Herald. But, she continues, "I've had a pile of letters both from men and women telling of the husband's difficulty in taking up married life again as a real partnership ...
Their homes are in danger, not of being dramatically wrecked, but of turning sour. Some husbands spend every evening with friends in the pubs, treating their homes as lodging-houses and leaving their wives as lonely as they were during the bitter years of separation.They sound monsters, don't they? Yet they're returned heroes, and they used to be warm-hearted decent chaps with happy home lives. It's only fair to give their point of view. They've been through hardships, danger and horror. They haven't got rid of that 'let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die' attitude. The one thing they were spared was responsibility for arranging their own lives, and their free time was naturally irresponsible ... so it's not easy to settle down to peacetime life. But by not trying they undermine their own future ...
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