How (or even would) people cope?

[OWWO]

I’m a relative newbie, and this post came about after a conversation with my elderly mum because of events at my work. I am interested in other people’s thoughts.

AIBU to think that, if people today had to live through an event like WW2, a lot of them wouldn’t be able to cope with the restrictions, rationing etc.

I work for a charity that helps those who are homeless, escaping domestic violence, or on a low income and, while 99% of the clients are genuinely grateful for what we do; lately we’ve had some who have been a little, how to put this delicately... entitled and grabby, not appreciating being told that something isn’t possible, no matter how many ways they ask or demand. Some even tell us to stuff it and walk out!

Am I wrong to think there there is a definite sense of entitlement (and an unwillingness to try to help one’s self) out there in the world today?

Try watching some of the testimonies from the Shoah Foundation on Youtube - that really brings home what some people endured in Europe.

And there are some today who wouldn't cope. Most people helped each other but I fear today everyone would be out for themselves.

People would cope because they had to cope. In all walks of life you get people who moan / complain just to get a little more and that would continue regardless. People today have different expectations because life has changed in the intervening 70 or so years. The WWII generation would have found it hard to take down a woolly mammoth with a sharp stick or build their own house with wattle and daub.

Expectations of what you should have are so difffrent now to when I was growing up. I'm 39. When I was growing up People’s houses were furnished with random stuff you inherited usually. A 3 piece suite was new fangled. Now people think they need to make their house look like a page from the next directory. That's a defined shift within a generation.

You were born in 1979 ffs

Next, Zara, h&m, new look - all existed at that time.

Don't let's get carried away. I'm 37. Photos of me as a baby and... gosh!! There's a three piece suite in the background.

Fascinating thread!

I've read more than once that rates of mental illness went down during WW2. This is not what I'd expected and I have wondered if it was because there fewer psychiatrists about to diagnose it, but it seems it wasn't just that. Of course, mental illness wasn't diagnosed anything like as much then as it is now, not least because there was very little available in treatment terms and there was huge stigma and fear of being sent to an asylum, because lots of people never got out again. But it does seem that during the war there were a few factors that helped the mental health of the population in spite of the constant worry about loved ones, living through bombing, enforced separations of families and so on and so forth.

1. Better diet. The rationing system was very well thought out to ensure that everybody got enough food and there was a big stress on growing and eating vegetables. Not much meat, fat or sugar available. For many poor people their diet under rationing was much better than before the war.
2. Plenty of exercise. Even those who owned a car couldn't get much petrol. Everybody walked or cycled or used public transport. People were very busy so there wasn't much sitting around.
3. Just about everybody had work to do, and lots of people took on volunteer roles on top of their everyday work. So no time to sit at home thinking about your troubles, plenty of company, strong common purpose.

Plenty of problems after the war, though. The children who were school age during the war years had often missed out quite badly because of the effects of bombing, evacuation, conscription of the younger teachers and nobody really keeping track of what was happening to children. Many of them never caught up later on.

One thing that's always fascinated me is the thought of all those families thrown into turmoil by the war then having to try to go back to normal in 1945. A few children stayed away as evacuees right to the end, especially those who'd been sent overseas, and of course lots of children who were with their mothers had seen almost nothing of their fathers for years and years. Imagine the AIBUs for Mumsnet 1945!

AIBU to think DH, who's just been demobbed, should cut our DD a bit of slack? She hardly knows who he is and he's telling her off for talking back to him!

AIBU to miss my war work? I was in a munitions factory and I do miss the company.

AIBU to wish we could get a place of our own? We've been living with DH's DM and it's really crowded with SIL and her kids here too. I've got my eye on a nice prefab.

The Relationships board would have been very busy too.

Got a bit carried away there, sorry it's so long!

Zara opened in the UK in 1998.

Tbh, the reason people stopped making their own clothes, cooking from scratch, etc, etc, is that most people clearly did not enjoy doing it - otherwise we'd still all be doing it for fun. If there is a necessity to do something, however, people would almost universally rather do it than die. It's hard to perceive something as a necessity when actually it dosn't seem to be a necessity for everyone else around you, though - so unless you are living a life like the one you are expecting those accepting your charity to live, it's not surprising in the modern world if they do not always appear as grateful as you would like for the things that you offer. It's not as if living standards went back to the Stone Age during WW2 and if they had for some people, you might not have found them feeling hugely grateful about it! It's all relative. And at least rationing ensured people were more equal than they are now - it's hardly a revelation that it is easier to accept some hardship if you think everyone else is in the same boat.

I don't think most people have a realistic knowledge of what WW2 was really like. People obviously felt entitled to more than they were getting if crime rates offer us any clues. We mostly only hear about "dig for Britain" and "Make do and mend" but in reality theft, looting, fraud, and violence increased.
www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/the-london-blitz-brought-out-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-in-the-population-copy.html

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-33566789

www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/10-facts-about-crime-on-the-home-front-in-the-second-world-war/

1974 in Spain.
1998 in uk, when that poster would have been the grand old age of... 19

I've not rtft but I wouldn't survive. DP and I struggle when the internet goes out! And that's often only for a few hours at most when it floods (not our house but local area). I can't imagine having the flood siren used for it's original purpose (that of bomb siren), having food limited by rationing rather than just self-budgeting and having other aspects of control taken over. Nope, not for me.

That said I can and do budget the food shop, make meals from scratch and can sew. So in those ways, I'd be fine. I've mended 2 of DPs socks this week as the hem had come undone on one and the toe on another. I'm pretty frugal and hate throwing anything away if I think it can be used as something else or better yet fixed.

People would cope because they would have to. My parents were the wartime generation. They went through shit so we didn't have to. And so did their parents.

Exactly this.

I also think people don't seem to realise just how 'nasty, brutish and short' life was for many people. Life was hard, but you basically expected it to be so you just got on with it anyway.
The death of my maternal grandfather blew my mother's family to pieces, when she was 13. She and her two sisters were farmed out to relatives, and her mother became a live-in housekeeper for a doctor. They had no other choices.
It's one of the reasons I fully support a welfare net, even if there is some fraud (and there isn't much, according to research).

Ha! The generation today would be queuing for rations asking where the gluten free vegan sandwiches were kept.

A few children stayed away as evacuees right to the end, especially those who'd been sent overseas, and of course lots of children who were with their mothers had seen almost nothing of their fathers for years and years.

My friend's mum was a baby when her dad went off to war. He spent it in a prisoner of war camp in fact and didn't come home for 6 years. He came home stressed and angry because if his awful experienced and had an expectation his daughter would a)automatically love him and b) be a model child. They had massive arguments in reality and she never liked him. She didn't know him.

This first bit is just pedantry about those specific shops. But Next started in 1984 and the Next Directory in 1987. (The Next Directory was regarded as upmarket in a similar way to Boden and Seasalt now. It seemed more normal not to have much stuff from it though. But then there were no forums to see people talking about it, and you couldn't search for specific second hand items.)

I hadn't heard of Zara until the mid 00s and didn't go into one until 2008. Quite a lot of cities didn't have them. (Their first UK branch apparently opened in 1998.)

Can't see when H&M opened in the UK but I remember hearing about it as a cool new thing when I was a teenager in the 90s. (It might have been one of those places that only had a branch in London and one or two other cities for ages, then started expanding.)

Whilst suites in themselves were certain;y common enough in the 80s there weren't quite as many people expecting to renew furniture every few years just because they felt like it. (Which is what I assumed PP was getting at.) It was when fast fashion and home decoration consumption were just starting to speed up, and buying habits in these areas that seem normal now would, to a greater proportion of people, have still seemed flashy, tacky or wasteful.

I believe people would cope because they would have to. To take a banal example. We had a flood in our farmhouse and had no hot water or central heating and the overhead lights blew. At the same time DS and I had to do the lambing during that terrible snow and freezing weather. We had no choice because the animals depended on us. Now everything's fixed and the weather's nice. We're back to our old entitled selves. My DM was definitely of the make do and mend generation. She even made her own pillow cases. If I had to live like that generation I could but I don't want to

Put it down to my Pollyanna tendency, but I think - once the shock had sunk in - that an awful lot of people who instantly assume that the state can/should help solve their difficulties would start to think that it was their responsibility too. My mum was a child in WW2, and says that she remembers my late grandmother occasionally bringing home people, whole families, who had been bombed out of the blitz on Coventry, to stay for a few days or weeks while they made arrangements. It wasn't comfortable, or abundant, but it was a roof over their heads and muck in with the chores. No one was a guest and it wasn't financial help. It was an agricultural property with a bit of space in the house and barns, just out of the city. Water from a well, and veg from the garden. My grandfather was a horse dealer.

Well, considering people called the police when there was a chicken shortage at KFC not so long ago, I don't think we'd cope well at all......

We certainly would not have managed to pull off the deception that V2 weren't hitting their targets or keep practice for D day secret. Every detail would be all over social media.

Gone With The Wind springs to mind.

Scarlett was a cosseted 16YO princess at the start of the book. Didn't lift a finger (didn't have to - she had slaves to do everything for her, so if we're talking about 'entitled', this is about as entitled as you can possibly get).

A couple of years later, she's delivering her SIL's baby as the town is going up in flames, flees an invading army in a coach and horse (which subsequently collapses and dies), returns home to find her mother dead (typhoid?), her father mentally unstable and incapable, the (outside) slaves well shot of the place, commits murder in self-defence, and is forced to take over from said slaves to work the family plantation with her own fair hands.

Obviously this is a story, but it's based on historical events.

People cope when they have to, or go under - I don't think our generation has it particularly easy, when compared with others that've found themselves thrown to the wolves.

Families from Glasgow were evacuated to my DGM's farm during WW2.
They had plenty of food but they hated being there. The women didn't know what to do with raw meat/vegetables and couldn't cook very well. They felt isolated in the country and missed the tenement community.
However the survival instinct is a strong one. Think of the people who came out of the Nazi death camps and people who survive the horrific things that are happening all over the world right now.

People had lower expectations in the 1940s because there was no health service, life expectancy was about 45 if you were poor, rights for women were minimal and if you weren't rich you were basically abandoned and reliant on charity.

It's a good thing that in the 80 years since then we've developed into a fairer and more equal society where people can and should expect more from life than living in rat-infested poverty and dying from a tooth abscess at the ripe old age of 32.

I can't bear folksy nostalgia for a distant past where people survived fucking awful conditions because they had literally no choice. I'm grateful every time someone poor and ill and disenfranchised stands up for their rights and entitlements because it shows we're a better society now, one which actually takes proper care of its citizens.

Scarlett is my heroine TheDowager I feel I have come back to my own Tara.

But, if pushed into that world BizzyLizzyLou, and the health service stopped functioning and schools didn't open, which is what happens in war zones, how would you cope?

I know that from our intensely privileged feather bedded perspective, it sounds horrendous. But if it all stopped, and sheer muscle were more useful than rights, what would you do and how well would you cope? Declaiming the inequity hasn't cut much mustard in Iraq, which 20 years ago functioned reasonably well.

That's a sad story, gendercritter. I'm sure it wasn't all that unusual, either. I read a very interesting book about life for children immediately after the war where lots of people commented on having a very difficult relationship with their father. Some kids had routinely been sleeping in the mother's bed and found themselves turfed out when dad got back. Not surprising that sort of thing led to tensions.

And that's before we even get to the men who found a child at home that they very soon realised couldn't possibly be theirs. In a few cases they hadn't even known of this child's existence until they got back. In others, they'd been misled about dates of conception. It wasn't easy to get a divorce back then, but I suspect the divorce rate did go up a lot in the first year or two after the war ended.

Civilisation, in my view -not than it's worth more than anyone else's- is a thin sheet of ice, and once broken, not easy to mend. 1938 Britain wasn't a golden age, but once every system was put under pressure, without state resources to fill gaps, it fell to people, like you and me, to do what they could, for themselves and their communities. Some stepped up, some didn't and some couldn't.

Caribbeanyesplease people's expectations have grown with the standard of living, which is on'y natural.