A study of habits

The latest volume of David Kynaston's masterwork on postwar Britain, Saul Austerlitz writes, finds the historian combing through shopping lists, police blotters, diary entries and downpage newspaper pieces. Family Britain: 1951-1957 David Kynaston Bloomsbury Dh152 "The young Alexander conquered India. / Was he alone? / Caesar beat the Gauls. / Did he not have even a cook with him? / Philip of Spain wept when his armada / Went down. Was he the only one to weep? / Frederick the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who / Else won it? / Every page a victory. / Who cooked the feast for the victors? / Every 10 years a great man. /Who paid the bill? / So many reports. / So many questions."

Bertolt Brecht's poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" is a thought experiment, a radical shift in perspective asking us to see - as if for the first time - the hidden lines in our works of history. What of all the forgotten men and women of the now irrevocably-lost past: the ones who silently conquered and wept and died, the ones whose names were written in invisible ink, even as their rulers' were stamped in bold on history's pages? Brecht, self-proclaimed voice of the proletariat, demands symbolic recognition of the infinite complexity of the past. His questions are ones that, by their very nature, cannot be comprehensively answered.

Someone should alert David Kynaston to the subtle teasing in Brecht's questions, as I fear that otherwise he may embark upon a studiously researched, densely detailed soldier-by-soldier study of Alexander's armies. Kynaston, a British historian, is at work on a vast history of his country in the years between the end of the Second World War and the election of Margaret Thatcher that he calls Tales of a New Jerusalem. With the publication of its second volume, Family Britain, Kynaston has only reached 1957, but he has come far enough for us to know he is in the midst of a remarkable, one-of-a-kind achievement. Kynaston is not only redefining the history of Britain; he is redefining the way history can - and should - be told. Brecht read the reports, and left us with dazzling questions. Kynaston has ventured to supply some of the answers.

In one of his essays, Jorge Luis Borges mentions a Chinese encyclopaedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which sorts animals into categories like "those that belong to the emperor", "embalmed ones", "those that tremble as if they were mad", and "those that have just broken the flower vase". This disparate taxonomy immediately comes to mind upon reading Family Britain, which similarly depends on dizzying shifts of perspective, and an audacious willingness to incorporate the heterogeneous. Like a historian's version of Borges' Chinese encyclopaedia, Kynaston's work is composed of mismatched, unrelated parts whose confluence add up to life in all its dizzying variety. Family Britain is elections and wars and cricket matches and murder trials and coronations and movies and horse shows, with none privileged as more relevant - more historical - than any other. It is newspaper headlines and politicians' memoirs and housewives' diaries and sociological surveys of pub life. It is, finally, the collision of large and small, national and personal, earth-shaking and mundane, all approached as essential to the narrative of history.

Kynaston's style takes some getting used to. The first hundred or so pages of the first volume, Austerity Britain, make for tough sledding, more because of readers' unfamiliarity with his mix-and-match technique than any faults in the writing itself. Eschewing elaborate explanation of his technique, Kynaston thrusts us directly into the flow of his narrative, and it is momentarily disconcerting to be thrown headlong into the search for so many answers: How common was sex before marriage? (Quite; nearly half of the young men and women born between 1924 and 1934 partook.) What sorts of birth control did they use? (Condoms, and occasionally withdrawal.) How much did people smoke? (The 79% of British men who did each puffed on almost 15 cigarettes a day.) What hobbies did they have? (Men gardened, women knitted.) Everything - even a Surrey grammar's school magazine - is grist for the research mill.

With this approach, Kynaston has returned to the familiar narrative of postwar Britain's return to prosperity and added the details left out of the newspaper headlines and history books: the housewives working 15-hour days (Kynaston finds one woman's list of daily chores "exhausting simply to read"); the gay men arrested, hounded and driven to suicide by a government intent on criminalising homosexual conduct; the West Indian immigrants confronting nativist racism and scrabbling for jobs and dignity. This revisionist history does not erase the older, more familiar story of Britain rebuilding itself as a post-imperial power that was smaller and less powerful, but still a world leader. It merely complicates and enriches it.

It is not that Kynaston is uninterested in the broader, political details, like Churchill's triumphant second term as prime minister, or the ruling Tories' inability to undo the welfare state Labour had constructed. He offers a compelling portrait of a country silently agreeing to maintain a holding pattern: preserving the radical changes (like the National Health Service) of the immediate postwar era, but otherwise beating "an instinctive retreat to familiar ways, familiar rituals, familiar relations, all in the context of only very slowly lifting austerity and uncomfortably limited material resources". This domestic drama takes place against an international backdrop of disheartening powerlessness. Austerity Britain marks the sun's setting on the British Empire; the close of Family Britain brings the country's importance as a geopolitical actor to a nadir. Along the way, we acquire a sense of what life felt like. Kynaston's writing is as rich with human drama as the widest-ranging novel, so much so that we must rouse ourselves from the drowsy passivity of listening to a superlative storyteller and remind ourselves that this - all of this - really happened.

Kynaston also understands intuitively how the part forms the whole; in his telling, the intellectual sparring between Britain's Le Corbusier enthusiasts and their opponents over the tenets of modernist architecture, and the concomitant debates within the government about public housing, are not merely arid wrangles over theory, but clashes over the very fabric of everyday Britons' lives: Would there be cupboards in the bedrooms? How small could a kitchen be before it was no longer functional? "If we can reduce the size of houses to rabbit hutches of course we can build more houses," the acid-tongued Labour Party member Aneurin Bevan groused. But the working classes were, on the whole, pleased with their new lodgings: "Hitler did a good job when he blew up my parents' house in Portsea," noted one.

Perhaps most crucially, Kynaston reminds us that the war was still a physical presence in people's lives. There is an astonishing photograph in Austerity Britain from 1945, of a Tory candidate for office in London's East End standing atop his car and addressing a small crowd of onlookers. The entire foreground of the photo is filled with rubble, devastated by the Nazi targeting of the city. In 1952, seven years after the end of the Second World War, the London East End district of Homerton was still mostly bombed-out. We learn, with a start, that sugar, butter, cheese, meat and eggs were all still being rationed by the government in 1953. The practice was so ingrained as to have become part of Britons' religious beliefs: a 41-year-old West Bromwich woman, when asked to describe her notion of the afterlife, suggested: "it will be a wonderful place with everything just right and there will be plenty of lovely food without rationing I hope." The food they ate, the streets they walked on; the war, while over, was hardly past.

Kynaston's treasure trove of magnificent minutiae also includes: the mathematician Alan Turing eating an apple dipped in cyanide, driven to suicide by the anti-gay frenzy of politicians like David Maxwell-Fyfe (who pledged that "I am not going down in history... as the man who made sodomy legal"); the future playwright Alan Bennett coming up to Oxford, intimidated by his classmates' trunks imprinted with "four, nay even five, initials. They were the trunks of fathers that were now the trunks of sons, trunks of generation..."; Mrs N, whose "whole life is 'scraping and pinching to make do', and whose entertainment consists of an occasional bottle of beer brought home by her husband; Sheikh Mohammed, the founder of the nation's first decent Indian restaurant; ten-year-old girls sobbing at their desks, having failed their eleven-plus examinations, convinced their lives are over; and the miner Lawrence Daly, criticised by his friends for showing his wife his pay stub, then discussing with her how much to keep back for himself. Kynaston summons these lives with the utmost delicacy, preferring his subjects' words to his own. Leaning on diary entries, questionnaires and memoirs, he riffles through their memories of those who sought to preserve their lives for posterity, digging for clues about the way they lived.

As Family Britain ends, the Suez war of 1956 has ended ignominiously, with the prime minister Anthony Eden liberally heaped with shame for his handling of the Middle Eastern misadventure: "If Sir Anthony is sincere in what he says - and he may be," remarked Labour's Bevan, "then he is too stupid to be prime minister." Britain's reign as a major world power was drawing to an inglorious close, but Britain - the British people - continued on. The same newspaper that reported on Eden's humiliation offered "a pleasing reminder," according to Kynaston, "of the permanence of the local and particular: 'Bus fares at Lowestoft are to be raised to offset petrol rises... Police have been asked by Harlow Council to watch for hooligans smashing street lamps.'"

For most historians, the task of writing about the past can be defined as piercing the fog of time's passage to penetrate to the lasting stuff of history. For Kynaston, the fog, too, is history. It is not enough to merely cut through it; without the bus fares and smashed street lamps, what we see is helplessly distorted by the selective bias in favour of the earth-shaking. Headlines make up history, undoubtedly, but so do the tiniest details: the most popular paint colour in these years, Kynaston informs us, changed from dull, dirt-concealing brown, to clean, crisp white. Austerity Britain was acquiring a belated splash of postwar brightness. Without Kynaston, we might have overlooked much of the grime underneath.

Saul Austerlitz is a writer in New York.