CAN ANY MOTHER HELP ME? by Jenna Bailey

Faber, £16.99

ORDINARY LIVES DON’T always make the most exciting history, even though the current fashion for memoir does not require famous subjects. The Russian poet Yevgeni Yev-tushenko wrote: “No people are uninteresting/ Their fates are like the chronicles of planets”, yet the laudable democratic humanism of that sentiment is challenged each day by the cult of celebrity.

Can Any Mother Help Me? is a corrective. It spotlights the quiet lives of other people’s grandmothers, whose shared histories throw a fascinating light on the lot of women in (roughly-speaking) the middle years of the twentieth century.

In July 1935 the letters page of Nursery World printed a cry for help from a woman in Ireland who used the pseudonym “Ubique” – Latin for “everywhere”. She wrote: “Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbours. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading but with no library am very limited with books. I dislike needlework though I have a lot to do! I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am alone in the house . . . Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘think-ing’ [she meant brooding] and cost nothing! A hard problem, I admit.”

Many women wrote in sympathy, offering to become pen-friends, and the magazine published her thanks, her regrets that she could not correspond with them all, since “even the stamps are 2d”, and her inspired suggestion that they form a correspondence magazine. Each writer, using a pen name, would write an article on any subject, send it to Ubique, who would assemble them, hand-stitch them into a decorative cover, and mail the magazine to the first member.

Once she had read it, she might add comments and send it to the next. And so on. This would happen each fortnight. So the Cooperative Correspondence Club began – it existed until 1990, when only six members remained alive. It had averaged around 24 members, with motherhood the only qualification required to become a member.

They wrote about their lives, sometimes in intimate detail that they might not have disclosed to neighbours. Protected by noms-de-plume, they wrote of daily life, the pain of childbirth, the tedium of domesticity (“I am bored, bored, BORED”), irritation with their husbands, and even their thoughts about sex.

In 1938 “Janna” wrote: “I should certainly welcome a serious discussion of sex problems, as I think the pooling of experiences is the only way one can really learn (except by often unhappy experience) the intricacies of this most important art.”

The woman mostly had university educations, but once married, they had to forgo any hope of a career; there was simply no choice. They had to conform, yet within the privacy of the CCC rebellious spirits such as “Yonire” could riposte (to another’s description of a husband oblivious to the morning routine): “Bad training! My husband jolly well mucks in and shares the work. After all – they are his children (as far as we know).” These startlingly bright women wrote of important issues, engaging in religious and political debate at a level that would shame women’s magazines today. The standard of writing is amazing.

During the war many of the women met; postwar, they decided on a yearly lunch, an event that continued for more than 40 years. So the CCC became a social as well as a correspondence club, and is a testimony to what my generation calls the power of sisterhood.

In unearthing these pieces of the recent past – equally entertaining and moving – from the Mass Observation archive at Sussex University and editing them with such care and affection, the historian Jenna Bailey has done us all a service that goes beyond a contribution to women’s history. At the end of the book we mourn these remarkable, ordinary women as if they had been our own.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist