In the background to every story in this book is the sound of a front door closing. “I'm home,” says the long-absent father and husband. “He's home!” says the family. Naturally, everyone tries to savour this happy Hollywood-ending moment, but the trouble is, even big moments have a habit of passing quite quickly, leaving you staring at the cheerless fireplace and listening to the ticking of the clock. Behind all those closed doors around Britain, millions of emotionally brutalised people must have looked at each other with roughly the same sequence of thoughts: “Blimey, this isn't easy. What do we do now, then? I hope this man isn't expecting to stay, by the way. Why on earth didn't I anticipate this sense of anticlimax?”

At the time, of course, the population was being urged to put the second world war behind it as quickly as possible. “Get on with your lives,” was the official advice. But what if peacetime existence was something you hardly recognised, and couldn't settle down to? What if civilian Britain was drab and weird and you missed your mates? What if you had become a teeny bit institutionalised by war or captivity? What if you weighed six stone and had turned into an old man afflicted by horrific nightmares? What if your strangely tall and mouthy children couldn't get used to the idea that you weren't just a photograph on a mantelpiece? Every testimony in this book confirms that, when damaged, changed men came home from the second world war to be united with their families, the idea of just “getting on with your life” raised far more questions than it answered.

What Julie Summers has done in this book is simply tell the stories she has collected, using lots of transcribed interviews, letting each experience speak for itself and also (less defensibly) leaving the collective story to speak for itself as well. What was I surprised to learn from these testimonies? Well, it really leaps out at you that nobody wasted any energy blaming anyone else for their problems in those days. Meanwhile, every story of retrospective forgiveness confirms that human beings are genuinely much, much better than you think. Did the stories need telling, though?

Absolutely, yes. One woman said, “It's strange, it's almost as if I've been waiting for someone to ask me these questions my whole life” - and one assumes that others felt the same. Taking an exclusively female point of view, moreover - from widows, mothers, wives, daughters, grand-daughters - in no way makes the reader forget the men. Rather, it's quite a practical idea, since one of the main complaints about men returning from the war was that they couldn't (or wouldn't) talk about anything anyway.

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Now, such a modest absentee-author approach can obviously pay off in the end sometimes. The trouble is that, without being put into sufficient authorly context, the individual stories here - presented one after another, after another - put enormous pressure on the reader to find a thread, and a lot of the time there isn't one, which makes you crazy. At the same time, the effect on the material itself is incredibly flattening. Even when you are learning terrible details of what we would now identify as post-traumatic stress disorder, you feel that nobody is helping you take it in. “Pat was very well adjusted and the only lasting effect of the war was that he hated eating rice.” “Tony was restive at home, unable to settle down. He could never walk into a room without looking behind the door.” “George could not play games without dizziness, nor drive a car. He wept when he went to the cinema.” “One of the strangest of Graham's foibles was his inability to eat a meal indoors.” What made me most impatient were the testimonies from people who had bucked the trend and adjusted fairly well (“I think that my mother was truly happy to have my father home again and it was exciting to move into a new house”). I really did resent the time I spent extending my sympathetic imagination to people who didn't even need it.

Perhaps a writer shouldn't read a book like this. Returning soldiers often suffered from a “fantasy of perfection”, apparently - and I've come to the conclusion that so do I, when I think I can see a far better book lurking inside a perfectly good one. In the end, I'm sure I will treasure all sorts of vivid everyday details from this volume - such as the woman who fell downstairs in surprise when her husband turned up, and, best of all, the man who got home to find a key under the mat and a note telling him to help himself to cocoa and sardines. What a good story that is, eh? Cocoa and sardines, indeed. “Over six years of longing for this moment,” he reflected, “yet now it had arrived, it was a little devoid of happiness and welcome. There was no one even to say hello - the cat couldn't wait to get outside for a wee.”

Stranger in the House by Julie Summers
Simon and Schuster £18.99 pp363

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