Juliet Gardiner is a woman who has always wanted out: she fled the pebbledashed conformity of her Hertfordshire home when she was 16; after the Divorce Reform Act came into effect in January 1971 she took advantage of it to branch out on her own.
An adopted war baby and the former editor of History Today, a staunch Labour supporter and the ex-wife of a Tory MP, Gardiner has run away from the staid, the easily safe, has taken on challenges and been challenging. When she applied to university as a graduate mother, she was asked if she’d had a hysterectomy and if she owned a deep freeze. She went on to gain a first and is the author of three critically acclaimed books: Wartime: Britain 1939–1945, The Thirties: An Intimate History, and The Blitz: The British Under Attack.
Diagnosed with a rare and aggressive malignant brain tumour in 2012, Gardiner has produced a memoir of her life and the fast-moving social changes she has witnessed. It starts with reflections on the postwar deprivations of a grey Britain and its fast-diminishing empire, then fairly rattles through the stigma of single motherhood, subtler memories of class, the transitional power of the 11-plus, advances in contraception, interior fashions, Habitat and the freedom that the Maclaren buggy brought with it.
There are glints of sharp prose, as when she describes her father as “one of the millions whom the two wars had left with a deep, unspoken grief for life”. But, overall, Joining the Dots is rather too pedestrian for its own good, and a slender crib sheet to the feminist history of the past century.
Wm Collins £16.99 pp194
