pumpkinstrokemarrow

A rather longer peice - maybe even front page stuff - about the drooping standards of nurses. But what do we expect? For a short period, say the second quarter of the 20th century, we had the money to pay for nursing care and there was a huge pool of decent women for whom nursing was the only available occupation. So standards were quite high. But, gradually, women were given access to lots of other, higher prestige male occupations and so were less drawn to nursing. A lot of nursing work is not that pleasant, so is it really that big a surprise that women prefer accounting? The formerly huge pool is shrinking. Which, taken with other factors, resulted in many being sucked into the pool from further affield, intially Ireland. I am reminded of the story of the successive waves of immigrants coming to occupy the once dodgy part of Luxembourg - down in the hole - called Pafendall.

Just read Beevor on D-Day. He makes quite a decent fist of bringing this rather unpleasant business to life, without losing the big picture. A point of interest for me was the French problem. Item 1, we thoroughly smashed Norman towns up during this battle, in some large part through not terribly effective air strikes. So the Normans lost more people during the invasion than we lost in the whole of the blitz. Item 2, Gen. de Gaulle, apart from being a rather prickly customer, was very concerned that there should not be an insurrection before he arrived. He wanted to be the legitimate government and not let a bunch of commies in, however heroic they might have been in the resistance. Item 3, also very concerned that a French division should liberate Paris, despite the rather modest and entirely US funded role of that division in the invasion. Item 4, the whole business of the transfer of powers from the first occupier to the second was rather messy. A lot of rather ugly score settling going on. With the interesting thought that much of the ugly abuse of ladies said to have fraternised with the first occupier, was down to male guilt over their less than heroic role in the whole business. Item 5, in small ways, occupier 1 was much more disciplined than occupier 2. It seems it was unusual for a German soldier of occupation to be drunk, abusive or scruffy in public. This not being to say that they were not very abusive in big ways.

I wonder if the Danes, the Belgians and the Dutch go in for all the sort of angonising about occupation and liberation that the French do? Maybe they never pretended to be major powers, so having their noses rubbed in was not so devasting. Must make enquiries.

Book a bit let down by its maps. Diagrammatic with rather sketchy indication of physical features and in page. So the narrative thundered on with the diagram well in the rear. One had to take it all on trust. The trick is to have better maps which fold out, a bit expensive perhaps but worth it. Much better read. Something that older history books go in for on a small scale, And, as it happens, the book recently bought in Foyles, a science rather than a history book, has its key diagrams in a fold out booklet pasted into the back cover of the book. Would not be that expensive these days of fancy paper handling machinery. But the differance between a mass production item from Viking/Penguin and a posh item from Belknap/Harvard, this last being, according to Mr G., an imprint of Harvard University. A gang whom one supposes can afford to indulge in a bit of vanity publishing.