The main idea of the book is that events in 1946 set the direction for the rest of the Twentieth Century. And there are plenty of examples.
The wartime leaders of Britain and the US were no longer in charge. Whereas in the UK Clement Atlee had been a key minister in Churchill's war cabinet, Truman in the US had not had similar experience of top leadership.
Russia was taking control of most of Eastern Europe after years of domination by Nazi Germany. The first hints of the Cold War and the iron curtain were detected.
General Douglas Macarthur was beginning the task of rebuilding Japan along democratic lines, a 180 degree change from the previous autocratic tradition.
Britain was preparing to leave India, while other European nations were trying to re-establish their empires in regions the Japanese had taken over during the war.
Germany was suffering the after-effects of the war: massive destruction by bombing raids and fighting across its territory. A hunt for Nazi war criminals was begun, and new systems of government, again along more democratic principles than Hitler had encouraged, were being launched.
The financial and trade systems had to be re-established, and in particular the huge task of feeding the starving millions in the worst affected areas had to be undertaken. In practice this meant the citizens of the UK had to endure more stringent rationing than they had during the war so as to feed Germany.
And the fledgling United Nations was taking its first faltering footsteps.
Overall the thesis that 1946 was a pivotal year is certainly argued well.
And I have started to think about my memories of that year and how our life here in New Zealand related to the accounts in the book.
1946 was the year I started secondary school, in what we called 'Third Form'at Auckland Grammar School. The Labour Government's Education Act had just been passed in 1944 introducing School Certificate, so we were in the second cohort of students who sat that exam. Everyone had to study Social Studies in the first two years. The teachers were just struggling to get to grips with this new way of dealing with History and Geography and Civics. I remember a local survey being touched on, but in hindsight it could have been much more interesting and inspiring to us.
I can't blame the teachers; several of them had just returned from flying Lancasters or Mosquitoes over Europe or the Pacific, or manning artillery in France or fighting through the jungles of South-East Asia. And the others were very elderly and worn out trying to hold the fort when the younger men were all away. But it certainly was the start of a new era.
We still had rationing, like the Brits, and lots of families were still sending food parcels to friends and relatives in UK or in other wrecked parts of Europe.
But in many ways the hints of the future had not reached us yet. I still travelled to town each morning by steam train. Diesel engines were yet to be introduced to our part of the world. And the streets I used to get to school from the railway station still had trams filled with workers on their way too. The petrol ration allowed us only fifty kilometres of travel each month, while new tyres were virtually unobtainable.
I think we saw bananas again after having none during the war, and products like peanut butter, which we had never heard of, started to appear.
Because building materials had been short during the war years, no new school rooms had been built, so classes were large: I remember classes of between forty and fifty in my last years at primary school, This took a while to rectify.
We were seeing the last of our American friends, who had built camps and hospitals near us, like Middlemore and Puhinui. So there were no crowds of US servicemen at church on Sundays any longer, nor being entertained for lunch by my parents.
Overall the thesis that 1946 was a pivotal year is certainly argued well.
And I have started to think about my memories of that year and how our life here in New Zealand related to the accounts in the book.
1946 was the year I started secondary school, in what we called 'Third Form'at Auckland Grammar School. The Labour Government's Education Act had just been passed in 1944 introducing School Certificate, so we were in the second cohort of students who sat that exam. Everyone had to study Social Studies in the first two years. The teachers were just struggling to get to grips with this new way of dealing with History and Geography and Civics. I remember a local survey being touched on, but in hindsight it could have been much more interesting and inspiring to us.
I can't blame the teachers; several of them had just returned from flying Lancasters or Mosquitoes over Europe or the Pacific, or manning artillery in France or fighting through the jungles of South-East Asia. And the others were very elderly and worn out trying to hold the fort when the younger men were all away. But it certainly was the start of a new era.
We still had rationing, like the Brits, and lots of families were still sending food parcels to friends and relatives in UK or in other wrecked parts of Europe.
But in many ways the hints of the future had not reached us yet. I still travelled to town each morning by steam train. Diesel engines were yet to be introduced to our part of the world. And the streets I used to get to school from the railway station still had trams filled with workers on their way too. The petrol ration allowed us only fifty kilometres of travel each month, while new tyres were virtually unobtainable.
I think we saw bananas again after having none during the war, and products like peanut butter, which we had never heard of, started to appear.
Because building materials had been short during the war years, no new school rooms had been built, so classes were large: I remember classes of between forty and fifty in my last years at primary school, This took a while to rectify.
We were seeing the last of our American friends, who had built camps and hospitals near us, like Middlemore and Puhinui. So there were no crowds of US servicemen at church on Sundays any longer, nor being entertained for lunch by my parents.
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