Great review -- I'd begun to think that you had tacitly decided to DNF this one!
And the "storage as a response to WWII" struck home with me as well. My mother used to have an aunt and an unmarried cousin (that aunt's daughter) who had lost "their man" (husband / father) in WWII and were living together alone. They were known to enjoy strawberry jam, so every so often they'd get a jar of strawberry jam on gift-giving occasions like birthdays and Christmas -- not because they wouldn't have been able to afford it on their own, but just as a gesture. They died in the 1980s, within a few years of each other, and it ultimately fell to my mom and me to clear out their apartment. We found that, much like some poorer people in the decades between the wars and before WWI (to which group they had never even belonged themselves), they had an entire wardrobe's worth of clothing and household linens (tablecloths, towels etc.) that had never been used; many items even still in their wrappings. In their basement, the storage continued, with a whole pantry's worth of tins, boxes, jars and other containers of preserved food. Part of that pantry was a whole battery of shelves filled with strawberry jam jars -- many, several years old and quite a few of them long past their sell-by date. We salvaged those whose contents was still edible -- but even with giving a good number of them away, it took us a long time to finish those that we had kept ... as a result of which, there was a time in my life where your safest way to make me run away and not ever return was to serve up strawberry jam. I've since learned to like it again, but I'll never forget the sight of that battery of strawberry jam jars in their basement.
Thank you for sharing this. I think it's a shame that these stories are being lost and the reality of the lasting effects of WWII on those who lived through it are being lacquered over with romanticised accounts or anachronistic viewpoints. In the UK, we now have a generation of English politicians who have never lived through a European war or been touched by the civil war in Northern Ireland. They take their safety for granted. The see it as their right, as Englishmen, to live this way, and completely ignore the cost of getting here and the ease with which safety can be lost.
And the "storage as a response to WWII" struck home with me as well. My mother used to have an aunt and an unmarried cousin (that aunt's daughter) who had lost "their man" (husband / father) in WWII and were living together alone. They were known to enjoy strawberry jam, so every so often they'd get a jar of strawberry jam on gift-giving occasions like birthdays and Christmas -- not because they wouldn't have been able to afford it on their own, but just as a gesture. They died in the 1980s, within a few years of each other, and it ultimately fell to my mom and me to clear out their apartment. We found that, much like some poorer people in the decades between the wars and before WWI (to which group they had never even belonged themselves), they had an entire wardrobe's worth of clothing and household linens (tablecloths, towels etc.) that had never been used; many items even still in their wrappings. In their basement, the storage continued, with a whole pantry's worth of tins, boxes, jars and other containers of preserved food. Part of that pantry was a whole battery of shelves filled with strawberry jam jars -- many, several years old and quite a few of them long past their sell-by date. We salvaged those whose contents was still edible -- but even with giving a good number of them away, it took us a long time to finish those that we had kept ... as a result of which, there was a time in my life where your safest way to make me run away and not ever return was to serve up strawberry jam. I've since learned to like it again, but I'll never forget the sight of that battery of strawberry jam jars in their basement.