Juliet Gardiner : Hello everyone! I'm ready to get going...

Chat Ed : Hello Juliet! Great, here we go...

dizzy : So what is your role on the Cabinet? What is your 'specialist' subject?

Juliet Gardiner : My role is to - like all the other members - to try to replicate authentic wartime conditions and to indicate to the family whereabouts they 'are now'. and what the conditions would have been like at that time, what the regulations would have been, and also to monitor the family - to make sure they're not taking any 21st century shortcuts... and you know, not living fully under the conditions of the 1940s. My particular role is having a watching brief for women and what they had to do - the conditions they had to live under.

Rebecca : how can you be sure that the situation is actually realistic, and not just the 'romantic' memories of how people think the war years used to be?

Juliet Gardiner : Well, I think that is actually by employing The Cabinet. We're all historians who have read and studied widely in that period, from a variety of sources. I don't think that many people do have a very romantic memory of the war - the people that do were children during the war, and they maybe felt they had fun and freedom... after all, there were days when they couldn't go to school, the time Ben and Thomas spent in the air-raid shelter with their family - but very few adults I've ever talked to have a romantic view of it. They do remember the camaraderie with fondness, the way the neighbours helped each other. As cabinet members we really do take our information from a very wide range of sources, aural and written, records, diaries, etc. So the problem with the war sometimes is that people tend to think that their individual experience was everybody's experience - but of course it was very different for each individual.

Nicola Linehan : How long did it take to 'create' the house authentically?

Juliet Gardiner : Well the house of course was already built - it was chosen because very little structural change was needed. Some windows perhaps, and blocked fireplaces, but on the whole the attraction of that house and its area - West Wickham - is how little it has changed. It took about four months, starting in December... the family moved in in April. Decorating, furnishing, equipping - and of course the garden.

clairey : Do you think the experiment would work better with a larger group, not just one family, as we are always told that people 'pulled together' so much then. One family going it alone seems artificially isolated?

Juliet Gardiner : I think that's a very interesting question. I think that was the thing that they found hardest, the fact that they were isolated... there wasn't anyone else going through the same experience. But on the other hand, I think the point of the programme was to concentrate the experience, and therefore a family, rather than a group was better - they all know each other, they're negotiating the war as a family. I think that you've picked on a really important point though. A lot of things that were very tough for the family would have been an awful lot less tough if their neighbours had been going through it too. Say rationing - there would have been a lot of swapping, say, if your family didn't eat a lot of sugar, you might have swapped it for eggs, or something like that. That was not an option open to the Hymers.

CHC : Did you have contingency plans in case the rationing became too much for the family, especially the kids?

Juliet Gardiner : No, we didn't. There were no contingency plans in the war... we decided that the family really had to live exactly as they would have done in the 1940s. The point with rationing was that it did give a basic and balanced diet... and the government only put food on ration if they could guarantee the supplies, so some things were never rationed. If you got your ration book, you KNEW your coupons would be honoured. In fact, in the case of the kids, though they did complain of being hungry a lot at the beginning, The Hymers both thought that is wasn't so much that they were actually hungry - it was just that they were missing their snacking. They got used to the small regular meals, though. And they were fantastic. They went to a school where there was a tuck shop - but they stuck with the rations just like the grownups!

BobUK : Was it deliberate to refuse them all the things on the shopping list, or was it purely coincidental that they couldn't have ANY of the things they wanted?

Juliet Gardiner : I'm not quite sure which bit that was - but the problem was that rationing was introduced in January 1940 but they changed throughout the war, they got more stringent - less fat, sugar and tea. There was a lot of stuff that was never on ration - vegetables, fish, offal, etc. That really did depend on availability. The government would only ration those things they could guarantee, as I just said. Nowadays we make a list and go to the shop - you had to go and see what was available other than your basic rations. Then you'd have to construct your meal around that! That's very hard for us to get our heads around today, where we start with what WE want and go out and get it. There was also the points system, the government introduced the points system, a way of giving the housewife a bit of choice and being able to make available what was seasonal or surplus. That's the way treats would happen, like tinned peaches say. Rumours of treats used to spread like wildfire.

GrahamC : Were there any 'cheats' at all? Contact lenses, modern medicines...?

Juliet Gardiner : No, there were none. No cheats at all, glasses. Luckily there was no need for modern medicine. Obviously we wouldn't have allowed one of the kids to get pneumonia and then be refused antibiotics... but what did happen was sunburn. I'm afraid we were very tough, and didn't give them any ambre solaire. We told them they would have had to wear a shady hat, and so for sunburn use calomile lotion. Ghastly stuff !

Andy : Did they even have to wear 1940's underwear?!

Juliet Gardiner : Oh yes! Talk to Lyn about that! The long bloomer knickers, corsets, which caused her agony... Suspenders on the corsets...l isle stockings, you know, like Nora Batty's! The boys wore the sort of underwear that they had - little y-fronts, vests. They sometimes complained that they were 'scratchy' !

Fenna : How did you create the air raid sounds?

Juliet Gardiner : It was recorded, a real recording of the sirens, and relayed from a speaker in the hall. I imagine it was from the BBC Archive or something. It was horribly realistic! Same with the All Clear.

Chat Ed : Two related ones now: Cedric : Did the children have to wear their 1940 clothes to school, and if so, what did their mates think about them?
Frances Farrar : When the father left the house, did he go back into year 2000 mode, or did he have to stay in 1940s mode?

Juliet Gardiner : The answer is that the children did wear their 1940s clothes everyday, but because they were going to a prep school, the uniform actually hadn't changed that much... the shorts were longer, and they wore braces, and the shirts were sort of made of flannel, but their mates took a great interest in it.
Juliet Gardiner : When the father left the house, he went back to his real job, making aircraft parts, so it's a factory. It was a small firm too, but he wore his 1940s clothes AND ate 1940s meals. A neighbour volunteered to provide the type of food that he would have had in a British restaurant in those days. They were set up in order to provide cheap, good food for the workers or the people unable to cook. They were hugely popular, and in all sorts of places like the V & A museum... plus it helped the family's rations if the father was having a good meal out. (Lynn made him a pack-up occasionally for the train journeys too)

iain scotland : the packaging for the food items did you recreate or was it original?

Juliet Gardiner : The packaging - a bit of both, iain. Some were original, some were photocopies though. There's a museum in Gloucester run by Robert Opie which is just stacked, floor to ceiling, with packages of everything. Oxo, Lux, Marmite... we got them from there, or copied them and pasted them onto modern tins.

Kiz : was there at any stage a point that you felt 'this isn't going to work'?

Juliet Gardiner : I think the family felt that, on the occasion you saw tonight, when they couldn't get cigarettes and both Lyn and Kirstie are great smokers. Michael was away working, and I think they just felt really very isolated. No cigarettes, they had great difficulty keeping the boiler alight and all the household things that we're not used to running these days! What happened was that a neighbour came round, the really important thing was that they got some cigarettes AND companionship, and the neighbour had lived there during the war and still does. So he was able to offer them memories and stories of the war. They felt that they weren't on their own, then. We never felt that it wasn't going to work though. They never asked for favours. They were absolutely committed from the word Go. Lyn found it very hard at the end - she didn't want to take off her 1940s clothes!

Carly : What was the weirdest/most difficult thing to get a hold of for the house?

Juliet Gardiner : Hmmm... The thing that took a lot of time was to get the right wallpaper. I think one of the things is that both the furniture and wallpaper in the 1930s often weren't very good quality. Therefore people haven't valued it, unlike say Victorian. People have tended to chuck it out, so Lia Kramer, the Art Director, had to do a lot of trekking around to find the authentic stuff. The other important thing was the kitchen. Absolutely essential to get the things, like the scales, absolutely right. very key. The weirdest thing was probably the gas masks - we wanted to get them all their own mask, as was expected during the war that the Germans would use poison gas - in fact that never happened, but everyone was issued with a gas mask - a gasbubble for babies! It was possible to get them but they contain asbestos, so we couldn't let the family use them. They're considered to be dangerous nowadays. That was the weirdest thing I suppose. We could get them but we couldn't use them!

Chat Ed : Okay, last question folks!
eileen : How did the family respond to having a camera crew in their home? Surely this would have been as odd as the 1940s experience itself!

Juliet Gardiner : Well again - I think they found the experience so absorbing and that they had to work so hard, that really all their concentration and energy went on that. To a large extent they really weren't aware of the camera. When the air-raid went off, they'd completely forgotten that the cameras were there! The cameras were rolling day after day, and I just think their attention went on the challenges really. It was a relatively small crew - it's a small house, it wasn't like a huge panoply of things. I think they just really forgot all about them. They didn't know I was on the cabinet, but as the author of the book I found that filming or not, the family were exactly the same. They had videodiaries - and Lyn regarded it as a confidante... she used it the most, she used it to unburden her soul. I think they had a very different relationship with the camera than we might imagine.

Chat Ed : Sadly we've run out of time! Thanks so much Juliet for being here...

Juliet Gardiner : Thankyou Chat Ed!

Chat Ed : Juliet's book, the companion to the 1940s House series, is available in the C4 shop: http://www.channel4.com/shop

Juliet Gardiner : Thanks everyone - we'll meet again I hope! I very much hope you are enjoying the series and that it's either bringing back memories or telling a story you'd never thought about. We tend to know a lot about big events, but the day-to-day living I hope has interested you!
Juliet Gardiner leaves the room