'The Army of the Unemployed': Walter Greenwood's wartime novel and the reconstruction of Britain

This article explores Walter Greenwood's completely forgotten wartime novel, Something in My Heart (1944), which is of note both as a sequel to his influential novel Love in the Dole (1933) and as a novel which explicitly focuses on the war as an opportunity to put right the social injustice and political mismanagement of the nineteen-thirties. The novel focuses on two unemployed Salford men in the late thirties and on their contribution to the war effort once they have joined the RAF at the beginning of the war. The article argues that the political motivations of Greenwood's novel in arguing for a very different post-war Britain are influenced both by his experience of pre-war censorship and his sense of the political possibilities opened up by the Ministry of Information's stress on the idea of 'the People's War'.