Ben Machell on why dinner and the Blitz just don’t mix

Our columnist's bit on the side
Ben Machell22 September 2016

Because I’m a massive killjoy who cannot allow people to just enjoy themselves, I’ve been angsting like mad over the opening of a new pop-up restaurant-cum-immersive theatre experience near London Bridge.

It’s called Maman Le Mot — French for ‘Mum’s the Word’ — and has a French Resistance theme. You dress up in berets and stick-on moustaches, are given secret missions and instructed to beware of Gestapo infiltrators. Watch out for the Nazi secret police. They’ll liquidate you, ha ha! But seriously if your date is hot for Occupied France, you’d be stupid not to go.

Yet there’s something about the whole concept that makes me feel, I dunno, a bit melancholy — the idea of tipsily play-acting your way through the past horrors of distant people. It’s the same with our appetite for Blitz-themed events, as if the mass-bombing of London was all about nice dresses and gin cocktails rather than holding your family close and bricking it in a little tin shed in your garden. It’s not like I don’t understand the nostalgia for wartime, when life, we tell ourselves, was more vivid and thus somehow more authentic. I just don’t aspire to it, particularly when it’s repackaged for public consumption as something twee, knowing and kitsch. Would you go to a Stalingrad-themed pop-up? The Dresden Diner? Actually, forget it. I’m trademarking both of those.

It’s possible I’m over-thinking all this. But I just can’t shake the memory of the time I was dragged to a ‘wartime’ tea dance at the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall. It was dark and there was crackly jazz and young men in old army uniforms whirling girls around a dance floor. At first I thought the whole thing was kind of naff. But as the night wore on, the jazz kept playing and the dancers kept whirling, it became almost ghostly. I stood in the corner and thought about all the grief, death and fear those original wartime dances would have been charged with, about how the tears in the girls toilets would have been not just about boys, but about boys who were never coming back. I felt a sudden urge to leave, and went to an indie disco instead. There were no pretend air raids, no faux-Gestapo, just oblivious kids barging into me as they danced. And for the first time in my life, I was grateful for it.

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