This counter-intuitive assertion from Stevie Smith's The Holiday (1949) forms the keynote of the ‘other’ postwar, the one that finds no escape and which is abjectly bound to the destructive force of war. In this formulation, the postwar is a paradoxical space in which the absence of war proves stranger, and more disorientating, than its presence. For the nation, war's end signifies loss, not only through the pain of bereavement, but also through a loss of structure. The goal has been achieved, the war is, or is about to be, won, and the social, cultural and emotional energies that have for so long been directed towards one purpose must find alternative outlets. The wartime subject, similarly, is faced with fragmentation, as he or she is confronted by ‘the bewilderment of a postwar consequence’ (Smith 1949/1979: 184). If the war came to make what Rose Macaulay called a ‘lunatic sense’ (1950: 61), then its conclusion demanded a further logical readjustment. In the face of the Holocaust, the atom bomb, a landslide election victory for the Labour party, and the estrangement of coming ‘home’, society once again found itself up-ended, its points of reference and structures of signification undergoing perplexing transformations. This is a period of disappointment and uncertainty, in which the work of reconstruction is permeated by a necessary and painful negotiation of grief.