The old, safe, quiet life of Britain ended. There were no more quiet evenings in the garden, no more leisurely teas in the working-class kitchen, no more visits to Wimbledon. People worked ten or twelve hours a day, and when they ate they ate strange dishes made of potatoes and carrots, and when they drank they drank weak beer and raw gin. These conditions were not universal. There were the shirkers in the safe hotels and the black markets. And, despite the bands playing "There'll Always Be an England" (a proposition that seemed highly doubtful in the summer of 1940) and despite the rolling oratory and defiance of Mr. Churchill, there was plenty of grousing. It was, they said in the ranks, "a hell of a way to run the bleedin' war"; or, as the suburban housewife remarked in the queue, "I really think they could get us some decent beef. How the children are to get along on this I cannot imagine." They went on, though. They were bombed and strafed and shelled, they were hungry and tired. The casualty lists came in from Norway, France, the Middle East, Burma, Malaya. The machines in the factories were as strained as the workers. Then, finally, it was over and they had won. Only a minute number had ever thought they would be beaten. But they were not the same people who had gone dutifully to war in 1939. Nor was the world the same. "Well, it's time to go home and pick up the pieces," said a major in Saxony in the summer of 1945. He, and thousands like him, found that the pieces just were not there any more. The economic drain of the war had made certain that Britons, far from enjoying the fruits of victory, would undergo further years of unrelenting toil in a scarred and shabby country. People were restless. They had been unsettled not only by the impact of the war but by the glimpse of other societies. Not until the last two and a half years of the war, when the American Army and Air Force began to flood into Britain, did people become aware of the size, power, and mechanical ingenuity and efficiency of the people who were so inaccurately portrayed by Hollywood. Some saw in Russia's resistance to the Germans and her final sweeping victories proof that the Communist society could endure and triumph no less than those of the Western democracies. Many who understood what had happened to British power during the war were convinced that if the country was to retain its position in the world, it would have to seek new, adventurous methods in commerce and industry and new men and new policies in politics. This conviction was held by hundreds of thousands who had once voted Liberal or Conservative but who in the election of 1945 were to cast their votes for the Labor Party.