“Careless Talk”: reading Britain’s Home Front fiction

When my students read the story “Careless Talk,” they often see the discussion of food as a sort of deceptively innocuous backdrop for the more serious matters in the story – the suspicions that the enemy might be listening in for idle disclosures, or that even old friends might not be trusted. As historian Jo Fox has pointed out, the “careless talk” posters produced a tension between making the public feel they could trust that they were all in it together, yet also making people feel like no one could be trusted.