Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey

In 1944 a 32-year-old woman called Roberta wrote about a particularly nasty case of morning sickness. "I am sick and in pain and feel absolutely like Hell and look a thousand, yellow and grey and ill." She had suffered years of bombing, hardship and shortages, she was expecting her fourth child and the other three had measles. The one bright light in her life was the fortnightly magazine produced by CCC, the Cooperative Correspondence Club, to which she contributed her cri de coeur.

The club began in July 1935. Readers of a weekly publication called The Nursery World were invited to contribute to the letters page, which was cosily titled "Over the Teacups". A mother signing herself Ubique asked for help. She was lonely, exhausted, bored and very hard-up, and she had, she confessed, a tendency to brood. She needed an occupation that would intrigue her, and would cost her next to nothing.

Responses flooded in from other readers, many of them expressing the same problems and asking would she like to write to them. Rather than replying to them all, Ubique suggested starting the club. The idea was that women contributed articles on any subject they chose and sent them to her. She then sewed them all into a linen folder and posted the magazine to the first member, who added her own comments and suggestions, if she wanted to, before sending it on to the next. Only one copy of each edition was ever produced, yet the magazine flourished, once a fortnight without fail, until 1990.

Jenna Bailey was looking through the Mass Observation archives in search of a subject for her thesis when she came across some of these magazines. As happens to the best of them, the thesis grew into a large research project and now into an engaging and informative book, often touching, occasionally hilarious, sometimes profoundly moving.

The CCC members came from all over the British Isles and from every political persuasion. Some were married to soldiers, others to conscientious objectors; some were deeply religious, others atheists (and one, apparently, an ontologist). Most of them were broadly middle-class, with the exception of a game and funny Lancashire mill-worker's daughter who called herself Cotton Goods.

They all used pseudonyms, to preserve their anonymity from prying eyes: this was a very private club. The names they chose are fun. A member called Doris simply reversed her name to Sirod; another coined a version of her perceived besetting sin and called herself Accidia: her opposite number, you might say, was Ad Astra who took over the editorship from Ubique and held it for nearly 50 years.

Men assume, bless them, that when women get together it is their husbands and lovers that they discuss. That is only occasionally true. The women of the CCC wrote to each other about everything, from farming advice ("When you are dealing with cows, you need to try and think like one... cows so easily lose heart") to the interesting notion that the female orgasm may determine the sex of a child. Discussions could lead to arguments and occasionally to blazing rows - one woman left with a huffy "My husband will not allow me to be insulted" - but mostly the friendships forged by the club were strong and lifelong.

Jenna Bailey has organised this rich material cleverly, telling the story of the club chronologically through the lives of its most active members. The writers' ages tend to dictate their subjects. At first, when the law barred married women from many careers, they wrote about practical ways of surviving motherhood without total dissolution of the brain. In wartime, they began to meet in person, rural members often sheltering evacuated CCC families. In middle age came some great set-pieces: Amelia watching the Coronation from the Statue of Achilles; Elektra appearing live on an early television debate; Yonire fighting off (and nearly killing) a would-be seducer in a pitch-dark organ-loft.

Some entries have a delicious period feel: the relief when Roberta is allowed to borrow a neighbour's "char" or the anxiety of Isis, who has fallen for her doctor and paces his waiting room reading snatches from a racy French novel she finds there, while chain-smoking to calm her nerves. Mostly, though, the book is a celebration of the kind of real and enduring friendship that some lucky women still enjoy today, though email has replaced the sewn linen magazine. The last chapters show this most powerfully, as grandmothers, friends for 50 years, support each other through illness, bereavement and grief.

Happily, a handful of them have survived into great old age, still keep in touch and sometimes meet for lunch. Long may they flourish.