As the war entered its final stages, literature as well as cinema proved keen to get away from the Nazis, and indeed from the physically, emotionally and spiritually enervating landscape of wartime Britain. The literature of escape took many forms, and this chapter will focus on writing emerging from the later war or immediate postwar years that negotiates the conflict through avoidance, or challenges its shibboleths through comedy. These are fictions which turn away from the effort of the ‘long haul’ to focus on pleasure, offering frivolity as an antidote to war weariness; or which conjure up fantastic worlds, including the world of childhood, as an alternative habitus in the face of an inhospitable reality. Traces of the wartime context, though, are still evident in these works. As Diana Wallace has noted, while readers might be attracted to the richness of a past world, ‘any historical novel always has as much, or perhaps more, to say about the time in which it is written’ (2005:4). These narratives, then, occupy a complex double space: both of their time and resistant to it, escapist yet critically engaged.