‘Because I wanted to write something about the war. Something but not about Spitfires and Blitz and men machine-gunning and going into battle. I wanted to tell a love story. When I came to do it, I found that I had lived one.’
Dorothy Partridge’s shrewd eyes in the puffy old face searched Georgia.
‘And was this here love story about my Harry?’
‘No, it is about more than that kind of love. It’s about several different kinds of love and what it did to us, about men going away, and women getting a bit of freedom and about what the war did to love.’
‘So you wouldn’t say it was romance then?’
‘No. It’s a love story. Didn’t we women love one another? You can’t call it anything else can you? It occurred to me whilst I was writing it, that it was a bit like having a love affair… Romance is too shallow a word. Eye of the Storm is a love story.’
Lying back on a soft sofa, she stretched above her head the arm with the hand holding the brandy glass, and watched the flickering flames of the fire glittering the cut glass.
Tomorrow, I shall go out on the Downs. Perhaps I’ll ride a bit… work off this brandy. Or maybe I’ll go to London and see what they think about the idea for the new book. Or get Nick to go over the plan for the trout tanks with me. Perhaps I’ll take Belle to the pond.
Markham/Romsey
The Consequences of War is set in a fictitious small market town in Hampshire at the time of the Second World War. The town is called Markham.
However, in the descriptions of Markham there is so much of Romsey, where I was born and grew up, that it would be untrue to say that I was not thinking of Romsey when I wrote The Consequences of War.
I am sure that those of my family and friends who still live there will know that I chose to set this story in my home town because of my affection for the place.
The fiction is in the people of Markham and what happened to them. My Markham people were not drawn from Romsonians, but came to life in 1989 and live only within the pages of this book.
What is not fiction is the change that took place in the lives of many married women. The Blitz is real; so are the air-raids and the fire-bombings of Southampton and Portsmouth; the ‘invasion’ of Hampshire by Yanks at the time of D-Day; shortages, rationing and the kind of life led by people who lived in small, quiet towns in Southern England during the Second World War.
Betty Burton,
Southsea, Hampshire
January 1990
First published in the United Kingdom in 1990 by Grafton Books
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Betty Burton, 1990
The moral right of Betty Burton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788630320
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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The Consequences of War Page 39