While every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of a number of other works quoted in this book, it has proved impossible in certain cases to obtain formal permission for their use. The publishers would be glad to hear from any copyright holders they have not been able to contact and to print due acknowledgements in future editions. Works whose copyright holders have so far proved untraceable are as follows: the lyric beginning ‘Good morning my sweet … ’ reprinted in Keep Smiling Through – The Home Front 1939–45 by Susan Briggs; London War Notes by Mollie Panter-Downes; D for Doris, V for Victory by Doris White, published by Oakleaf Books; and the poem ‘End of D-Day Leave’ by Aileen Hawkins, reprinted in Shadows of War: British Women’s Poetry of the Second World War, edited and introduced by Anne Powell.
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First published 2011
Published in Penguin Books 2012
Copyright © Virginia Nicholson, 2011
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196974-9
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* See Appendix, p. 449, for a breakdown of women’s military and civilian casualties.
* See Virginia Nicholson Singled Out – How Two Million Women Survived without Men after the First World War (2007)
* Frances Faviell is the nom de plume of Olivia Parker (born Olive Frances Lucas in 1902). Confusingly, she also painted under the name Olivia Fabri – this being the surname of her first husband, a Hungarian painter named Karoy Fabri. Having largely drawn my account of her life in the 1940s from her published (but now, sadly, out of print) books, I have presented her under the name she chose as a writer.
* I am indebted to the author and teacher Jonathan Keates for telling me this endearing story about how his parents met; it was sad to hear that the charming Lieutenant Keates died of tuberculosis in 1949, when his younger son was only three years old. Sonia never remarried.
* The figure was then raised to sixty shillings – which was still under 50 per cent of the pay of a man working in a factory at that time.
* To sned: a pleasingly obscure word meaning to cut or lop off a branch: OED.
* Degaussing is work carried out to protect ships from magnetic mines, by neutralising their magnetic fields. This is done by encircling the hull of the ship with a conductor carrying electric currents. ‘Luckily I was not expected to do anything technical, but I would have to control all the processes of instrumentation for the ships on the range.’
* Incredibly, one of the pilots had managed to crash-land and he and his crew survived. All were taken prisoner.
* See Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (1984)
* But Amy’s session with the Air Force boy sounds even nicer if pronounced with a Huddersfield accent, using the long ‘u’, as in ‘coodly Woodly’.
* Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, hero of the Dieppe Raid and later recipient of the Military Cross after his actions on Sword Beach during the Normandy invasion. He was also famed on that occasion for instructing his Scots piper to pipe the commandos ashore, in defiance of contrary orders.
* Based on the real-life artists’ model Christabel Leighton-Porter 1913-2000.
* Bill survived, picking up no fewer than twenty-one service medals. For twenty-one years after the war he and Aileen were employed as gardener and housekeeper by the concert pianist Sir Clifford Curzon at his home in Hampstead, until Bill’s death in the 1960s. Aileen died in 2006.
* Landing ship tank.
* Service abbreviation for ‘Unserviceable’.
* Julie Summers, Stranger in the House; Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War (2009).
* Contemporary figures offer a little perspective on those of sixty years ago. In 2008 132,562 couples got divorced in England and Wales.
* He died in 1960 of a heart attack, aged forty-nine. Frances went on to serve as lady-in-waiting to HM the Queen Mother for nearly forty years.
* In Austerity Britain (2007), David Kynaston airs the opposing argument, put forward by cultural historian Angela Partington, that the New Look made a defiant statement, that it was ‘stroppy’, feisty and mould-breaking. Partington compares its ‘strong colours [and] severe shapes’ with the ‘twee … sensible’ utility styles of the earlier 1940s and points out that many working-class women subverted the ‘designer’ New Look to match their own requirements. But to describe the curvaceous silhouettes of 1947-8 as ‘severe’ is surely stretching a point, while ‘twee’ doesn’t exactly sum up – to me anyway - the skimpiness and rigidity of wartime styles.
* Helen Forrester’s books have sold 4 million copies, and in 1988 she was granted an Honorary Degree by the University of Liverpool. She is still alive and living in Canada, but her powers are fading, and her memory is inconsistent. Dr Avadh Bhatia died in 1984.
* Winwood Reade (1838-75), romantic Victorian traveller, doctor and controversialist, author of The Martyrdom of Man (1872).
* A brilliant journalist and passionate educationist, for thirty years W. E. Wil
liams was editor-in-chief of Penguin Books. He also helped set up the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which developed into the Arts Council. His wife, Gertrude Rosenblum, became Professor of Social Economics at the University of London.
* They included Eva Hubback, Principal of Morley College, Ann Temple of the Daily Mail, the scientist and pacifist Professor Kathleen Lonsdale, the birth control pioneer Dr Helena Wright, Juanita Frances, activist and editor of the feminist forum Wife and Citizen, Mary Field, film producer and president of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women, and the trade union leader Dame Florence Hancock.
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