Our Last Letter: Absolutely gripping, epic and heartbreaking World War 2 historical fiction
Page 30
Finally he sleeps soundly and then, waking late, he goes downstairs. Breakfast is laid and there is a note: Help yourself. Back in a few minutes. He is about to tuck in when he hears voices, the front door opens and Kath enters with her daughter – their daughter – following behind.
They are both smiling.
If you absolutely loved Kath’s story of wartime courage, heartbreak and love, then don’t miss The Lost Soldiers! The stories of three women whose lives have been torn apart by war collide as they search for their loved ones on the battlefields of Europe… Will they find who they’re looking for?
Available now!
The Lost Soldiers
From the New York Times bestselling author comes a remarkable novel of three women whose lives have been torn apart by war. For fans of The Nightingale, Wives of War and Lilac Girls, The Lost Soldiers reveals the strength, love and courage found even in the darkest of times, and the ultimate triumph of hope.
In the summer of 1919, British Ruby is mourning her beloved husband Bertie, missing since 1916. His grief-stricken parents ask one last task of her: travel to the Belgian battlefields to find Bertie’s grave, and with it the peace that will come with knowing his final resting place.
Alice, an American, knows in her heart that her brother Sam is alive – but after he signed up under a false name, no news has been heard from him since he arrived in Belgium. Leaving her life and her fiancé behind in Washington, Alice sets sail for Europe, promising herself that she will not rest until she finds her brother.
Martha has risked everything to travel to Belgium. A German, she knows she will be met with neither sympathy nor understanding. But her son lies somewhere in Belgian soil, and her husband’s dying wish was for his grandfather’s bravery medal to be passed down to his son. It is a promise Martha will do anything to keep.
When the lives of these three women collide, they begin to question whether that which unites them could be greater than their differences. As an unlikely friendship blossoms, their story reveals their untiring determination to find out what happened to the men they love, no matter how painful the truth.
The Lost Soldiers is available now.
Get it here.
Also by Liz Trenow
The Lost Soldiers
All The Things We Lost
Our Last Letter
The Hidden Thread
The Forgotten Seamstress
The Last Telegram
All the Things We Lost
Once upon a time I would have trusted him with my life, but the Alfie I fell in love with seems to have disappeared, and I’m afraid I’ll never find him again.
1918 As victory bells sound across London, Rose Barker waits for her darling husband Alfie to come home. But, injured by a shell in the final days of the war, Alfie struggles with terrifying nightmares, and the more Rose tries to help him the further he sinks.
2014 Years later, Rose’s great-granddaughter Jess returns from Afghanistan, where she served as a front-line medic. Constantly reminded of those she could not save, Jess’s relationship is crumbling, and her life is falling apart.
But just as Jess is at her lowest, she receives an unexpected gift: the diaries of her great-grandmother Rose. And as she turns the pages, Jess discovers a story of enduring love—and hope—which will change her life forever.
Get it here!
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A Letter by Liz
Hello, and thank you so much for choosing to read Our Last Letter.
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This is a very personal novel, based in a remarkable place that I have known nearly all my life, and which is very dear to me: Bawdsey Manor, on the easternmost coast of England.
My father was a keen dinghy sailor and as children we spent many anxious hours watching him from the shingle at Felixstowe Ferry in Suffolk. Across the river, we could see fairy-tale towers peeping enticingly above the pines, and when the tides were right we would pack buckets and spades and take the ferry over to the small sandy beach at Bawdsey Quay. But the Manor itself, at that time still in the hands of the Ministry of Defence, remained firmly out of bounds, with soldiers at the gatehouse and Keep Out signs posted all around the fences.
Several decades later, our friend Niels Toettcher was sailing on the River Deben when he spied a For Sale sign. The Ministry of Defence was selling Bawdsey Manor and all its grounds and cottages. He landed, visited the place and fell in love with it, and for the next twenty-five years he and his wife Ann lived and ran a successful English language school there.
Of course we visited often and fell in love with it, too. How could you not? The mansion is remarkable in itself, but with the addition of its extraordinary military role (see my Note on the History), its masts, since taken down, and curious outbuildings, it is irresistible. I so enjoyed ‘living’ there once more, in my imagination, as I wrote Our Last Letter.
I love hearing from readers, so do get in touch! If you want to find out more please go to www.liztrenow.com. You can also follow me on Facebook, on Twitter and on Goodreads. I’d also be very grateful if you could write a review. It makes such a difference helping new readers to discover my books for the first time.
Thanks, Liz
A NOTE ON THE HISTORY THAT INSPIRED THIS STORY
Although Our Last Letter is entirely fictional, it was inspired by real-life events, people and places, especially Bawdsey Manor itself.
The history of Bawdsey Manor is well documented: William Cuthbert Quilter, a local landowner and MP, bought the land in 1873 to build a Victorian gothic ‘seaside home’. Over the next twenty years he added towers and facades in Flemish, Tudor/Jacobean, French chateau and Oriental styles to accommodate his growing family and lavish house parties. His wife, Lady Quilter, set about creating extensive formal gardens, a vast, walled kitchen garden and most notably the Cliff Path, using an artificial rock called Pulhamite.
In 1936 Bawdsey Manor was bought by the Air Ministry. Sir Robert Watson-Watt and his small team of brilliant scientists moved from nearby Orford Ness, working in utmost secrecy and under great pressure to develop new radio direction finding technology before the feared outbreak of war. Stables and outbuildings were converted into workshops and the first receiver and transmitter towers were built. Just eighteen months later RAF Bawdsey became the first fully operational radar station in the world.
In a frantic race before war broke out, dozens of similar stations with their distinctive towers were hastily constructed all along the south and east coasts of Britain. Watson-Watt – whose mother had been an early feminist – shocked everyone by declaring that they should recruit and train women as radar operators because they had better concentration, more patience and the delicate touch needed for the sensitive instruments.
After war was declared, thousands of young women joined the newly-created Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), and were put through rigorous aptitude tests. Because of the secrecy, those chosen to be radar operators had little idea of what this meant until they started the intensive period of highly technical training. Even then many failed to make the grade.
The work was hard and demanding; intense concentration and nerves of steel were required. Shifts operated day and night scanning the skies for signs of enemy aircraft and tracking our own during dog fights. Later, they provided a vital early-warning system against bombing raids. It was also dangerous; the stations were highly vulnerable in their coastal positions and easily identifiable by their tall masts. Several suffered disastrous bombing but the women never deserted their posts.
When America joined the war and the USA
F began building dozens of new airfields in readiness for the arrival of thousands of planes and troops, radar research was given a huge boost of additional funds and expertise. After the war, radar developed into microwave technology which today has countless applications in our everyday lives such as speed cameras and air traffic control, as well as in space.
All around East Anglia are the remnants of wartime airfields, none more chilling than the top-secret RAF Woodbridge (the official name for Sutton Heath), just a few miles inland from Bawdsey. Known as a ‘crash ’drome’, its especially wide runways were designed for use only by aircraft in trouble and it was fully equipped with extra-bright lighting, emergency medical facilities and heavy-lifting equipment to remove the wrecks. More than four thousand RAF and USAF planes crash-landed on this airfield during the war, and many lives were saved.
Felixstowe, one of the most easterly towns in Britain, has always been on the front line of war. At its southern end, Landguard Fort – now overlooked by the giant cranes and gantries of one of the largest container ports in Europe – has its origins in the sixteenth century. The coast is ringed with Martello towers built to defend Britain against Napoleon.
During the First World War, a flying boat squadron at Felixstowe played a critical role in tracking German U-boats and later became the first Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment for flying boats and seaplanes.
The work of the scientists who developed radar and the women who operated it remained an official secret for many decades. Now, the work of Watson-Watt and his team is widely credited with being a major factor in winning the Second World War, particularly in the Battle of Britain but also during the Blitz and in subsequent phases. Yet sadly their inventions and the dedication of thousands of radar operators are rarely celebrated, and are certainly far less widely recognised than the code-breakers of Bletchley Park.
Bawdsey Manor continued as an RAF base throughout the Cold War when Bloodhound missiles were sited on the cliffs but today it is in private hands (as an activity centre for young people) and not open to the public. However, Bawdsey Radar Trust has set up a small museum in a former transmitter block with exhibits explaining how radar began, how influential it was and still is today. A millennium-funded project has enabled the recording of fascinating oral histories from the women and men who worked there. The Museum recently won the Suffolk Small Museum award and is well worth visiting. Find out more at www.bawdseyradar.org.uk
Here are just some of the books, exhibitions and websites that have helped in my research:
Gwen Arnold, Radar Days: Wartime Memoir of a WAAF RDF Operator (Woodfield Publishing, 2000)
Jim Brown, Radar: How it All Began (Janus Publishing, 1996)
Robert Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World (Touchstone, 1998)
Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–45 (Headline, 2004) Ian Goult, Secret Location: A Witness to the Birth of Radar and its Postwar Influence (The History Press, 2010)
Phil Hadwen, John Smith, Ray Twidale, Peter White and Neil Wylie, Felixstowe from Old Photographs (The Lavenham Press, 1990)
Phil Hadwen, John Smith, Peter White and Neil Wylie, Felixstowe at War (The Lavenham Press, 2001) Phil Hadwen, Ray Twidale, Peter White, Graham Henderson and John Smith, The Hamlet of Felixstowe Ferry, Pictures from the Past (The Lavenham Press, 1990)
Gordon Kinsey, Bawdsey: Birth of the Beam (Terence Dalton, 1983)
Colin Latham and Anne Stobbs, Radar: A Wartime Miracle (Sutton Publishing, 1997)
Virginia Nicholson, Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives in War and Peace 1939–1949 (Viking, 2011)
Robert Watson-Watt, Three Steps to Victory (Odhams Press, 1957)
RDF to Radar, a film made by the Telecommunications Research Establishment Film Unit in 1945/46. On DVD from Bawdsey Radar Trust.
Bawdsey Radar Trust runs the transmitter block museum: www.bawdseyradar.org.uk
Felixstowe Museum at Landguard Fort: www.felixstowemuseum.org
Acknowledgments
This book would never have happened had our friends Niels and Ann Toettcher not decided – in a brilliant, crazy moment – to buy Bawdsey Manor from the Ministry of Defence and set up an English language school there. We were among their first guests and fell instantly in love with the place. The memories of many happy times in that magical place live on in our hearts.
The wartime history of Bawdsey Manor and in particular the extraordinary story of Robert Watson-Watt’s invention of radar is being wonderfully told through the work of the Bawdsey Radar Trust and the museum they have set up in a wartime transmitter block. Thanks to all who gave me their time and advice, particularly their former chair, Mary Wain.
Steph Merrett and her team at Felixstowe Library in Suffolk, England, are possibly the friendliest librarians in the world, and were very helpful in sourcing research materials about the town in wartime. Long live libraries!
I am, as always, eternally grateful to my tireless agent Caroline Hardman and to Maisie Lawrence and the team at Bookouture who have helped to ensure that this book reaches my wonderful readers in North America, for whom the development of radar and its vital role in winning WW2 is very much a shared history.
Last but not least, I could not do what I do without the love and support of family and friends – you know who you are.
Published by Bookouture in 2020
An imprint of Storyfire Ltd.
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.bookouture.com
First published in the UK in 2020 as Under a Wartime Sky
by Pan Books, an imprint of PanMacmillan
Copyright © Liz Trenow, 2020
Liz Trenow has asserted her right to be identified
as the author of this work.
Epigraph copyright © Louis Brown, 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78681-653-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, 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.