Millions Like Us (87 page)
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
In addition, the author gratefully acknowledges the kind permission of copyright holders to quote from a number of authors and sources, as follows: lines from ‘September 1, 1939’: Copyright © 1940, The Estate of W. H. Auden; excerpts from
In My Own Time
by Nina Bawden reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London on behalf of Nina Bawden, copyright © Nina Bawden; ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, written by Nat Burton and Walter Kent, used by Permission of Shapiro Bernstein & Co. Limited, all rights reserved, International Copyright secured; ‘There’ll Always be an England’, words and music by Ross Parker and Hugh Charles © Copyright 1939 Dash Music Company Limited, all rights reserved, International Copyright Secured, reprinted by permission;
Brief Encounter
© NC Aventales AG 1945,
www.noelcoward.com
, use of quote by permission of Alan Brodie Representation Ltd,
www.alanbrodie.com
; excerpts from
London Under Fire
© Mrs Robert Henrey, and
A Farm in Normandy
and
The Return to the Farm
by Madeleine Henrey both published by J. M. Dent & Sons, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group, London; material from the Mass Observation archive reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London, on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, copyright © The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive; extracts from
A Pacifist’s War
and
Everything to Lose
, copyright © Frances Partridge, reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN; excerpts from
Change into Uniform
reprinted with thanks to the late author and journalist Helen Long, née Vlasto. Extracts from
Love Lessons
by Joan Wyndham (Heinemann, 1985),
Love is Blue
by Joan Wyndham (Heinemann, 1986)
and
Anything Once
by Joan Wyndham (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992) are printed by permission of United Agents Ltd on behalf of The Estate of Joan Wyndham. Acknowledgements are due to the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, with particular thanks to Gordon and Alexandra Tregear, for the use of unpublished excerpts from the writings of Monica Symington née Littleboy, and to Mrs Ouida V. Ascroft for the use of unpublished excerpts from the writings of Miss F. M. Speed, both now held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum.
Permission to quote from
A WAAF in Bomber Command
is given by Peter Brimson, Pip Beck’s son; quotations from
The Years of Opportunity
by Barbara Cartland reprinted by kind permission of Cartland Promotions; permission to use quotations from her own work, without payment, is granted by Margaret G. Pawley; and quotation from the lyric ‘Not a Cloud in the Sky’ by kind permission of Peermusic (UK) Ltd, London. Particular thanks to John Parker for his (retrospective) permission for the use of material from two of his mother’s books:
The Dancing Bear – Berlin de Profundis
, published by Rupert Hart-Davis, and
A Chelsea Concerto
, published by Cassell plc, a division of the Orion Publishing Group, both by Frances Faviell.
Grateful thanks too, to Rachel Anderson for permission to quote from
Spam Tomorrow
by Verily Anderson, ‘Payment for use of the quotations selected, waived as agreed by Verily before her death on 16 July 2010’; to Mrs Dorothy Brewer-Kerr for permission to quote excerpts from
Girls Behind the Guns
; to Christopher Clayton, for permission to quote from
The Enemy is Listening: The Story of the Y Service
by Aileen Clayton; to Robert Bhatia on behalf of his mother, Helen Forrester, for the use of quotations from
By the Waters of Liverpool, Lime Street at Two
and
Thursday’s Child
; to Ralph Kite, the son of Lorna Kite, for the use of quotations from the unpublished writings of his mother; to Susan S. Green for the use of quotations from the published and unpublished writings of her mother, Joy Trindles; and to Mrs Phyllis Willmott for permitting quotations from
Coming of Age in Wartime, Joys and Sorrows
and from her unpublished diary held in Churchill College Archive.
*
Acknowledgements are also due to the following whose works have been quoted from: Lucilla Andrews,
No Time for Romance
;
A Woman in Berlin
; Ursula Bloom,
Trilogy
; Vera Brittain,
Lady into Woman
; Sue Bruley, ed.,
Working for Victory
; Frances Campbell-Preston,
The Rich Spoils of Time
; Joyce Grenfell,
The Time of My Life
; Eric Hobsbawm,
Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century
; Elizabeth Jane Howard,
Slipstream
; Kenneth Howard,
Sex Problems of the Returning Soldier
; Margery Hurst,
No Glass Slipper
; Shirley Joseph,
If Their Mothers Only Knew: An Unofficial Account of Life in the Women’s Land Army
; Zelma Katin,
Clippie;
Christian Lamb,
I Only Joined for the Hat
; Hilde Marchant,
Women and Children Last: A Woman Reporter’s Account of the Battle of Britain
; Judy Milburn and Peter Donnelly on behalf of the estate of Clara Milburn for permission to quote from
Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s Day-to-Day Reflections 1939–1945
; Naomi Mitchison,
Among You Taking Notes
; Jenny Nicholson,
Kiss the Girls Goodbye
; quotations from Iris Ogilvie from Vera Lynn, with Robin Cross and Jenny de Gex,
Unsung Heroines: The Women Who Won the War
; Margaret Powell,
Climbing the Stairs
; Barbara Pym,
A Very Private Eye
; Rozelle Raynes,
Maid Matelot
; Dorothy Scannell,
Dolly’s War
; Maureen Wells,
Entertaining Eric
; Margaret Wharton,
Recollections of a GI War Bride: A Wiltshire Childhood
; Virginia Woolf,
The Diaries of Virginia Woolf
and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, from
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
.
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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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
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, England
First published 2011
Published in Penguin Books 2012
Copyright © Virginia Nicholson, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on
pp. 489–93
constitute an extension of this copyright page
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Mirrorpix.com
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-14-196974-9
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Join the conversation:
*
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.