Millions Like Us (88 page)

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Based on the real-life artists’ model Christabel Leighton-Porter 1913-2000.

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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.

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Landing ship tank.

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Service abbreviation for ‘Unserviceable’.

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Julie Summers,
Stranger in the House
; Alan Allport,
Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War
(2009).

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Contemporary figures offer a little perspective on those of sixty years ago. In 2008 132,562 couples got divorced in England and Wales.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Winwood Reade (1838-75), romantic Victorian traveller, doctor and controversialist, author of
The Martyrdom of Man
(1872).

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A brilliant journalist and passionate educationist, for thirty years W. E. Williams 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.

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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.