Tag Archives: London WW2 setting

Mrs Porter Calling by A.J. Pearce

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Mrs Porter Calling by A.J. Pearce is the third book by the author with the setting of WW2 London and the problems of running a women’s magazine called Woman’s Friend.

It begins in April 1943. Emmy Lake had begun knowing nothing about journalism but she’s now really confident about what she’s doing. She’s the agony aunt and she really wants to help the many readers who write in asking for her help.

Unfortunately the magazine’s owner Lord Overton dies and it transpires that he has given his niece the ghastly Honourable Mrs Porter the complete ownership of Woman’s Friend. Mrs Porter is only interested in high society and the best things in life which include clothes and make-up that no ordinary woman would be able to contemplate buying.  All of the readers’ favourite articles  are being dropped and worst of all the problem page is going too.

Within a very short time Mrs Porter has changed the magazine from a financial success that advertisers are queuing up for space in, to a magazine that very few women are buying.

With the help of Bunty, Thelma and Guy as well as the magazine team Emmy sets about trying to save the Womans’ Friend.

As with the two previous books in this series it all feels very authentic, the author has done her research. Inevitably as it’s wartime there is sadness and disaster, but they just ‘put their shoulders back’ and get on with it, as people had to. This was another enjoyable read.

Yours Cheerfully by A.J. Pearce

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Yours Cheerfully by A.J. Pearce which was published in 2002 is a sequel to Dear Mrs Bird, you can read my thoughts on that one here.

With the departure of the ghastly Mrs Bird at the end of the last book things at work in the offices of the magazine Woman’s Friend are improving hugely for Emmeline Lake. She can now reply to the problems page letters as she would like to instead of going behind Mrs Bird’s back.

The bombing of London has eased up somewhat, but Emmy’s best friend Bunty is still carrying the scars both physically and mentally from her experiences.

The government is starting a campaign to get women into the wartime factories to do their bit, the Ministry of Information want the women’s magazines to promote the idea, but those women who are already working in factories are having a tough time of it. Although the government realises that nurseries are needed to let the mothers of young children get back to work, the men who run the factories have no intention of changing anything, in fact they’re sacking women if they have childcare problems. Of course the women aren’t even being paid the same as men for doing the same jobs! Emmy gets involved.

This is a really enjoyable read with the relationships between the women of varied classes being to the fore, with no snobbery involved. The author did plenty of research to get the nitty gritty details of wartime Britain, including the fact that wives first realised that their husbands were either dead or missing when his army pay was stopped and they got no money! This happened several times to my father when the merchant ships he was on were torpedoed. No ship, no pay, but I suppose he was just glad to be picked up by another ship. I used to work with a woman who got a telegram saying her husband was missing and after six months they would begin to pay her her war widow’s pension, but what was she supposed to do for money for those six months?! The day before those six months were up she got a postcard from Italy from her husband who was a prisoner of war there!

My mother was of that WW2  generation and she worked in a factory sewing military uniforms, but that was before she was married with children. It was the most memorable time of her life though and every conversation came back to her wartime experiences. This book feels very authentic and true to the times. I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series which is called Mrs Porter Calling.

The Light Over London by Julia Kelly

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The Light Over London cover

The Light Over London by Julia Kelly was first published in 2019. It’s a dual time novel with the setting being in WW2 London 1941 and 2017 Gloucestershire. This type of structure often works well but at times they can be annoying if you are enjoying the story and the timeline suddenly switches away from it. The author is American but is now living in London.

Cara has recently divorced and relocated to Gloucestershire where she has got a job with an antiques dealer who does house clearances. When she finds a wartime diary in an old tin while helping with valuations and house clearing she asks her boss Jock if she can keep the diary and he’s happy for her to do so. The diary has been written by a woman who had run away and joined the army to do her bit, rather than stay at home and marry the young man that her rather bullying mother had planned out for her future.

The diary comes to an abrupt end and Cara is keen to find out what happened. She’s helped in her task by Liam, her new and rather good-looking neighbour. So the book contains two romances and a bit of a mystery, unfortunately for me it just didn’t work, in fact there are so many anomalies in the writing that I took to keeping a note of them, this might seem like nit-picking but if you are setting a book in England and all the characters are English then it’s important not to import Americanisms into it as it jars so badly.

The most obvious one was the use several times of the word purse where it should have been handbag.

The word blond was used to describe a woman but the ‘e’ also appeared in the next sentence, otherwise it was without the ‘e’.

The word stand-down was used in relation to the end of the war.

Card shark is used a few times, it should of course be card sharp, I have no idea if card shark is American.

Ticket taker should be ticket collector.

Do you think Princess Elizabeth will serve? The phrase in the UK is/was join up.

Off ramp was used when it should have been slip road, and tea kettle was used instead of just kettle.

In other words the book is in need of being edited to weed out the incongruous Americanisms – as well as the cornier romance parts.

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

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If you read my recent review of Elizabeth Bowen‘s book The Little Girls you’ll be surprised that I decided to read another of her books. It was a shock to me, in fact when I logged on to My Library Account I was aghast to see that I had requested this book. That’s what happens when you look at blogs late at night and it’s just too easy to click and request books which other bloggers have enjoyed. Luckily I did like this book as much as the other blogger did, sadly I can’t remember which blog it was, do let me know if it was you!

Anyway The Heat of the Day which was first published in 1948 did turn out to be a far better read than The Little Girls, in fact it seems that it was Elizabeth Bowen’s most successful book, I imagine that’s because of the subject matter. The book is based mainly in London during World War 2 which is where Bowen herself was based at the time and she seems to capture the atmosphere of the place perfectly as you would expect from someone who lived through the bombing.

The main character, Stella is a middle aged woman who is having a relationship with Robert who is a few years younger than her. She works for the government. Robert was wounded at Dunkirk, and it seems to have had a psychological effect on him. Depending on his mood his limp can be bad or almost completely unnoticeable.

Stella is divorced and has a son Roderick in the army, his father died soon after the divorce and eventually Roderick inherits an estate in Ireland on the death of a cousin. Ireland was a neutral country and it wasn’t possible for him to travel there as he was in the army. Stella travels there to see to his business affairs, back to the place where she had spent her honeymoon. It’s suffering from the same deprivation as Britain with candles and even matches being in short supply.

Harrison is also working for the government, he’s a counter spy and he’s haunting Stella whom he has fancied from afar for years. He tells her that Robert is suspected of being a spy.

Nothing is as it seems in this book as you would expect from a spy story. Looking at Bowen’s own life it’s easy to see that she used a lot of her own experiences to write it, with a character who suffers from mental infirmity (supposedly) and she herself inherited an estate in Ireland.

This book is regarded as one of the best portrayals of London during the bombing raids of World War 2, when people lived for the moment, never knowing if they were going to wake up in the morning or not.

The book was adapted for TV in 1989.