by Annie Murray
Acknowledgements
This is the sort of story that requires a very large number of small pieces of information, so my sources have been varied. But I owe some particular thanks. First to Dorothy Brewer Kerr for her memoir The Girls Behind the Guns, to Margaret Dady for A Woman’s War, and once again to Eric Taylor for Women Who Went to War, 1938–1946. Angus Calder’s social history of the Second World War, The People’s War, was of assistance, as was Donald Thomas’s An Underworld at War. The BBC’s large online archive of oral testimonies on World War II has also been invaluable.
My special thanks also to Eric Hill and the other lovely members of the Heartlands Local History Society, based at Nechells Green Community Centre in Birmingham.
For Alice Louise Roberts
First published 2010 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2010 by Macmillan
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-330-52568-8 PDF
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Copyright © Annie Murray 2010
The right of Annie Murray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Table of Contents
Reveille
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Square-bashing
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Homefires
Fifteen
Sixteen
On the Cliffs
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Homefires
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Absent Without Leave
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Homefires
Thirty-Two
The Viennese Ballroom
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Homefires
Thirty-Nine
What is Family?
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Soldier Girl
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
