Millions Like Us (75 page)

41. Anne Popham and Graham Bell in his RAF uniform. ‘You are the dearest thing in my world,’ she wrote to him.

42. Schoolgirl Nina Mabey grew up to become Nina Bawden, well-known author of
Carrie’s War
, which was based on her experiences as an evacuee.

43. SOE coder Margaret Herbertson both experienced and contributed to the Allied victory in Italy in 1945.

44. Women welders were beset with danger from flying slag, burns and ‘arc eye’, partly because they often chose style over safety.

45. How to stay in fashion while fitting the caterpillar track to a tank.

46. ‘Mummy’s girl’ Thelma Ryder was sent away from home to work twelve hours a day making piston rings for aircraft.

47. Joyce Grenfell and her accompanist, Viola Tunnard, arriving in Baghdad, 1944.

48. Vera Lynn in the Far East, 1944. ‘I was an ordinary working-class girl. I was singing to my own kind.’

49. Backstage at ENSA HQ.

50. A QA tending a wounded soldier in an Italian field hospital.

51. QA Iris Ogilvie and a fellow nurse staging an upbeat publicity shot in front of a Bayeux hat shop, shortly after the Normandy landings.

52. QA Joy Taverner never questioned her early faith – ‘until Belsen’.

53. The war is over. A WAAF returns home.