More book-buying shenanigans today… was in Blackwells and my eye was caught by the title Debs at War, because I thought it might refer to my heroine, Deborah Mitford. It doesn’t, but closer inspection didn’t make the book look any less interesting – the full title is Debs at War: How Wartime Changed Their Lives 1939-1945, and it’s about those who were debutantes shortly before war broke out. Anne de Courcy, the author of this book (and maybe known by some as a biography of Diana Mitford/Mosley), interviewed 47 women who were pre-war debs whose lives were dramatically changed by the war. They entered the Services, as Wrens, WAAFs, FANYs or ATS; they became nurses or VADs; some even started factory work and tried to hide their background.
As before, I’ll try to give an overview of a book by its chapter headings. The difference, of course, being that I haven’t read this one yet…
– Childhoods ‘We were taken down to say good morning to our mother’
– A Question of Upbringing
‘You won’t need exams’
– Coming Out
‘The whole point was to find a husband’
– The Approach of War
‘I stood in the room that had been my nursery, listening to Chamberlain declaring war’
– Joining Up
‘I wasn’t going to get on with anything else until we’d finished with Hitler’
– FANYs
‘Posh girls driving staff cars’
– ATS
‘We were the rough, tough ones’
– Fun in Wartime ‘Boyfriends were more important than bombs’
– Factories
‘We were working too hard to flirt…’
– Nursing
‘Sometimes the ambulance bells never stopped’
– Love and Marriage
‘…and then we got engaged. Crazy, really, wasn’t it?’
– Bletchley
‘How much German do you speak?’
– On the Land
‘We don’t want any bloody land girls here’
– The Class Barrier
‘We’d never met girls like these before’
– Wrens
‘We began to learn to do without sleep’
– The Air
‘Why are you bringing up only half an aeroplane?’
– Afterwards
‘The war made us feel capable of doing something’
This sounds like a really interesting companion to some of my other “war time” interview collections. Another one for the “when will I ever get time to read all these” wishlist!
Sounds great, thank you ! I added it to one of my lists. They grow, and grow, and grow (I have more than 500 titles on them)…
I’ve read Anne de Courcy’s “1939:The Last Season”. She is very good on that time and social stratum.
Sounds like the perfect book!
I found this book fascinating. One of the debs featured, Christian Miller, wrote a memoir called A Childhood in Scotland, which I wholeheartedly recommend (published by Canongate, I think) – quite interesting to compare her childhood to that of the Mitfords.
I’ve had my eye on this along with a few other books by de Courcy, which are generally not published in the US.
I read ‘Debs at war’ earlier this year. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is just the way history should be written, in an engaging style.
A bit late posting on this – have been away for a couple of weeks. Ditto peta’s comment and others.
Bletchley: Now that was an interesting place – have read about it several times in the last year.
I just finished the author's biography of the three Curzon sisters-not bad-Debs at War sounds better