February 2022
War Babies
War Babies, the title of my new novel describes my own generation. We were the children of war, not just during the fighting or bombing or dislocation that took place between 1939 and 1945, but the longer lasting effects after it had finished. The return of the fathers to the mothers who had run their families on their own often over five or six years.
When my family moved to London, my first images were of bomb sites and the purple flowers of the buddleia that flourished there. At the coast, there were still barbed wire and skull and cross bones, a warning of bombs, live and dangerous. But there was a sense of a new order too: socialism, and as the sixties came, the rise of feminism. War Babies, written from three points of view, at first with all the passions of youth, allows me to describe a period, now history, also holds the roots of much that followed. Not content with that, I have tracked forward and the most dramatic of the three sisters becomes a recognisable woman of today.