Orphans of War (63 page)

Once again I’ve borrowed the beautiful landscape of the North Craven Dales for the location of Sowerthwaite, Brooklyn Hall and the Old Vic. I was privileged to meet the late Mrs Frances Capstick of Hellifield who, a few years before her death, gave a wonderful account to our local history group of her extraordinary time in charge of the evacuee hostel, Mount Pleasant, near Settle during the war. Her life and stories inspired the beginning of this novel but Aunt Plum and all my evacuees and their adventures are fictitious. Thank you all my local friends who passed on anecdotes about their own experiences of evacuation. I also found
Evacuation: The True Story,
broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in August 1999 another moving source of information for this book.

Some of the details of the fashion industry in the 1950s were gleaned from Eric Newby’s
Something Wholesale: My Life in the Rag Trade,
published by Picador, and Ginette Spanier’s
It Isn’t All Mink,
published by Robert Hale in 1972.

Thank you, Maxine Hitchcock and Keshini Naidoo, for editing my script with such care and making some
thoughtful suggestions. Thanks, also to the ‘Flying Ducks’, Northern Chapter of the RNA, always there to encourage and enthuse when the going gets tough.

Leah Fleming was born in Lancashire of Scottish parents, and is married with four grown-up children and five grandchildren. She writes full-time from a haunted farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales and from the slopes of an olive grove in Crete.

Find out more about Leah at www.leahfleming.co.uk and visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive updates on Leah Fleming.

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The Girl From World’s End
The War Widows

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

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Copyright © Leah Fleming 2008

Leah Fleming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-1-84756-023-0

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EPub Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007335008