Wendy in Wartime

A wartime life, told in her own words. In November 1939, with the war just two months old, Wendy Scorer married Hugh Farthing — a handsome young RAF pilot more than six years her junior — in a hasty white wedding at her parents’ house in Bowdon. Two years later, Hugh would be shot down by the Japanese somewhere over Singapore, missing presumed dead, leaving Wendy a widow at twenty-eight.


Drawing on Wendy’s gloriously frank diaries and a vast cache of family letters preserved across three generations, bestselling novelist Rebecca Tope reconstructs her aunt’s Second World War in extraordinary detail. Here is the British home front as it was actually lived by the affluent upper-middle classes: hasty weddings and sudden postings, fur boleros and ration coupons, dances at the airfield, infidelities forgiven and unforgiven, and an unending paper lifeline of letters criss-crossing wartime Britain.


From the early idyll at Kinloss in the far north of Scotland, to ambulance-driving on icy Cheshire roads, to weekends in London hotels under the doodlebugs; from the slow, agonising loss of Hugh in the Far East to a string of restless wartime lovers, the comfort of cocker spaniels, the long voyage to start again in Rhodesia, and at last a second marriage that would endure for thirty-six years — Wendy in Wartime is a vivid, unflinching, often very funny portrait of a woman who refused to let history happen to her quietly.


Generously illustrated with verbatim quotations from the original diaries and letters, this is social history at its most intimate: a real life, told with novelistic flair by a writer celebrated for her Cotswold, Lake District and West Country mysteries.


Wendy in Wartime is Volume One of the Scorer Family Memoirs..