Last Women Standing
On sale
6th May 2027
Price: £25
Genre
The ten women in this book were born between the wars, they grew up in the devil’s decade and survived and served in history’s most fatal conflict – together they have lived more than 1000 years. Grace added on her age to enter the female army: ‘I joined up cos I was lonely. I was a domestic servant at 14 and thought fighting a war had to be better than that.’ Welsh Mary didn’t have an option: ‘it was the factory or the forces, my father wouldn’t let me in the military so I was soldering flame flares.’
Cast under the shadow of World War II, in a Britain where teenage girls did what they were told, Last Women Standing is a series of deeply personal stories narrated by ten centenarians looking back on young lives defined by service, secrecy and endurance. Manette swapped the Land Army for the Wrens: ‘I was followed in Egypt. Because I spoke fluent French they thought I was spy.’ Engaged to airman Frank, Robbie worked at Bomber Command HQ: ‘we were walking together one evening and he held up his arm – he said ‘see that thumb, its killed women and children.” Wren Officer Mary was working in the run up to D-Day: ‘we were sleeping on the floor, there was a lot of adrenalin, we couldn’t believe it when they postponed the landings.’
Poignant and wry, these exceptional veterans served a war machine initially wary of female service that went on to control and conscript unprecedented numbers of women. Bletchley veteran Hazel extracted herself from the GIs’ ‘flying fortress – it was not worth a tin of fruit’, Robbie recalls free sanitary towels: ‘the girls polished the barrack floor with them’ and ‘Lumberjill’ Hannah ‘starting drinking in Gloucestershire – the pub was the only entertainment. They didn’t like us Londoners’.
Today, in a world surrounded by numerous existential threats, their collective voice, curated by award-winning historian Dr Tessa Dunlop, is a powerful reminder that against the odds, a generation of marginalised young women rose to the challenge when Great Britain was fighting for its life. Theirs is an extraordinary story of survival, both then and now.
Cast under the shadow of World War II, in a Britain where teenage girls did what they were told, Last Women Standing is a series of deeply personal stories narrated by ten centenarians looking back on young lives defined by service, secrecy and endurance. Manette swapped the Land Army for the Wrens: ‘I was followed in Egypt. Because I spoke fluent French they thought I was spy.’ Engaged to airman Frank, Robbie worked at Bomber Command HQ: ‘we were walking together one evening and he held up his arm – he said ‘see that thumb, its killed women and children.” Wren Officer Mary was working in the run up to D-Day: ‘we were sleeping on the floor, there was a lot of adrenalin, we couldn’t believe it when they postponed the landings.’
Poignant and wry, these exceptional veterans served a war machine initially wary of female service that went on to control and conscript unprecedented numbers of women. Bletchley veteran Hazel extracted herself from the GIs’ ‘flying fortress – it was not worth a tin of fruit’, Robbie recalls free sanitary towels: ‘the girls polished the barrack floor with them’ and ‘Lumberjill’ Hannah ‘starting drinking in Gloucestershire – the pub was the only entertainment. They didn’t like us Londoners’.
Today, in a world surrounded by numerous existential threats, their collective voice, curated by award-winning historian Dr Tessa Dunlop, is a powerful reminder that against the odds, a generation of marginalised young women rose to the challenge when Great Britain was fighting for its life. Theirs is an extraordinary story of survival, both then and now.