Three Cheers for the Brownies!

Publication day for   Home Front Girls book 5   A Baby for the Home Front Girls   is Wednesday September 3rd.   Kindle link   Paperback link

I sometimes get asked about Star House, and I can tell you that the name comes from a real house – though the Star House of the Home Front Girls books, with its bedrooms named after the greats of the music hall, and signed photographs of Florrie Forde, Vesta Tilley and others lining the walls in the hallway and up the staircase, is my own invention. After the war, my gran was for some years a theatrical landlady in Windsor Road in Levenshulme in the south of Manchester. Her boarding house wasn’t called Star House, but she had a friend nearby who was also a theatrical landlady – and her boarding house was Star House.

A Baby for the Home Front Girls is dedicated to all the wartime Brownies. Children played a significant role in life on the home front. Older children acted as messengers during air raids, cycling from ARP station to First Aid post, like Noakes in The Home Front Girls. Bigger boys were stretcher-bearers in hospitals.

Salvage soon became a job for children. Hundreds of thousands of them joined the ‘cog’ scheme, each of them becoming a small cog in the mighty war machine. Schools, Guides and Brownies, Scouts and Cubs all competed with one another to collect the most salvage in their local neighbourhoods. Newspapers ran a ‘cog’ page each week for children, and a special song was written called ‘There’ll Always Be a Dustbin’, which was sung to the tune of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Working towards earning their ‘cog’ badges was an important part of wartime life for many youngsters.

As for why I specially cbhose to dedicate this book to the Brownies - well, they salvaged enough jam jars to pay for both a lifeboat and an aircraft. Impressive, eh?

So, the next time you’re sorting through your own recycling, preparing to put it out for collection in the various boxes, spare a thought for our salvage-minded wartime generation, who by the time D-Day came round had provided 1.1 million tons of waste paper, 1.3 tons of metal and more than 80,000 tons of rags to help fight – and win – the Second World War.

Home Front Girls series page on Amazon