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the satisfaction and the income to live their single lives with dignity and pride.

    As I discovered from the fragments of family history I extracted from Dad and his brother Laurie, our family’s maiden aunts each had a story, characteristic of so many of the surplus two million.
    The four girls had three brothers, the birth order being: Jack, Olive, Len, Violet, Bob, Gladys and finally Lily.
    By the time war was declared in 1914, their mother was worn out by childbearing and suffered bouts of pneumonia. Jack and Len had joined the army, and Olive, as the second child and oldestgirl had, some years earlier, taken on the burden of caring for her ailing mother, her father and her younger siblings. Even so she had been walking out for three years with Raymond, the son of the local undertaker. Olive and Raymond got engaged the day he left for the front.
    Violet had been working in a local draper’s shop, but at the beginning of 1914 had got a job on the glove counter in Selfridges. There she found an admirer, the rather dashing younger son of a Knight of the Realm. Her own father was outraged by this inappropriate connection, and Edward’s family would not have welcomed a shopgirl in their midst, had they known of the liaison. Vi moved out of home to live with two other sales girls somewhere in the West End, and Edward kept her well hidden, but promised that when the war was over and she was twenty-one they would marry.
    Gladys, aged seventeen, and Lily almost sixteen, were both bright and rather serious girls, who helped at home and had done well at school. They wrote letters to and knitted socks for their brothers Jack and Len who were also in the army, and Bob who followed them in 1916. Gladys took some classes in shorthand and typing at the local workers club and Lily soon followed.
    They were working-class people. Their father, a bricklayer, had high hopes of developing his business into a building company with the help of his sons, but that was put on hold when the boys were called up. Money was short and the family struggled to pay the fees for Gladys and Lily’s secretarial training. Olive was tied to the home and Vi had moved out.
    One evening in August 1916, Olive answered the front door to find Raymond’s father on the doorstep. He had come to tell her that his son, her fiancé, had been killed weeks earlier on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. A devastated Olive retired to her room and locked the door for several days, emerging only to go outside to the privy. Her younger sisters stepped in to care for their mother and left trays of food outside Olive’s door. A weeklater she came out in her best clothes to attend the small chapel service for Raymond and two other local men who had also died at the Somme, and whose bodies could not be returned. That done Olive put her overall on again and returned to her domestic role. Uncomplaining, hardworking, heartbroken all her life, she rarely spoke of her loss nor recovered from her grief. She spent the rest of her life looking after her parents and her sisters; always the one who ran the home and made it possible for the others to live their lives free of domestic responsibilities. In family photographs, except those taken at weddings and funerals, Olive is always wearing an overall, or an apron, just as she was the first day I saw her in 1949 when she would have been in her late fifties.
    Vi, meanwhile, was having a good war. In Selfridges she met a photographer who was looking for models for postcard portraits, a contemporary, somewhat less sophisticated, version of the postcards of the Professional Beauties that had been so popular before the turn of the century. In those days the professional beauties were usually the mistresses of important and powerful men, one of the most admired being the actress Lily Langtry, mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and Prince Louis of Battenberg. The postcards were perfectly