Damn This War!

'Moving, funny ... an exquisite story of love, hope, distance and, ultimately, disenchantment.' Mail on Sunday 'A sad and truthful fragment of modern history' TLS 'Beautifully written' Jenny Uglow The love story of Zippa and Tony is nothing without the context of the Second World War. The war introduced them - they met as blackout wardens in London. It gave them darkened streets to wander in, hand in hand, then, by sending Tony away to officer training camps, it sharpened their hunger for each other, casting a glow over his comings and goings. It turned them into schemers and wanglers against fate and army regulations. It pressed them into marriage, and when the war decided to deploy him to North Africa, it whispered the urgent question of a baby. To which Tony, thinking of the war, replied maybe not; and Zippa, thinking of the war, said yes. In spite of themselves, the war experience was changing them both, and yet both were hanging on, looking back, suspended in memory and time, and living from letter to letter. Decades later, their daughter Julie discovered their letters, and piecing them together began to create a portrait of her parents and their relationship that was completely unfamiliar to her. Vivid, honest and completely absorbing, Damn This War! is a true insight into a wartime love story.

With Damn This War!, Julie Hankey completes a trio of family histories based on a large cache of letters and photographs reaching back several generations. The first of these was A Passion for Egypt, a biography of her archaeologist grandfather who worked in Egypt before the 1914-18 war. Out of that grew Kisses & Ink, largely about the Victorian and Edwardian women in the family. Damn This War! tightens the focus onto the author's parents and brings the story up to the end of Second World War and its aftermath.