Home Fires and Spitfires - Daisy Styles

This book was lent to me by a friend who knows I've an interest in things WWII related.  Following the midwives and mothers-to-be of a Lake District Mother and Baby Home is an interesting premise, although aligning the story to Call the Midwife is a very big stretch in my opinion. Anyway, my interest was piqued enough to spend a solid period of time reading it, and on the whole I enjoyed it.

The girls who find themselves at Mary Vale Mother and Baby Home are each interesting, especially Zelda, a Jewish German refugee who arrives at the Home starving and traumatised after fleeing Nazi Germany when her husband is shot in the street for being Jewish.

Diana is pregnant and planning her imminent wedding when her fiancé sets out on a secret mission from which he goes missing, and she must leave the WAAF role she loves to move across the country to have her baby.

Gracie works in the shipyards and dreams of operating the huge dockyard cranes, but when she discovers her dashing suitor is married, and she is pregnant, what direction will her life take?

Their stories are interwoven with characters introduced in the first book in the series, but this book reads very well as a stand alone novel.  There is plenty of wit and humour as well as grief and loss, and the setting is very well described.  It's very clear that the author knows this area of countryside well and describes it so that you can see it through her eyes.  

This is an easy read and I enjoyed it although the style of language used for a 1940's tale and how people are sometimes referred to (ie Harry referring to his senior officer as 'Derek')  grated here and there, as did some of the story elements for me.  

For instance Diana would have been dismissed from the WAAFs as soon as her pregnancy was known, and she wouldn't have had loose hair at work, it would have been tied or pinned back and not 'falling in a  silky curtain over her face'.  The SOE Lysanders flew from Tangmere not Duxford, pilots didn't work on the Operations Room balcony where Controllers, Tellers, Liaison, Warning and Recorders worked so Harry being 'recalled' there is highly unlikely, the mountain-rescue team mentioned by Sister Mary Paul wasn't formed until 1953, and church bells certainly wouldn't have been rung for a wedding, as their ringing during wartime was to announce an invasion. 

I also found the repeated reference to 'pouting' lips off-putting, together with some of the other descriptions of the women of Mary Vale.  At one point I checked to see if the author was female because the descriptions of the girls in the story seemed more like they'd been written by a man!

I both loved and was disappointed by Zelda's story, which felt like it had two distinct halves.  It all started very strongly and realistically.  She's introduced as a terrified, exhausted and grief-stricken Jewish German refugee who barely speaks English and is viewed with hostility and suspicion by women within Mary Vale and some of the locals in nearby Kendal. This is an interesting angle in a WWII-era novel and could have been better explored.  Yet we very quickly move to there being almost no references at all to her German accent or speech patterns.  And it seemed to me that after the trauma of losing her beloved husband and fleeing for her life and that of her unborn child the decisions she makes later on in the book are highly unlikely within the time scale described.  I'm not against the story's direction for her, just the speed at which it happens.

The Spitfires of the title and cover are noticeably absent from the story, except by association with Duxford. There are certainly some spitfire characters though!

All that said, this is a well-told story with some interesting characters.  Perhaps a little too much romance for me, but I'd while away a few more hours reading another of Daisy Styles' books.

9781405945196, Penguin