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Army Without Banners - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Army Without Banners

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Middle-aged Mildred is at war. She’s driving an ambulance in London during the Blitz, terrified but determined to do her bit while the bombs rain down. She’s living at her friend Daphne’s house, sleeping in the living room alongside other women volunteers on mattresses, being cooked for by the redoubtable Mrs Dove, and working her shifts at the ambulance station. She sees the nightly destruction of London’s buildings and streets close-up and death at first hand.

Nine years after Business as Usual, author and illustrator Ann Stafford’s experiences in the Blitz bring British history back to life. Her novel is a fascinating report from the front lines of the Home Front in the darkest days of the war. Her heroes are the volunteers, the women and men who picked up the pieces and the bodies after the bombs stopped falling. Until the next raid ....

Ann Stafford’s inimitable illustrations add authentic glimpses of life under fire on the Home Front. 

With an Introduction by Jessica Hammett, University of Bristol.

ISBN-13: 9781912766789

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Handheld Classics

Publication Date: 01-30-2024

Series: Handheld World War 2 Classics - #8

Ann Stafford was the pen-name of Anne Isabel Stafford Branfoot, later Pedler (1901-66). Her family came from County Durham, where her grandfather ran the Tyzack and Branfoot Steam Shipping Company, which he left after the First World War. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College and Newnham College Cambridge, where she graduated in French and Russian. She completed a PhD at Kings College London in 1926 in Russian social history. She also studied art in Paris during the university vacations, and her illustrations to some of her books are skilled and arresting. She married the barrister Tom Simpson Pedler (1891-1975) in 1926, but was no longer living with him from the early 1930s, by which time she had a son, John.She worked at the Times Book Club in the early 1930s, where Helen Evans was her secretary. She and Helen collaborated on their first joint novel, Business as Usual (1933), as well as on newspaper features. Ann became a children's author and the author of romance and historical novels from the 1930s to 1960s, including many written with Helen as Jane Oliver, and under a joint pen-name as Joan Blair.Ann met the Polish writer Michael ‘Misha’ Lubin at an International PEN Club meeting in France in the 1930s, and she was able to sponsor Lubin and his family to come to the UK before Nazi Germany prevented Polish Jews from leaving at the beginning of the Second World War.During the war Ann was a volunteer ambulance driver from the Paddington ambulance station and was in charge of an East End advice bureau. After Helen’s husband was killed in 1940 she shared Ann’s house with her and John in St John’s Wood, London. Later the two close friends lived next door to each other in North Gorley, Fordingbridge, Hampshire. Ann died in 1966 in Salisbury, looked after by Helen. Jessica Hammett is a historian at the University of Bristol.

Read an Excerpt

Daphne had always been very particular about her hall; she wouldn’t have letters and cards left on the table or allow you to stand a suitcase on the floor for more than a split second because she said the Ming bowl would be offended if you did. 

But now the hall was very dark and cluttered up with suitcases, shabby ones too, girt with string and straps; and heavy coats were draped over the stairs, in preparation for the sort of emergency in which the house was bombed but youweren’t and you wanted to arrive at a friend’s house with a change of clothes. A bucket of sand stood by the door and an inverted tin hat filled with apples, a leek, a pound of sausages and some knitting wool lay where the Ming bowl had been.

Table of Contents

The Living Stone

 

Master Sacristan Eberhart, by Sabine Baring-Gould        

The Marble Hands, by W W Fenn         

The Mask, by Robert W Chambers       

The Stone Rider!, by Nellie K Blissett    

A Marble Woman, by W C Morrow      

The Duchess at Prayer, by Edith Wharton         

Benlian, by Oliver Onions         

The Marble Hands, by Bernard Capes   

Hypnos, by H P Lovecraft         

The Ceremony, by Arthur Machen       

At Simmel Acres Farm, by Eleanor Scott           

The Maker of Gargoyles, by Clark Ashton Smith            

The Menhir, by N Dennett       

The Living Stone, E R Punshon  

The Statue, by James Causey   

Something in Wood, by August Derleth