The Consequences of War is set in a fictitious small market town in Hampshire at the time of the Second World War. The town is called Markham.
However, in the descriptions of Markham there is so much of Romsey, where I was born and grew up, that it would be untrue to say that I was not thinking of Romsey when I wrote The Consequences of War.
I am sure that those of my family and friends who still live there will know that I chose to set this story in my home town because of my affection for the place.
The fiction is in the people of Markham and what happened to them. My Markham people were not drawn from Romsonians, but came to life in 1989 and live only within the pages of this book.
What is not fiction is the change that took place in the lives of many married women. The Blitz is real; so are the air-raids and the fire-bombings of Southampton and Portsmouth; the ‘invasion’ of Hampshire by Yanks at the time of D-Day; shortages, rationing and the kind of life led by people who lived in small, quiet towns in Southern England during the Second World War.
Betty Burton,
Southsea, Hampshire
January 1990