There are many people who have been wonderfully helpful to me in the course of writing this book. My particular thanks go to Jeremy, my husband, who, as ever, has been an unwavering source of encouragement and support.
Thank you also to my editor Suzanne Clarke for her excellent advice, and to Charlotte Ledger and Eloisa Clegg at HarperImpulse for all their help.
Thank you to Brenda and Robert Brookes for answering my endless questions about Gloucester after the war. Thanks to Judith and Stuart Samuel for all their ideas, and also to Penny Wright for giving me so many location details. Finally, my grateful thanks go to Vivian for sharing her childhood experiences of life in 1940s London.
The appearance of buildings and streets in Gloucester during the post-war period was drawn from the photographic record in ‘Gloucester: A Pictorial History’ by John Juřica (Phillimore & Co. Ltd, 1994) and ‘Gloucester in Old Photographs from the Walwin Collection’ compiled by Jill Voyce (Alan Sutton Publishing, 1989).