Damn This War!

Between the Blitz and the Desert, a Story of War-Crossed Love

Julie Hankey

• Publisher: Icon Books
• eBook ISBN:
  9781837730377
• Year: 2023

'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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prologue: Zippa and Tony
• Chapter 1 ‘Those golden autumn days’
• Chapter 2 ‘Damn this war’
• Chapter 3 ‘Better not think’
• Chapter 4 ‘Soldier, I wish you well’
• Chapter 5 ‘If I were killed’
• Chapter 6 ‘Millions and millions of flies’
• Chapter 7 ‘Blood and pain’
• Chapter 8 ‘A considerable achievement’
• Chapter 9 A turning point
• Chapter 10 ‘A lovely ambassadress, darling’
• Chapter 11 ‘Largely centred round Rosalind’
• Chapter 12 ‘She looks like you’
• Chapter 13 ‘To sustain and stimulate guerilla warfare’
• Chapter 14 ‘The mechanics of it’
• Chapter 15 The soldier’s return
• Chapter 16 ‘My despair is indescribable’
• Chapter 17 Dreams and shadows
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements