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The strange thing about writing a book is that it starts as a germ of an idea and ends by being a public object. It is a bit like having a baby who grows into a child and then is suddenly thrust out into the world entirely alone to be loved or hated without protection from the parent (me).

When I first had the idea for Our Uninvited Guests it was a completely different creation in my mind. My son Richard and I were in Harrogate in 2012. We had been looking at Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries in the north east because I had been asked by the Commission to write panels to explain why there were large groups of CWGC graves in civilian or military cemeteries in this country. It is a little known fact that there are 13,000 Commission burial plots and cemeteries in Britain. But that is an aside. We were staying near the Hotel Majestic where, I was given to believe, my great-grandfather, Harry Summers, had spent the last ten years of his life. In fact, it turned out he had not lived at the Majestic but at the Prince of Wales Hotel. However I only discovered that last year. My interest was piqued by the idea that all the grand hotels in this magnificent spa town were earmarked by the government for requisitioning in the event of war and that is indeed what happened. The Hotel Majestic was taken over by the RAF; the ballroom at the George Hotel housed the General Post Office and so on. It was said that had London been bombed flat, the government planned to move lock, stock and barrel to Harrogate.

So was born a book proposal entitled Hotel Majestic. The subtitle was always ‘the secret life of country houses 1939-45’. The more research I did the more I realised that it was the people and their lives in these houses rather than the houses themselves that interested me. Of course it is interesting to know that the government decided, in 1938, that any house with more than four rooms downstairs could be requisitioned under the Defence of the Realm Act. My house would have escaped but my sister’s would not, for example. So yes, the obvious places such as Bletchley Park, Woburn Abbey, Chatsworth, Blenheim Palace were taken over but so were smaller properties all over the country. In St John’s Wood a house with a garden that led straight onto Primrose Hill was commandeered by the Air Raid Precautions Unit while a small manor house in Sussex was used as a safe-house for French Resistance couriers en route to France.
Further, I discovered that the Ministries of Information, Food, Supply, War etc could take over any building they wanted almost anywhere in the country with barely a shrug. Greater Malvern became infested with civil servants, BBC employees and later Radar technicians. The one thing in that town in short supply was school boys. They had been ousted and were living at Blenheim Palace.

In Aylesbury, for example, no fewer than 60 properties were requisitioned in whole or in part. Sometimes the Ministry of Food forcibly commandeered freezers from ice-cream parlours, refrigerated plants and garages. At other times they took over tracts of land for access. The armed forces had almost carte blanche to occupy whatever they required.

A chaotic picture began to emerge and I soon realised that government bureaucracy, while fascinating for a page or two at most, is actually a killer. The book soon gained a new title: Behind Closed Doors. This very nearly stuck but there are a number of books and films with that name and the publishers decided in the end it should change to something more focused on the people rather than the houses. People matter: they are endlessly fascinating and almost always surprising when placed in unusual juxtapositions. BBC employees with beards cycling around the West Midlands are far more evocative than Nissen huts in Tewkesbury. Nuns in purple habits walking through the wild countryside near Bridgnorth captured my imagination as did an American journalist crawling over the heather in Northern Scotland. Why was there a pregnant mother from the East End sleeping in a hospital bed in the Prince Regent’s suite in a country house in Hertfordshire and why was a forger living in Audley End? What were they doing there and how did they cope with being completely torn from the roots of their former lives?

This is the question at the heart of my new book Our Uninvited Guests. If you have time to read it you will meet some of the most beguiling characters imaginable. I have favourites but I won’t spoil it by telling you who they are. Suffice it to say that this book has been one of the most delightful and challenging I have ever written. It took longer than any other both to research and write but the rewards for me personally have been immense. I hope they translate into a rewarding read.

Our Uninvited Guests is published on 8 March 2018 by Simon & Schuster £20.00

This book came about as a challenge from Julie’s editor to see if the Women’s Institute did anything interesting in the Second World War. As a result of the research she carried out over four years the conclusion she inevitably came to was that there a wealth of material. The year after the book was published ITV bought the rights to turn it into a television drama. It ran under the name of Home Fires for two seasons in 2015 and 2016. The true story of the country women who kept the countryside ticking is what is on offer in Jambusters (Home Fires in the USA and Canada).

Topics to consider for discussion might include:

Coming just 21 years after the First World War what do you think women feared most from the Second World War?

How much did the WI’s Pacifist stance affect the way it was perceived by the British Government?

How important was a sense of humour during the war?
Were you able to relate to any of the characters in the book and if so, what drew you to them?

Has the author got the balance right between using her research to tell the factual story and her writing abilities to create an engaging narrative?

Do you think today’s women would rally to the support of the government in a future war and if so, what would be their main focus?

Did this book change your opinion on the Women’s Institute or the role of women on the Home Front in the war?

Wednesday 29 March 2017 is the most significant day in the life of the United Kingdom this century and possibly even of the last forty-four years. Some go as far as to say it represents the most momentous decision taken by this country since the end of the Second World War. Whatever side you are on in the question about whether it is a good or bad thing that Britain is going to leave the European Union, it cannot be denied that invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is a noteworthy event. The Britain of today will look different in two, five, twenty years time. The anxiety must be what that Britain might look like and how will the changes affect all our futures.

As a historian I find momentous and noteworthy events both alarming and exciting. As such I turned back to history to give me some lead on the whole development of the idea of a united Europe and examine what its forefathers had in mind in the immediate aftermath of 1939-45 for the future of a war torn continent. It is a common myth that in 1940 Britain stood alone on the edge of Europe with no help or support. In exact terms we were alone but in reality we had nationals from all over the continent living, fighting and working for Britain and towards the war effort. Polish and Czech airmen flew magnificently during the Battle of Britain and were at our side in many other operations in the war including D-Day. Britain changed out of all recognition over the course of the war.

The evacuation of people to the countryside, the influx of foreign fighters including 300,000 Canadians and a few million American GIs, mean that people living in rural villages heard accents and saw sights they had hitherto never encountered. 10,000 men from the West Indies came to Britain to enlist and were sent to North Africa and Italy in 1944. Of the GIs, over 130,000 were black soldiers and many found the non-segregation in Britain at first alarming but then a delight. They were billeted all over the country. Then there were Poles in Northern Scotland, Czechs in Cheshire, Americans in Cornwall, Canadians in Suffolk, Danes, Greeks and French in Malvern. The country was welcoming not only to foreign fighters but to refugees. Over 10,000 children arrived with the Kindertransport in 1938-39, just two years after 4,000 children from the Basque country fled here to escape the Spanish Civil War. Britain coped and despite the historic resentment of many to change, by and large they accepted the incomers.

After the war some of those who had made Britain their wartime home chose to remain here rather than returning to their countries of birth. It wasn’t perfect in the early years and there were times of strife but the country has changed over the last eighty years and I am proud to be a citizen of a wonderful, multicultural country.

After the devastating years of conflict Europe had to be rebuilt and countries aligned so that such a violent and destructive conflict could never happen again. There are many significant players who had a finger in the early version of the European pie but one of the most fascinating from my perspective was a man who had spent the pinnacle of his career training volunteers to enter Nazi occupied Europe and cause mayhem, murder and sabotage. His name was Sir Colin McVean Gubbins. His name may not be familiar to British or American readers but in France, Belgium, Poland, Czech Republic, Norway and the Netherlands he is recognized as a great hero.

Born in Tokyo in 1896 he was sent, aged seven, to live with his maternal grandparents on the Isle of Mull. He did not see his father or mother for five years but he described his childhood as blissfully happy. After school he attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and in the summer of 1914 he was in Heidelberg learning German. In August had to make a frantic dash back to Britain to avoid arrest. He succeeded by disguising himself as a child and later wrote: ‘My escape from being imprisoned in Germany was entirely due to the kindness of the Englishman, a complete stranger, who lent me £1 on Cologne platform.’ Gubbins was at Ypres for the first and second battles, then on the Somme where he won his Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry. He was shot in the neck on the Somme in October and was in hospital for eleven days; he was gassed in 1917 and suffered from trench fever in April 1918 but was fit enough to join General Ironside, later commander-in-chief of the Home Forces, as ADC on the autumn mission to Archangel in Russia to prepare a winter campaign. After the war, then aged twenty-three, Gubbins was sent to Ireland where he was given a three day course in guerrilla warfare and observed the methods used by the nationalists at first-hand. In 1923 he learned Russian and then went to India to learn Urdu.

Promoted to major in February 1934, he was posted to the War Office and appointed GS02 in a new section of MTI (Military Training Instruction), which was the policy making arm of the Military Training Directorate. In this role he was sent in 1938 to Czechoslovakia to oversee the withdrawal of Czech forces from the Sudetenland. It was something that he found exceptionally repugnant and it remained a matter of lasting shame to him for the rest of his life. It also gave him a first-hand view of the brutal force of Nazi expansion.

In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, the invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Gubbins was put in charge of training stay-behind parties of men who would work locally to sabotage Germans stores, blow up bridges and generally slow down their advance parties. When the threat of invasion lessened he was transferred to a new section called Special Operations Executive, known by its nickname Baker Street which was the London HQ. Its aim was to train foreign fighters who would be sent back to their own countries to carry out secret missions.

He moved to the Highlands to set up Special Training Schools where agents from occupied countries could be trained in the brutal arts of guerrilla or, as Churchill called it, ungentlemanly warfare. Men and women were turned into silent killers, explosives experts, radio operators and sabotage agents who were parachuted into France, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway and so on to carry out their secret and often deadly work. Gubbins worked with SOE for the whole war and clocked up some notable successes in Norway, France and, most spectacularly, in the Czech Republic when two agents trained in the Highlands carried out the successful assassination of Acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. The reprisals for the murder of Germans was hideous but the heads of the various governments-in-exile in London thought the boost to a country’s morale and the confirmation that they had not been forgotten was a price worth paying.

At the end of the war Gubbins’ department was shut down. His biographer wrote of him:

Britain was spared the shame and misery of enemy occupation; without this experience it is difficult to appreciate the part played by clandestine resistance both in restoring national self-respect and in permitting courageous individuals to escape from the ignominy of their situation. . . It was as a resistance leader that he came to fashion Special Operations Executive, and to write his own page in the history of almost every country occupied by the enemy in the Second World War.

So respected was he in the countries that had been occupied by the Nazis that the government had to waive the rule that an officer could receive only four foreign honours for services in the war. Eventually he received more fourteen awards including the highest from Norway, Denmark, Greece, France, Poland, Belgium and the United States of America. Gubbins received a knighthood in 1946 and began the second half of his life’s work, which was to promote European Unity. Despite the fact he had spent five years trying to devise every possible lethal means of undermining the Germans, he realized that the only way of securing a lasting peace in Europe was to work together.

In 1946 an old Polish friend, Jozef Retinger, asked him to help set up the Independent League for Economic Cooperation in Brussels. This was merged with various others in 1947 to become the International Committee of the Movement for European Unity with Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys as chairman. In 1954 he was asked to represent Britain as a founder member of the Bilderberg Group, an organisation set up to promote a strengthening of US-European relations and preventing another world war. When asked what he considered to be his greatest achievement he said the role he had been most honoured to play was in helping to prevent a further war.

Gubbins died in 1976 at the age of eighty, by which time Britain had been a full member of the European Union for three years. I was sixteen at the time and two years later I would leave home to live in Germany. I spent two years in Munich prior to university and then a year in Vienna. Later I spent time in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Milan, Naples, and many other cities where my work took me. Freedom of movement and the lack of borders is something I now take for granted.

Will all this change? I wonder what Sir Colin McVean Gubbins would think of the step his country is about to take on 29 March 2017 and where he might imagine it could lead…

Gubbins’ story will be told in full in my next book Behind Closed Doors. It will be published in spring 2018.

Part of my work as an author is to give lectures. I do two six week seasons in the autumn and spring all over the country, speaking about the social history of the Second World War among other topics. The ITV drama series HOME FIRES, inspired by my book Jambusters, is a favourite theme at the end of my talk about women and war. Everywhere I have been since May 2016 I have been harangued by people who are desperate for answers, confused why the series ended on such a dramatic cliff-hanger and who would love nothing more than to see HOME FIRES return to their screens. I politely explain the ITV line that the broadcaster is seeking constantly to refresh their offering. That explanation is not always well received and often produces sarcastic laughter.

Last week I was lecturing in Exeter and among the audience was the mother of a senior crew member from the drama. She told me that she had learned from her son that the reason it had been cancelled was because it was too white and middle class. I had guessed that might have been one of the reasons it was not re-commissioned but I had not heard the remark from a reliable source. I cannot let that go. This is my response, tempered after a week of editing my thoughts and controlling my indignation.

Rural Britain in 1939 was predominantly white. That cannot be denied. But it was far from middle-class. Mass Observation, that brilliant window on everyday life, presented the most valuable of vignettes in its myriad reports, diaries, questionnaires and observations during the early years of the war. Set up in 1937 by three young men, anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet and journalist Charles Madge, and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, its aim was to document and record everyday life in Britain through the eyes of ordinary people. They listed four classes in Britain in the late nineteen thirties: upper class, middle class, artisan class and unskilled working class. They estimated that the working class accounted for sixty-five per cent of the population as opposed to roughly fourteen per cent in 2015. The upper class, or aristocracy, represented five per cent and the remainder (thirty per cent) was split between the burgeoning middle class of the nineteen thirties and the artisan class, which included skilled workers on low incomes. This is reflected in all the research I have done for my books on the social history of the Second World War and was picked up by the writer Simon Block for HOME FIRES.

A typical village in the early twentieth century would have a manor house, inhabited by the squire and his family, who might be resident full time or who might only come down for the hunting. Then there would be the farmers, some owning their own farms, others as tenant farmers but many of very long standing. These families, headed by the men, might have been working the land for many decades, if not centuries. Resistance to change, and in particular to book learning, was strong among this group. The main body of the village would comprise farm labourers and their families, who again might have been living in the village and serving the big house for generations. Some villages had a doctor and he, as a man of learning with knowledge of science, was held in high regard. The vicar or priest was accorded equal respect. A few villages could boast an artist or two but they were generally on the periphery of village life and not part of the hierarchy.

HOME FIRES echoes this picture of English rural life at the outbreak of the Second World War. Joyce Cameron is the wife of the wealthiest man in the village, even though we barely get to see Douglas Cameron in the series. I have always imagined him as owning farms and land in the in the area around Great Paxford. Joyce could best be described as old school middle-class in that she was born into the privilege rather than earning her way into it as the other middle class character, Frances Barden, would have to have done. Frances and Peter, a wealthy factory owner, are both university educated and belong to the new middle class that, frankly, appalled Douglas and Joyce Cameron. Their household, with Cookie and Thumbs – the cook and gardener – and Claire Hillman, the housemaid, represents a fairly typical well-to-do family of the era. Had the Bardens had children, there would have been a nanny and quite possibly a nursery nurse. That is the sum total of the middle-class characters in Home Fires and they dominate the drama in the early episodes, in keeping with the mores of the time.

For the women in Great Paxford the arrival of the Women’s Institute, probably in the early nineteen twenties, did more for their social mobility and education than anything else. It gave them a reason to meet up and discuss any number of topics regardless of their social background. When the WI was set up in Wales 1915 it was modelled on the Canadian model of a safe meeting place for women to expand their horizons, share experiences, learn and try new things and, above all, it was meant for every woman, whatever her personal circumstance. From the word go there was to be no bar for anyone joining the WI. Church and Chapel, Conservative and Labour, upper and working class, gay and straight – everyone was welcome. This did not always succeed, especially if a village were hide-bound by ancient traditions and divisions. But the first two episodes of HOME FIRES shows how that could be and was broken with a change of leadership. Under the guidance of Frances Barden the Great Paxford Women’s Institute opens its doors to a wider spread of women from the village and welcomes incomers.

Their first recruit from the village is Steph Farrow, a tenant farmer who runs her herd of a dozen cows with her son Little Stan. It is possible that her farm is owned by Douglas Cameron, although that has never been mentioned. Certainly it does not belong to the Farrows. Her husband, Stan, goes off to war leaving Steph in charge and she soon gets into difficulty with the Ministry of Agriculture when she finds it impossible to keep up with her paperwork. We realise that she can neither read nor write. Illiteracy among women born before the First World War was high and it was something that the Women’s Institute was keen to address. Education was, and remains, the keystone of the movement and it gives the WI its present charitable status. Thus it is entirely in character that Steph is taught to read and write by a fellow WI member, Teresa Fenchurch, the teacher from Liverpool.

Teresa is a breath of fresh air in Great Paxford. Coming straight from a poor area of the city she has experience of all types of families and children. She is no doubt the first in her family to be educated to teacher level and the passion with which she encourages the children to learn to read and write is something new in the village. She understands how education can change lives and open doors for children who, in the past, would have had to follow their parents into farming or service. Her past liaison with Connie, a fellow teacher from Liverpool, is the key reason she had to leave the city and she hopes to put it behind her. She is typical of the kind of woman who came from the city to the countryside during the war, though many of the teachers who ended up in village schools were there because of the evacuation of school children rather than by choice. This chimed with many viewers who remember their parents talking about the quality of teachers coming from the cities into the countryside during the war and raising the standard and ambition of local teaching.

Teresa’s landlady, Alison Scotlock, has her own secret that she is keen to hide. Although ostensibly a respectable working woman trained as a book-keeper, she is not legitimately Mrs Scotlock. She and George were not married as he was unable to obtain a divorce from his first wife. Had this become widely know in Great Paxford she might have found it difficult to stay. She therefore lives dangerously close to the edge of society and her entanglement with the world of crime is born out of necessity. Her friendship with Teresa is understandable: They each learn the other’s secret and agree, in an unspoken understanding, to keep it.

Dr Will Campbell, as a professional, is held in high regard as is Adam Collingbourne, the vicar and their wives enjoy status because of their husbands’ professional roles. Erica and Sarah soon evolve as powerful characters in their own right and we see the world through their eyes rather than that of their husbands. The novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, the daughter of a vicar, wrote that the dilemma for vicars was they had to live a middle-class lifestyle on a working-class salary. That is hinted at in Home Fires because Sarah has no help in the vicarage and is happy to take in a lodger at the outbreak of war. Erica Campbell helps to bolster the family’s income working as the practice pharmacist, something that is especially helpful during series two when the family fortunes are affected by Laura’s affair with her boss.

Bryn the Butcher is from North Wales, probably the son of a butcher or a farmer, and his wife, Miriam, hails from the same sort of background. The butcher’s place in the village, like that of the greengrocer, garage owner and postman, was such that they would have addressed most of their customers as Mr or Mrs so-and-so. They belong to the artisan class as defined by Mass Observation. Bryn probably encouraged Miriam to join the WI in order to make friends with other women in the village and to help to break through the class barriers.

Bob Simms and his long-suffering wife, Pat, represent the dark side of village life in the nineteen thirties. Bob is a frustrated writer. His first novel was a runaway success but he has failed to match that with any subsequent writing. Pat lives to service Bob’s writing life. The domestic abuse she suffers at Bob’s hands is not unusual for that era – nor sadly for today – and the secrecy that surrounds it plays to the conspiracy of silence that is prevalent in abusive households. Whether she and Bob were ever able to consider themselves middle-class is a moot point. From the perspective of where we first meet them in Home Fires they have definitely slipped down the ladder to surviving on a working class income with Bob getting jobs where he can. He is too proud to admit that Pat could help out by working but eventually she prevails and we celebrate her tiny bit of freedom from the tyranny of their domestic life.

Other characters who are introduced into the drama in uniform join that mysterious ‘class’ that was, by its nature, classless. Some 15 million men and women were entitled to wear uniform over the course of the Second World War. Some were in the armed services but others were in organisations such as Air Raid Precautions, Home Guard, Women’s Voluntary Service or the Women’s Land Army. Women were called in to take over roles that were traditionally the preserve of men. They worked as tram and bus conductors, they stripped engines of all sizes, from locomotives to lorries; they worked in factories making uniform, parachutes, helmets or munitions, camouflage nets and vehicles. All these people belonged to a special caste that changed with their clothes. Zelma Katin was a tram conductor in Sheffield during the day and a housewife by night. She wrote: ‘The Englishman’s inhibitions vanish before the sight of a uniform and he speaks far more readily to conductresses than to fellow-passengers. I suppose he feels that as we are public servants he has a stake in our personal lives.’ Jenny Hillman, the village gossip, takes on a whole new persona when she joins the WAAF in series two while our admiration for Wing Commander Nick Lucas cutting a dashing figure in his blue uniform is such that we never even question what his background might be.

The young people in the drama – Will and Erica’s girls Kate and Laura; David Brindsley, the butcher’s son; Claire Hillman and Spencer Wilson, housemaid to the Bardens and postman respectively are all less inhibited by their backgrounds and point forward to the social mobility and class upheaval that grew out of the Second World War.

And then we have the foreigners who appear in the second series. There is Mrs Esposito, an Italian who has lived in the village for twenty years. She is rounded up and arrested as an enemy alien along with 19,000 of her fellow countrymen on Churchill’s orders but not before we witness the shocking verbal abuse of her by the local children. They run behind her shouting ‘Wop Wop’. Meanwhile, 4,000 Czechoslovak soldiers arrive in Cholmondeley Castle in June 1940 and as Great Paxford is just down the road from there we get to see them in the second series. The Czechs fought with great distinction alongside the Allies in the Battle of Britain, D-Day, Arnhem and many other battles besides. They, along with the Poles, who were at this stage not in Cheshire (though they turned up later in the war) were among the huge number of servicemen from all over who fought alongside the Allies.

Had we been allowed to continue with Home Fires the face of Great Paxford would have changed, as did the face of rural Britain, as wave upon wave of incomers changed life in the countryside forever. This culminated in 3 million American GIs which included 130,000 black soldiers, a battalion of whom were housed in Tattenhall, just a few miles down the road from Great Paxford. Sadly that honour has been denied us and I deeply regret that we were never able to tell the whole story.

I think one of the reasons why HOME FIRES resonates so strongly with its audience is precisely because it is not a one dimensional middle-class drama. The history is so interwoven with the stories that it represents a snap shot of real-life seventy five years ago. The men and women whose lives we see created on screen in the brilliant scripts by Simon Block are in our DNA. Their lives and experiences have echoes in our own past. Their joy and pain, their losses and gains, are universal and familiar. They are in our parents, grandparents, great aunts and uncles. The world is one we can recognize and I am only sorry that the powers that be could not see how relevant and important that was, and remains, to many people who love the series.

It is a week since my last blog about Home Fires and things have moved on dramatically. Since that phone call at 12:08 on Wednesday 11 May 2016 telling me that ITV had decided against commissioning a third series I have witnessed more activity on social media in a fortnight than I have ever experienced before. The energy and enthusiasm of fans for Home Fires is matched only by their frustration, sadness and at times barely concealed fury at ITV’s decision to drop the show after just two series. That it ended on a spectacular cliff-hanger has been one of the biggest points of discussion but the other is more subtle and interesting. Why cut a strong, women-led drama which had such a great following? Especially when the networks are all trying to prove how egalitarian they are with a view to showing women on television.

When I first talked to script writer, Simon Block, about why writing about the WI in wartime appealed to him, he said: ‘It offered a fantastic opportunity to write about a lot of women in their own right, and not merely as adjuncts to – or victims of -various men, which is so often how women are portrayed in television drama.’

He went on to describe how he was impressed by the support and friendship the Women’s Institute offered to “often isolated women who needed the companionship of other women like never before – even if for a few hours a month. The book opened my eyes to the great extent WI women mobilised to make such a huge contribution, generating a fantastic spirit of ‘community’. The fact that this was largely unknown (as is often the case with women’s history) left me feeling it was a significant episode in British culture that should be more widely recognised.”

That resonated with the audience who have been writing movingly about how much they love the characters and how they feel connection with the drama. One lady posted on the Jambusters public Facebook page (so it can be verified that I’m not making it up) “I always admired the women who live and struggled through World War Two, I think because my 81 year old mother has memories of it. Jambusters added to my knowledge and Home Fires brought it all alive for me.”

Mark Umbers, who plays Wing Commander Nick Lucas in the drama, wrote a beautiful open letter in which he said: ‘Home Fires assembled a large ensemble cast but told its stories from the female perspective — in a way that didn’t diminish its male characters. What it proved beyond doubt was that a female-driven narrative, across a broad range of characters and ages, could routinely draw in consolidated audiences of around six million in the UK alone — despite a negligible publicity.’

He is right of course and what a viewer pointed out is that the message coming across is that women-led dramas scare TV executives who can’t believe they can be popular. When Home Fires first came out in Britain it got poor reviews from TV critics who thought it was clever to poke fun at what they thought was a weak and whimsical drama. How wrong they were. My friend Andy said: ‘I think some critics would only be happy if a Panzer division drove down the middle of Great Paxford High Street followed by storm troopers raping and pillaging.’ But actually the portrayal of women’s lives behind the scenes of the most devastating conflict in history did interest and captivate people. Six million week in week out for all twelve episodes across two series. And the drama ‘won’ the 9pm slot 11 times out of 12, meaning it got a higher percentage of the viewers than the BBC offering on the other side.

‘One does have to ask if sexism was involved. Would the same decision have been made if it was a men’s organisation that was at the centre of the drama?’ asked someone on Facebook. I can’t provide her with a definitive answer but I wonder whether the decision to cancel the show was taken by men in suits who didn’t understand that a drama about ordinary women’s lives could catch on. It wasn’t sexy enough and there was a lack of death on screen perhaps. Maybe Andy was right and they would have been happier with tanks rumbling down the high street and Hugo Boss uniform-clad German officers.

What I do not understand is how ITV so grossly underestimated the Home Fires audience. The drama touched people at a very deep level and made an impact on men and women alike, people who are now invested in the drama and at a loss as to why it has been pulled. That it has produced such a violent and wonderful outpouring of emotion is heartwarming for the writers, producers and wonderful cast and crew who so loved working on the show.

As Simon Block said in a Radio Times interview on 13th May: ‘What people like me forget at our peril is that without the audience a show like Home Fires doesn’t really exist, except on a shelf somewhere in an unlit room. It only truly bursts into life when it ignites an audience’s imagination, as they develop a relationship with the characters – empathising with some, identifying with others, reviling Bob! In that sense it’s the audience’s show as much as ours, and that’s what I think they want to voice at the moment. And I support that 100%. For a writer who stares out of the window for 90% of his working life the reaction has been very affirming.’

The protest must be getting under ITV’s skin. According to the press there are hundreds of pots of Jam flying like Harry Potter owls into the press office at ITV. The petition is ever growing and both Facebook and Twitter are alive. WI and other audience members are displaying posters, writing letters and generally protesting in a very British and Home Fires-like way. I shall continue to fight for Home Fires because, like Simon, I believe the show belongs to everyone who is invested in it emotionally as well as financially. Let’s continue to fight to #savehomefires.