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By the end of the Second World War the British government had such minute control over every aspect of people’s lives that it governed the length of men’s socks and the amount of metal and rubber in women’s corsets. Even trouser turn-ups were banned and only six designs of underwear for women were permitted. Food was equally carefully monitored and rationed. Everything had been streamlined and controlled to help towards the war effort. The novelist Barbara Cartland was heard to lament that love was about the only thing left unrationed by 1945.

In November 1939, however, things were still much more easily available and all rationing, apart from petrol which had been introduced in September, was in the future. The government recognised that controls would be necessary and not just food, as during the First World War, but also civil industry and trade. Some planning had taken place in the Board of Trade, but this was mainly to control the import/export market. The immediate impact on civilian trade was major price rises. Unsurprisingly, the demand for goods such as sandbags, black-out material and torches or flashlights rose suddenly and the prices followed. Profiteering became a major issue and was addressed in November through the Prices of Goods Act 1939, which ‘limited the profit earned per unit of a commodity to the amount received at the end of August 1939’. The Act had only limited success, which meant that profiteering occurred and inflation, much feared by the government, was an ever present concern. Clothes were particularly susceptible to substantial price rises. A woman told a journalist early in the war that she had gone into a shop to buy gloves and said to the assistant that she wanted to get them now because she feared the new stock would be dearer. To which the assistant replied: ‘Bless you! You’re too late. We’ve put up the prices of the old stock already.’

The editors of women’s magazines tried to encourage practical solutions such as the wearing of housecoats to protect skirts and blouses. Pat Simms (Claire Rushbrook), for example, and Erica Campbell (Frances Grey), wear housecoats or aprons over their dresses. We might look at these garments today and smile at the memory of own grandmothers or aunts wearing them, but even the high-end fashion magazine Vogue considered them important enough to include designs for housecoats in the winter pattern book of 1939.

Controls of all sorts were introduced in the early months of the war. Market stalls were carefully monitored and once sugar rationing was introduced in January 1940 the Women’s Institute was no longer able to sell cakes and biscuits at their country markets. The WI found the bureaucracy of the Second World War a severe trial and one of the reasons my book was titled Jambusters in the UK was precisely because the WI expended a great deal of energy busting bureaucratic log-jams in order to keep the countryside going. One irritated member wrote in her diary: ‘We went o Coventry this morning and I spent 20 minutes in the Food Controller’s Office getting a permit for butter and sugar for the Women’s Institute teas.’

The WI is nothing if not resourceful and positive. The government recognised the value of a huge voluntary body of women who could be marshalled with just one telephone call to their General Secretary, Miss Farrer, and it made sure that the WI was involved in the outset on food production. WI members were invited to sit on county agricultural committees and to encourage their villages to put aside as much land as possible to grow fruit and vegetables. In episode 2 of Home Fires some of the drama hinges on the determination of Mrs Barden (Samantha Bond), the WI president, to plough up the cricket pitch for vegetables. This is something that happened throughout Britain. My own grandfather returned from the war to see that his beloved tennis court had been ploughed up for growing potatoes.

The autumn of 1939 brought great change and a strange sense of a new normality. As you watch episode three you will sense the heightened state of tension and emotion that the war rendered within the families in Great Paxford. It affects everyone in different ways: fear, anger, love, danger, separation but the Great Paxford WI offers its members a solid backbone as the country finds its way during the so-called Phoney War of 1939-40.

Women needed each other as never before. The Travel writer Rosita Forbes wrote in the magazine Women’s Own: ‘In these hard times, when the utmost is required of everyone, the most important virtues are courage and kindliness. Women’s courage is the valour of endurance, of standing up to endless small difficulties, of putting up with things and making things do. When you are sick and tired and frightened of the future as well, and you go on working without making a fuss, then you are quite as brave as the first person who flew across the Atlantic.’

The first Jersey Festival of Words took place this weekend and what a great success it was. This is a young festival, in every sense of the word. I do not mean that as an insult but rather as a compliment. First, I discovered that the only reason I was there was because the chairman’s wonderful 15 year old daughter had heard me speak at Hay in May and told her mother she would like me to come to Jersey. What a compliment. I could not have been more delighted to be invited by a young, sparky, clever girl with a passion for fashion. Secondly, there were children’s events built into the programme rather than be run as a separate series of workshops and lectures. Well done Jersey! When I walked into the Green Room I was greeted by Jo behind the bar and asked if I would like a cup of tea and a sandwich, which was very welcome. She reached into the fridge and produced a small selection of sandwiches. ‘Hidden!’ she told me. There had been a stand-up comic workshop for children held earlier in the day and they had made short work of the sandwiches when they were let into the Green Room for a break. I thought that was lovely and I was delighted to meet one of the junior comedians who, at that moment, was lying on the floor with his trainers tied to a chair by cable ties. The atmosphere was so unpretentious and delightful that it was impossible not to get swept up in the genuine enthusiasm of the organisers for this new festival.

When the time came for me to do my presentation I got changed into my 1940s dress, shoes, hat and make-up and launched onto the stage with a mixture of nerves and excitement. The auditorium of the Opera House is handsome and the stage was set with two arm chairs so that it felt a little like a wartime sitting room. I was talking about Fashion on the Ration and it was fun to lift the skirts on wartime clothes rationing to a new audience. No turn-ups on men’s trousers and a shortage of corsets always get people laughing but the serious side of the wartime fashion industry also surprises people. For example, the benefit to the economy of fashion exports rose almost four-fold between 1939 and 1945. Not something widely known. It is also the case that with a lack of fashion to report on, the editor of Vogue decided to educate her readership about the war, running articles written by the American photographer, Lee Miller, as she made her way across France with the US Army in 1944 and 1945. The editor, Audrey Withers, took the decision to publish Lee’s photographs from a German concentration camp in Vogue, something almost unthinkable today.

After the talk was over I was invited back to the Green Room for a glass or two of Prosecco to celebrate the end of a very successful first festival. How lovely to be included in what was essentially a private party. I have written earlier this year about a bad festival experience. And about my good ones too: Hay, Dartington, Fowey etc. But Jersey is truly something special. Already on that Sunday evening the committee members were talking about possible events for next year. And they were intent on consulting their teenage experts on what would work for the young as well as for the older readers. Give me a young festival anytime!

I love nothing better than objects that tell a story. A small but perfectly formed exhibition at the Priest’s House in Wimborne, Dorset, is full of the most delightful, exquisite objects that tell the story of 100 years of the WI. Actually, it tells the story of the WI in Britain but it starts with a plate from Stoney Creek in Ontario, where the WI began in 1897. The commemorative plate proclaims ‘Stoney Creek Women’s Institute The First in the World’. It is hard to believe from the perspective of 2015 that such a huge and impressive organisation as the Women’s Institute started with just one institute in rural Canada. The plate reminded me that mighty oaks grow from a single acorn.

The WI’s long and distinguished history is as varied as its membership. From campaigning to craftwork via food preservation and entertainment, there is so much to tell. Yet I cannot bear visiting an exhibition and having to read a book on the wall. Let the objects speak for themselves. This was my mantra when I was organising exhibitions in my previous career and I stand by it today as firmly as I did twenty years ago. The curators at the Priest’s House have succeeded here and I congratulate them warmly. I have great admiration for a small exhibition that can leave you with the impression that you have been to a much larger one. Every object justifies its inclusion by telling us something. The display of WI badges, for example, reminded me of the evolution of the county federations. The much larger reconstruction of a First World War kitchen underlined the fact that the first WIs were formed during that war when the country was short of food. Other objects spoke eloquently of the very high level of skill of Dorset feather-stitchery and Dorset buttons, while the beautifully designed panels tell the story of the WI succinctly. Scrap books, photographs and banners from many of the federation’s local WIs give a flavour of how each institute has its own characteristics.

This is a beautiful exhibition in a very lovely museum which boasts not only a fine permanent collection but a stunning garden and a very good coffee shop. The Priest’s House Museum is definitely a hidden gem, but like all the loveliest of gems, it is worth seeking out.

The exhibition ‘For Home and Country’ runs until December. Highly recommended.

Book festivals: love them or loathe them, they are part of an author’s life. The current best estimate of the number of literary festivals in the UK is 364. One for every day of the year except Christmas Day. I will have done twelve this year, that’s one a month, and by and large I have good experiences of them. Some authors are becoming concerned that the sheer number of these festivals means that they no longer fulfil their original brief, which is to bring writers and readers together in the mutual love of books. So are they worth doing?

Although some literary grandees do get a sizeable fee for doing festivals, most authors do not get paid or if they do, it is a standard fee of £100 to £150. Even then, most festivals that do pay ask that the author considers waiving the fee as a mark of generosity towards the organisers.

We are asked to give up a day of our time, sometimes more than a day if the festival is far away. And believe me, many of them are miles from Oxford: Wigton, Pitlochry, Dartington are just three that need overnight stays. We are asked to perform for free in front of people who have paid up to £10 a ticket and we may, if we are lucky, sell some books. Recently many of us have noticed that festival goers no longer buy books in such quantities as once they did. You used to be able to reckon on roughly one in ten audience members buying a book after the talk. My experience this year is that the number is closer to one in twenty. The benefit of appearing at book festivals, we are repeatedly told, is exposure. This is not something that is easily quantifiable so it continues to get bandied about even though there is no evidence to prove the claim.

Most authors are uncomplicated and enjoy meeting people who read our books and turn up willingly at festivals. What do we expect in return? In my experience, very little. I wrote a list of author requirements for someone who was organising a new book festival from scratch. I unearthed them this morning:

1. Clear instructions about transport, parking, timings
2. A person to welcome the author either at the festival or from the train station
3. Clear guidelines beforehand about what will be covered, ie. expenses, overnight stays (if relevant), a fee plus technical requirements for those authors who want to do a powerpoint presentation or something similar
4. Free sandwiches and soft drinks in the Green Room for before and after the talk

I think those are pretty modest. Most festivals are well set up to meet these requirements and some go way beyond. Hay, which I attended this year for the first time, was stand-out brilliant. It ran like clockwork and despite the fact it attracts huge audiences and big names, there was never a moment when I was made to feel I was in a sausage machine. My friend Mary, who has attended Hay for years as an audience member, was thrilled to see behind the scenes and was impressed by the organisers’ attitude to the ‘artists’ as we were termed. Ways with Words, which runs festivals in Dartington, Keswick and Southwold, is another festival that offers an excellent experience with plenty of food, conversation and fascinating people. However, it is not just the large or well established festivals. Fowey in Cornwall hosts a lovely, small festival in May which is a treat to attend. Not only is the setting glorious and the organisation excellent but the volunteers who help the immensely energetic festival organiser, Brenda Daly, are friendly, helpful and enthusiastic. Wigton is similarly a lovely event with a wonderful atmosphere. With experiences like these it is easy to see why authors are prepared to give up their time to travel hundreds of miles to speak for 45 minutes in front of audiences large and small.

So when this weekend I attended a festival where not one of the guidelines had been followed I felt pretty put out. I drove 240 miles to speak to 11 people and sell 8 books – a good strike rate, I admit but I think the audience felt sorry for me – and I even had to spend 20p to use the public lavatory! Still, I suppose it means I’ve only got 363 to choose from next year…

I was recently asked to write a piece about women who have inspired me over the years. I thought long and hard about it. Some stand-out familiar names sprang to mind: Katherine Grainger, the greatest living British oarswoman; Angela Merkel; Meryl Streep and so on.

However, I came to the conclusion that it is ordinary women who are the most inspirational to me: those who work hard, sometimes against the odds, and succeed quietly. One of my greatest inspirations has been my mother-in-law, Vera Steele. She read medicine at Glasgow University immediately after the Second World War, living in digs in a city still reeling from bombing raids and wartimes losses. She recalled recently cycling around the back streets of the city with a fellow doctor, heading into rough areas to visit women who had either just had or were about to have a baby. She talked about it in such a matter-of-fact manner but it seems to me to have been a courageous thing to have done, at a time when women doctors were not as numerous as they are today and Glasgow was a dangerous place in many ways. She married a GP in 1952 and was obliged to give up working. There was no such thing as maternity leave in those days. She made the decision, she told me years later, that there was not room in a marriage for two careers and a family. After her three children were born she went back to work part-time in a Psychiatric department. She succeeded in combining all aspects of her life and to do so apparently effortlessly. When I met her in 1980 she was the same age as I am now, 54, and she had a calm about her which I have always found admirable. She mustered her unruly brood with affectionate firmness, she cooked for as many as turned up to her table and was well-loved and respected by her colleagues at work. Now, aged nearly 90, she is frail but her mind is sharp and she is interested in everything her family is up to. A thoroughly inspirational woman.
Another woman I have looked up to all my life is a German friend called Atti. She was 52 when I first went to live in Munich in 1978. She took me under her wing and helped me to learn everything I could about her wonderful country. ‘Until you understand our culture – our music, literature and art – you will never truly be able to speak good German,’ she said to me. I took that to heart and over the two years I lived there I absorbed as much of German culture as I possibly could. She was always generous with her time and took me to exhibitions, on sight-seeing tours, to concerts and even, on one memorable occasion, to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play. This is put on every decade and tells the story of Christ’s passion. It was a truly memorable occasion. That alone is not enough, however. What Atti brought to all these moments was her zest for life, her absolute passion for everything she did and saw. She made me look, see, listen, in a way that no one had ever done before and I know that she helped to shape the person I am today. She had grown up in Berlin under the Third Reich. Her brothers both fought on the Eastern Front, her older brother being a prisoner of the Russians until 1949, and she was unafraid to talk about the war and the impact it had on their lives. That was something new. The war was still close in people’s minds to be a difficult subject but the description of her experiences had a deep impact on me. It is something I would like to write about in the future. When we last mooted it UK publishers were still too squeamish to accept the good German story but that was 10 years ago so perhaps things are changing.

The third woman who I would say was an inspiration is a woman I never met. Her name was Edith Jones and she was the tenant farmer’s wife in Shropshire whose diaries form the golden thread through Jambusters. Edith recorded life at Red House Farm on the Long Mynd in brief but delightful detail. I learned, over the course of the years 1932-1947, that she had an outside ‘double-seater’ privy, that she washed her clothes in ‘sweet’ water, gathered in rain butts and that she was passionate about her chickens and her vegetable garden. She experimented with haybox cookery in 1938, cooking ham, beetroot and stews with considerable success and was very proud of her Victoria sponge cakes which regularly won prizes at WI competitions (she became a member in 1931). I read about her matter-of-fact acceptance, tinged with sadness, when a sickly calf she had looked after day and night for several days did not survive. ‘It was buried by the men’, she wrote, adding ‘poor little thing’. Edith’s everyday life was hard. The Long Mynd was remote in the 1930s. Although only 11 miles or so from Shrewsbury, she was unable to leave the village except with her husband Jack, until one fine day when a bus service started and once a week she would hop on the bus and go into the town to market or the cinema. Yet this woman, who worked long hours all year round, harvesting, bottling, pickling, helping out on the farm and turning her expert hand to mending clothes, prams and anything else that might be broken, still found time to read. To her, education was something so precious that it could not be squandered. She told her great-niece when she was in her 80s in hospital that she was shocked the other patients were not improving their minds by reading books or playing scrabble. Edith Jones, like Vera and Atti, lived her life to the full. She did not win a medal for bravery or receive an honour for service to the community, but she made a difference to the lives of those around her and her tireless energy inspired other younger people to take life by the horns and make of it what they could.

There is something rather extraordinary about the way history goes round in cycles. I’m not making a point about history repeating itself. That has been made often. I am talking about a cycle that I observed last week at the launch of Fashion on the Ration at the Imperial War Museum. When I was in my twenties we were fascinated by the designs and the clothing from the 1920s. I remember loving the boyish shapes under the flappers’ glorious dresses. There was something so unbelievably refined and beautiful about them and I wanted to look like them, dance like them, smell like them and love like them. But to the generation growing up in the late 1930s and 1940s, those elegant lines and dropped waists were considered ugly and old-fashioned. Completely out of date with the then current thinking about fashion which celebrated curves and divided the bosom into two for the first time in decades. Despite the overriding impression that wartime clothing was dull and depressing, there is a generation of twenty-somethings who today are rediscovering and cherishing the Utility designs of wartime Britain: flat caps and round glasses, Victory rolls and lace-up shoes, tweed suits and rayon dresses. To me it is fascinating to see fashion come full circle and be celebrated in such style.

When I wrote Fashion on the Ration the single most striking thing for me was the colour of clothing in the Second World War. Used to seeing images in black and white it is all too easy for forget that colour was one of the only things in clothing that was not rationed or constrained by the austerity clothing regulations. Colour brings joy and energy to good design and nothing exemplifies that more than the Utility range of clothing on show at the Imperial War Museum in London (5 March to 31 August 2015).

I wonder if anyone, ever, will find anything attractive about bell-bottom jeans and the horrendous designs I wore in my teens in the 1970s…

There is something deliciously private about the written word. That probably sounds slightly ridiculous, especially when my job is to publish and make public words that I write. But think about it for a second. The relationship between the reader and writer is intimate. It is one to one. I particularly feel that intimacy when I am curled up on a sofa reading a book in which I become so absorbed that nothing else matters apart from those words on the page that are conjuring up a world created for me by another writer. Of course, they are not created specially for me but it feels like it and that is one of the many magical properties of books.

So if something I have written appears in a different medium it takes on a new character. Take audio, for example. The Colonel of Tamarkan appeared as an audio book in 2010. And it went through quite a process before it became runner up in the Audio Book of the Year (beaten by Dr Who). First it had to be abridged. That is a strange but fascinating process. 127 thousand words had to be distilled into about twenty-five thousand whilst not losing the thread of the story. The nimble fingered Neville Teller did a wonderful job to the extent that when listening to the book it is quite difficult to recall what he left out. I say nimble fingered because it felt to me as if he had unpicked a jumper and crocheted a scarf in the same colour and design.

Then there has to be a reader. Chrome Audio engaged Anton Lesser. I was lucky enough to meet him when he arrived to do the reading. As I listened to him speaking words that I had written six years earlier, investing them with meaning, I felt them lift off the page and gain a rounded form. It was intensely exciting and he really ‘got’ my grandfather’s voice. He captured the humour and the despair beautifully. The result is marvellous. It is public too but still in an intimate way because although it has been broadcast on the radio several times, there is more often than not a one to one relationship between the listener and the radio.

So when I heard that Chrome wanted to make an audio book out of Jambusters, I was immediately enthusiastic. Neville Teller has once again unpicked my narrative and produced a lively and cleverly shaped script which will be read by Samantha Bond, one of my favourite actors. I am so looking forward to hearing those women I came to know so intimately while I was writing the book have a life beyond the pages. I know she will breathe life into them, as Anton did with the Colonel, and I think the result will be equally marvellous.

There is something very special about working in a library. All too often I end up working in my office at home. It is lovely and I do know how lucky I am with my view over the spires of Oxford. However, going to a library is like going to a cathedral of learning. Last Friday I had three hours to kill in Liverpool. The city of my birth – well almost, I was actually born in Clatterbridge hospital on the other side of the Mersey – it is a place I love and feel very much at ease in.

I made my way to the Central Library, recently refurbished and only opened in May 2013. http://liverpool.gov.uk/libraries/find-a-library/central-library/. It is absolutely beautiful and I was incredibly impressed by the quality and detail of the workmanship. But what impressed me more than anything else was the atmosphere. The place was alive and buzzing, throngs of readers and visitors looking at books, working at computers, sitting in comfy chairs, admiring the building or just looking vacantly out of the windows.

I made my way to the Picton Reading Room, a show-stopping, arrestingly impressive space that houses three tiers of books in a round space with a huge cupola above, and decorated in exquisite industrial age wood and metalwork. At first I just sat and worked but then I found myself caught up in the atmosphere of the place. It is more than a cathedral to learning, more than a temple to the written word, it is a a Pantheon-like space that speaks of the beauty of knowledge. So imbued was I by the power of this glorious reading room that I succeeded in finishing a book proposal I have been struggling with for weeks.

Thank you, Sir James Picton (1805-1889), for campaigning for a public library for the city of Liverpool. He argued that public libraries should be supported by public funds as they performed a vital role in society ‘by fostering social unity and cultural harmony’. In 1852 a special act of parliament authorised a levy on a penny rate for the support of a public library and museum. The library and museum was built by Sir William Brown and opened in 1860. The Picton Reading Room, modelled on the British Library in London, was opened in 1879. Picton became the first chairman of the library and museum committee in 1851 and held the position until his death in 1889. I salute his foresight and belief in the importance of liberal learning.