The story of Wren Jane Beacon in World War Two is the story of any lively and intelligent young woman suddenly plunged into a drastically different world. Whether she is your sister, girlfriend, daughter or you yourself, how she encounters rigid systems and overcomes or learns to live with them, is an everywoman story with timeless resonance. Back in 1939 a young woman from her background would have expected a comfortable life based on home and – perhaps – further education until she married. World War Two changed all that for ever, and the interesting question for you is how you would have reacted or supported a girl caught up in the maelstrom of that new world. Could you have survived, flourished, helped and supported her?

In reading about her you will see eternal verities of life placed in the setting of a world surprisingly different from what we know in the twenty-first century. It seems so similar in many ways yet in others is quite different and her spirited response to the world she enters is both an instinctive reaction and a consequence of her upbringing – think ‘Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’. Ranged against her was not so much the Nazi enemy but the most hidebound, traditionalist and chauvinist organisation imaginable. Deeply set in its ways, the Royal Navy of 1939 had an intensely male culture which viewed women as delightful creatures from a different stratosphere – and certainly not humans to be accepted as co-workers. In very short order, chronic manpower shortages forced them to change their minds and the openings, often through gritted teeth, gave Wren Jane Beacon and many more like her an opportunity to show what they could do given half a chance.

Could you have done, or supported, what she does? The challenges she faced were enormous and complicated by her own impulsive nature, but only someone with that level of drive and determination could have done what she did. You would be facing the direct dangers of enemy action; the eternal threat of the sea itself; and entrenched hostility from a male service which viewed you as an interloper. Could you deal with all that? How Jane overcomes them all is the thread which will run through the series of twelve or so books following her through world war two.

Alongside all that, she is a hot-blooded and loving creature brought up to expect to settle with one life partner. But the cruelties of war are cruelest of all on emotional lives. The intensity of ‘live for the day’ creates a pressure cooker atmosphere which leads people to acting much more hastily than might otherwise be the case and the certainty that loved ones may be dead tomorrow takes away the willingness to wait inherent in moral strictures. When that certainty turns to reality and people find themselves alone again but longing to love and be loved, girls like Jane Beacon find themselves having adventurous love lives which were never intended but nonetheless are lived to the full. Follow all of this in the Wren Jane series.