Our Patch february 2015
COMPETITION
WIN A SIGNED COPY OF MISS CARTER’s WAR!
Sheila Hancock
acting in film
‘Delicious’. Below,
with comedian
Lee Evans
also directed The Soldier’s Fortune in
Hammersmith in 1981.
Sheila’s recent career branchings are
not the result of conscious planning.
“I’m endlessly curious,” she said. “If
people ask me to do something I’ve
never done before, I tend to do it.”
She has always had a strong social
conscience and a powerful left-leaning
political outlook.
Mention of the rise of UKIP leads to
pursed lips and a narrowing of the eyes.
“It depresses me,” she said.
“People get angry about the
lack of jobs and houses, but the
root of the problem is deprivation,
mismanagement of the economy. It’s
the root of everything, but people
blame Europe… or anything else.”
Turning to ‘Englishness’ and the
world view of the English, she said that
the country was worshipped the world
over for its arts. “That’s what England
really is,” she said.
In many ways her new book is a
campaigning novel, underlining social
advances and the march towards gender
equality, while condemning injustice in
all its forms.
>> It is 1948 and Britain is struggling
to recover from the Second World
War. Half French, half English,
Marguerite Carter, young and
beautiful, has lost her parents and
survived a terrifying war, working
for the SOE behind enemy lines.
Leaving her partisan lover she
returns to England to be one of the
first women to receive a degree
from the University of Cambridge.
Now she pins back her unruly
auburn curls, draws a pencil seam
up her legs, ties the laces on her
sensible black shoes, belts her grey
gabardine mac and sets out towards
her future as an English teacher in
a girls’ grammar school.
For Miss Carter has a mission
– to fight social injustice, to prevent
war and to educate her girls.
Through deep friendships and
love lost and found, from the
Fifties’ peace marches and the
flowering of the Swinging Sixties,
to the rise of Thatcher and the
battle for gay rights, to the spectre
of a new war, Sheila Hancock has
created a powerful, panoramic
portrait of Britain through the life
of a singular woman.
HOW TO WIN:
>> To be in with a chance of winning
one of two signed copies of Miss
Carter’s War, just answer this
question: Who gave Sheila Hancock her
first mortgage? Three lucky runners-up
Experienced writers always counsel
newcomers to ‘write on subjects they
know’, and the characters in Sheila’s
novel are comp