For context, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean by Philip Mansel (John Murray, 2010). For a literary and social portrait of Alexandria 1900 to 1950, Alexandria: City of Memory by Michael Haag (Yale University Press, 2004). See p. 277 for M. de Menasce’s musical afternoons featuring the pianist Gina Bachauer—and cakes!

Personal memories include Out of Egypt: A Memoir, by André Aciman (Picador, 1994). This foremost writer on exile describes the exploits of three generations of his Jewish family from their arrival in Alexandria to their sad departure. Les Cahiers AAHA (Amicale Alexandrie Hier et Aujourd’hui, http://www.aaha.ch) are a rich resource of history and debate on all aspects of Alexandria and her communities, from history, politics, and culture to food, drink, and beachside cafés. I am grateful to the collection of interviews Voices from Cosmopolitan Alexandria (eds. M. Awad and S. Hamouda, Biblioteca Alexandrina, 2006) for a certain venerable lady’s recollection that during the war, people used to remark that only the ugly girls married RAF pilots . . .

For air raids on Alexandria, https://www.britishpathe.com/video/alexandria-bombed/query/Precautions will take you to a Pathé newsreel of the aftermath of a bombing. Individual raids in the spring of 1942 are listed in Shores and Massimello (see above). The novel No One Sleeps in Alexandria (see below) gives details of bombings, air-raid shelters, and Egyptian casualties.

For Yvette’s blue-jacketed Lycée notebooks: In the Afternoon Sun, a memoir by Julie Hill (Bookbaby, 2017).

I also drew on fictional works. Robert Solé’s Birds of Passage (translated by John Brownjohn, Harvill Press, 2000) is an enchanting novel, grounded in the author’s family history, about several generations of a Greek Catholic, Syrian Alexandrian family. It was my privilege to translate two novels by a master of modernist literature, Edwar al-Kharrat: City of Saffron and Girls of Alexandria (Quartet, 1989 and 1993). Al-Kharrat was born in 1926 into a Coptic family in Alexandria, and his novels intertwine stories of love and family life from the 1930s and 1940s with the city’s eternal myths. No One Sleeps in Alexandria, a novel by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid (translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab, AUC Press, 1996, mentioned above), vividly describes the wartime tribulations of ordinary Alexandrians.

Out of the thousands of photographic archives available online, the historic fragments and memorabilia of the Cohen family, including sketches by the artist Sidney Arrobus, can be viewed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cam37/sets/72157601540771110/. This collection includes a wrinkled scrap of wrapping paper from Hannaux Department Store in Alexandria, too small, I think, to line a kitchen drawer. Yvette’s must surely have been bigger.

The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in Egypt

The WAAF at War by John F. Turner (Pen and Sword Aviation, 2011) and Sand in My Shoes by Joan Rice (Harper Perennial, 2007) address the topic from different angles.