For hunger, and the tipped-over dinner cauldron, see Trevor Keeling in the People’s War archive at https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/44/a2974944.shtml.

Frobisher’s and James’s marches are described at https://www.lamsdorflongmarch.com/ and https://www.stalagluft3.com/long-march/. I beg forgiveness for transposing two small incidents, concerning a bucket of water and a dog, from Joseph Fusniak’s account of the march from Lamsdorf—the ordeal undertaken by Ronald Frobisher—to James’s shorter journey from Belaria to Luckenwalde (https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/38/a1317638.shtml).

Stillbirth

As Yvette says, she was lucky even to hold her stillborn child in 1950. Parish records and widely reported anecdotal evidence tell of babies being immediately removed from the mother and treated as Yvette attests (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-51271977). More on baby loss past and present in the UK can be found at https://www.sands.org.uk/.

Times had changed by 2005 when I lost my own daughter at birth, and I cannot fault the care given to me, my daughter, and her father. All the same, no research was needed to create Yvette and James’s beloved Catherine and her hard journey into the world.

The Church of England from the Postwar Period Until the 1970s

Although James was ordained before the war, his era was indeed a time when many young men went straight into the Church after demobilization. The Testing of Vocation by Robert Reiss (Church House Publishing, 2013) describes the wave of postwar ordinations into the Church of England that Ronald Frobisher alludes to in the opening pages of Think of Me. Christopher Campling, who served in the wartime navy before entering the Church, writes atmospherically in his autobiography I Was Glad (Janus, 2007) about his religious training with all its burdens and austerities. Like James Acton, Prebendary Austen Williams, already a military chaplain, was captured by the Germans in 1940. He commented later that his world-famous ministry at the church of St. Martin-in-the Fields in the 1970s, with its Sunday soup kitchen and scores of homeless sheltering in the crypt, was not unlike an internment camp: “There are people who smell in some way or don’t use the right language. They are a threat and a bore and a mess. But you can’t exclude them. You live with, you get fed up with—and you live with getting fed up with—them, and you just go on. There is no getting away” (Beeson, p. 149, see below). The experiences of these young priests gave me an insight into James as curate and vicar to the people of Alver Shore. Alver Shore is not Gosport, Hampshire, but this photo archive gives a feel for the wartime south coast: https://www.gosportsociety.co.uk/GosportSociety_the_war_years.html.