Here are just some of the books, exhibitions and websites that have helped in my research:

Gwen Arnold, Radar Days: Wartime Memoir of a WAAF RDF Operator (Woodfield Publishing, 2000)

Jim Brown, Radar: How it All Began (Janus Publishing, 1996)

Robert Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World (Touchstone, 1998)

Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–45 (Headline, 2004)

Ian Goult, Secret Location: A Witness to the Birth of Radar and its Postwar Influence (The History Press, 2010)

Phil Hadwen, John Smith, Ray Twidale, Peter White and Neil Wylie, Felixstowe from Old Photographs (The Lavenham Press, 1990)

Phil Hadwen, John Smith, Peter White and Neil Wylie, Felixstowe at War (The Lavenham Press, 2001)

Phil Hadwen, Ray Twidale, Peter White, Graham Henderson and John Smith, The Hamlet of Felixstowe Ferry, Pictures from the Past (The Lavenham Press, 1990)

Gordon Kinsey, Bawdsey: Birth of the Beam (Terence Dalton, 1983)

Colin Latham and Anne Stobbs, Radar: A Wartime Miracle (Sutton Publishing, 1997)

Virginia Nicholson, Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives in War and Peace 1939–1949 (Viking, 2011)

Robert Watson-Watt, Three Steps to Victory (Odhams Press, 1957)

RDF to Radar, a film made by the Telecommunications Research Establishment Film Unit in 1945/46. On DVD from Bawdsey Radar Trust.

Bawdsey Radar Trust runs the transmitter block museum: www.bawdseyradar.org.uk

Felixstowe Museum at Landguard Fort: www.felixstowe museum.org

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would never have happened had our friends Niels and Ann Toettcher not decided – in a brilliant, crazy moment – to buy Bawdsey Manor from the Ministry of Defence and set up an English language school there. We were among their first guests and fell instantly in love with the place. The memories of many happy times in that magical place live on in our hearts.

The wartime history of Bawdsey Manor and in particular the extraordinary story of Robert Watson-Watt’s invention of radar is being wonderfully told through the work of the Bawdsey Radar Trust and the museum they have set up in a wartime transmitter block. Thanks to all who gave me their time and advice, particularly their former chair, Mary Wain.

Steph Merrett and her team at Felixstowe Library are possibly the friendliest librarians in the world, and were very helpful in sourcing research materials about the town in wartime. Long live libraries!

I am, as always, eternally grateful to my tireless agent Caroline Hardman and the team at Pan Macmillan, especially my eagle-eyed editor Alex Saunders, whose suggestions at draft stage were really helpful.

Last but not least, I could not do what I do without the love and support of family and friends – you know who you are.

In Love and War

Three women, once enemies. Their secrets will unite them.

The First World War is over. The war-torn area of Flanders near Ypres is no longer home to troops, but groups of tourists. Controversial battlefield tourism now brings hundreds of people to the area, all desperate to witness first-hand where their loved ones fell.

At the Hotel de la Paix in the small village of Hoppestadt, three women arrive, searching for traces of the men they have loved and lost.