Nancy Banks-Smith (I remember the wartime evacuation. Eventually the isolation gets to you, 28 March) confesses to having cut out a couple of bras from a blackout blind when evacuated at boarding school. While at teachers’ training college, my mother and friends temporarily repurposed blackout curtains into full “skirts” for a country dancing evening. Gathered at the waist with large tacking stitches, the skirts were easily returned to the windows the next day. Mum admitted the origin of the skirts to the quizzical PE instructor, who was sworn to secrecy. As with Banks-Smith, there will now be no one left to whom Mum could usefully confess.
Annie Coombs
Acton, Cheshire
• Reading Nancy Banks-Smith’s poignant tale of her lost pork pie reminded me of a story often told by my mother-in-law, Alice. She was a child in the war, and she and her three brothers looked forward to Sunday when they would each, in turn, get to eat the one rationed egg. One Sunday she came down in great anticipation because it was her turn, only to find her father, just home on leave, eating her egg. I’m sure she was pleased to see her dad but oh, 70 years later, how the loss of that egg still rankled.
Gill Vincent
Sheffield
• Surveying my self-isolating hair in the mirror, I feel I have discovered the reason women in the 1940s and after (including, possibly, Dame Emmeline, so vividly brought to life by Nancy Banks-Smith), wore their hair in a coil round the back of their heads. It would be because they could not access a hairdresser to trim their mane. Is this style due a revival?
Elizabeth Dunnett
Malvern, Worcestershire
