Last year some passages of letters my grandmother sent during the second world war made it into Mike Carlton’s naval history book, The Scrap Iron Flotilla. She was an actor and married to a commander in the navy, my grandfather. By all accounts she was fun.
“Her doings at balls, parties and suppers were often in the newspapers,” Carlton writes. In one of her letters, she recounts doing the boomps-a-daisy with the HMAS Sydney’s doctor and a waltz with the captain. “We finished up en masse in the Palais Glide,” she writes. “It was 3am before the party broke up.”
