L'amour est bleu

In this sequel to "Love Lessons", in which the author recounted her coming-of-age in bohemian Chelsea during the early years of the war, she continues her education in love and life through the war years, in the blue serge uniform of a WAAF. Joan Wyndham is 19 in April 1941, when she and her three close friends, Oscar, Gussy and Pandora, are posted to a bleak, forbidding billet outside Preston. Promotion rescues her from the horrors of bed bugs, bullying and constant hunger, and transfers her to a paradise of chintz sofas, log fires, and abundant booze. On leave in London, she meets a Yugoslav painter and Zoltan, a poseur with whom she falls painfully in love. Posted to Inverness, she embarks on a new round of romantic adventures - with a Scottish aristocrat, a Norwegian sailor and, later, a young battle-scarred fighter pilot. As five years in uniform come to an end, she has to make a choice between Oxford and the glorious prospect of an unregimented life.