Miles Bingham on how he helped get his mother’s wartime memoir published after her death

Blitz damage in Bush Hill Park (credit Enfield Local Studies Library and Archive) and (inset) Valerie Braunston

There can’t be many things more dispiriting than clearing out your mother’s house the day after putting her into a nursing home, knowing the property needs to be sold.

Armed with black bin liners and rubber gloves, I started delving into cupboards and corners that hadn’t been touched for years.

Imagine my surprise when in my 88-year-old mother’s attic writing room, I found the manuscript for a book, plus handwritten notes next to her gnarled up manual typewriter. What I’d discovered was the story of her wartime childhood spent in Bush Hill Park – I was dumbstruck.

While I knew that in years gone by she’d been an after-dinner speaker, where her favourite talk had been her Blitz and evacuation escapades, I simply never realised that she’d written it all down.

I immediately found her writing fluent, darkly funny and at many points highly illuminating. This was all in stark contrast to the frail, mildly demented lady that I’d just left in a care home. I only had one choice, and that was to get her work published.

The wheels of publishing turn at their own steady pace. “Would your mother be available to do publicity?” I was asked. Not exactly, I told them, as she’d sadly died in the interim. Another publisher loved the manuscript but declared that they “only publish books where the writer has a sizeable social media following”.

I ploughed on, ignoring the knock-backs, and eventually found a company willing to publish my mother’s memoir.

Valerie Braunston was one of the last voices of a generation that grew up during the Blitz and her book vividly recalls spending eight months sleeping in an Anderson shelter in the back garden with German bombers overhead.

In the middle war years, she describes the smogs descending over London and also the waves of illnesses that swept across the city, a new kind of danger. And just when the local people felt they couldn’t take much more, the V-1 rockets struck out of the blue, at which point my mother’s nerves broke and she was evacuated to the countryside to recover.

Valerie escaped back to London and witnessed VE Day in Bush Hill Park, before her story ends with her attending Latymer School, where she falls in love with acting and wins a duologue competition with (now dame) Eileen Atkins.

Published by Wrate’s Publishing, London Can Take It has received glowing early reviews and even hit Amazon’s top ten of new military biographies. It seems people, perhaps more than ever, want to connect to a wartime past slowly slipping through our collective fingertips.

The whole project for me has been part of the grieving process after losing my mum. I’ve now learnt so much about the Second World War that I’ve become a volunteer at a museum in Brighton where we have an air raid shelter open to the public to visit. The wheel really does turn full circle.

London Can Take It by Valerie Braunston is available from Amazon or can be ordered directly from the publisher:
Visit londoncantakeit.co.uk

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