Chapter 9, School Daze and other ramblings on the 2 year anniversary

[rthstewart]

So,  Chapter 9 of AW went up today, on the second anniversary of when I started posting TSG.  Yikes.  My notifications through FF.net are completely screwy.  I am not getting them at all or they come 12 to 24 hours later.  This doesn't help my perennial anxiety whenever I post.  So, do let me know, here or via a review if you got it. 

A huge thanks to all of you who made note of letters that you wanted to read and thought should be included.  In looking through this chapter, it really is a sum and substance of so much that has gone before and so much of what is to come. 


The Research
I always say this but in this case, it was really hard to write of Ruby suffering racism and what I am doing to Jill Pole and her family.  Sources on black race relations in the UK were wildly conflicting and contradictory, but among the ones I looked to:

The WRENS
Caribbean RAF
Experiences of a Black British Commonwealth Soldier
The Yanks are Coming -- Black American Soldiers in the UK
Meeting Joe Louis
Moving Here
WREN at Bletchley Park
The women of Bletchley Park

On issues of recruitment, training, and such (with a huge thanks to Theoretica!)

Recruiting and training
Paradata, Anthony John Clark
(and others at the site)
Pegasus Bridge
2nd Airborne Battalion, Oxs & Bucks
Ambrose's Pegasus Bridge:  June 6, 1944
Kramer's Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France

Also, pretty!  Beaulieu
And because there must be a beaver, Castor fiber
Mary Elizabeth Sutherland, MP, Labour Party Chief Woman Officer
A History of the Blue Funnel Line
Lane's, The Merchant Seaman's War

Reflections
2 years!  Whoa.  The highlights are undoubtedly the awesome women I've met along the way with amazing interests and insights.  Yes, I know, ideally, I had this all this story mapped and presented it to you like Athena from Zeus' head.  But, I enjoy immensely treating this as an interactive and iterative process.  Over and over there are things here that are far better because readers helped me put it there.  Fan fic provides the framework for our interaction -- the excuse that allows us to get to know each other better across the great expanse of the Internet, like ladies chatting across a backyard fence.

The lowlights?  Oh gosh, no surprise there.  Finding myself all unknowing in the middle of a culture war and the stinging slump of last summer.  The beauty of the highlights described above, however, is what truly pulls me through.  Thanks so much for the friendship! 

Comments

[autumnia]

Read, adored and reviewed! Really, there were so many good moments in there, I don't know if I could pick a favorite. The ones that definitely stood out for me (now that I read all of it) include Peter and the OTC; Susan writing/receiving from Tebbitt, Gladys and Peter; Mary and Eustace; Edmund and his mother.

What I forgot to mention in my review was that Lucy writing to Aidan showed us more about their relationship than the bits we've seen sprinkled among your stories. It is certainly a more open relationship than Edmund and Morgan's and despite being able to talk to those beyond the Wall, it seems this is also a way for Lucy to talk to Aidan privately.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

despite being able to talk to those beyond the Wall, it seems this is also a way for Lucy to talk to Aidan privately. This is one of those things that I threw out there back in the Heart and Mind chapter in TQSiT and never thought much about it. It's very vague in that chapter and while I call it "talks with dead people" and that's how Peter and Susan describe it, when she actually does it as a point of view character in that chapter it is much, much more vague. More in terms of feelings and only with those with whom she is very close -- specially Aidan and Briony and Aslan. I had a review comment on why she doesn't do it with, say the dead of Europe now in the War and that if I don't explain it, it could come off as a superpower. So, I'm thinking about this a little more. I certainly did not assume that it was something that it applied to the dead of Spare Oom.