Front Line 1940

by Lucilla Andrews

A love story set in London during the Blitz. Visiting a wounded friend in St Martha's Hospital, Josh Adams, an American war correspondent meets the young staff nurse in charge, Ann Marlow, who will end his professional detachment from the war.

Genres: World War II, Romance, Historical, Historical Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 1990

About the author

Lucilla Matthew Andrews Crichton
aka
Lucilla Andrews, Diana Gordon, Joanna Marcus.

Lucilla Matthew Andrews was born on 20 November 1919 in Suez, Egypt, the third of four children of William Henry Andrews and Lucilla Quero-Bejar. They met in Gibraltar, and married in 1913. Her mother was daughter of a Spanish doctor and descended from the Spanish nobility. Her British father workerd by the Eastern Telegraph Company (later Cable and Wireless) on African and Mediterranean stations until 1932. At the age of three, she was sent to join her older sister at boarding school in Sussex.

She joined the British Red Cross in 1940 and later trained as a nurse at St Thomas' Hospital, London, during World War II. In 1947, she retired and married Dr James Crichton, and she discovered, that he was addicted to drugs. In 1949, soon after their daugther Veronica was born, he was committed to hospital and she returned to nursing and writing. In 1952, she sold her firt romance novel, published in 1954, the same year that her husband died. She specialised in Doctor-Nurse romances, using her personal experience as inspiration, and wrote over thirty-five novels since 1996. In 1969, she decided moved to Edinburgh.

Her daugther read History at Newnham College, Cambridge, and became a journalist and Labour Party communications adviser, before her death from cancer in 2002. In late 2006, Lucilla Andrews' autobiography No Time for Romance became the focus of a posthumous controversy. It has been alleged that the novelist Ian McEwan plagiarized from this work while writing his highly-acclaimed novel, Atonement. McEwan has protested his innocence. She passed away on 3 October 2006. She was a founder member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, which honoured her shortly before her death with a lifetime achievement award.

Reviews

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucilla Andrews was a nurse during WW2 in London. Her books have a ring of truth and experience to them and this one is no exception. It details the horror of the blitz of London in 1940. It shows the terrible devastation of that time - the loss of life and destruction of buildings. This book shows the courage of nursing and other hospital staff as they care for patients while bombs rain down around them.

[Anette · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and moving description of the London blitz, as well as the attack on Coventry in 1940.

[Nightwitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many of these English-books-about-the-Blitz are nostalgic to the point of being gauzy; there are plenty of Cockney details but the meat of them, the real pain points that make the characters human, are missing. Andrews lived through the period she described and her portrayals feel real: people genuinely believe they may die, and many people do; characters and places are destroyed at random, and nobody has that comforting confidence that England Will Be Victorious with which so many authors imbue their fictional characters. When characters die, it is sudden and sharp and mostly random and feels very truthful. Some minor characters we care about survive; others do not; there is no rhyme or reason to any of it, it's simply war. 

Andrews has a real gift for characterization. A character describes her guardian aunt as "torn between her suffragette youth and Edwardian upbringing," lecturing a pair of siblings who were fighting by giving the boy "hell for fighting with a girl because no gentleman ever raised his hand to a lady," and lecturing the girl "for kicking [her brother] because no nice girl ever kicked a boy's bare knees and 'if you ever have to kick a man, child, for goodness' sake kick harder and higher!'" Another, minor character drops stitches on his knitting in the middle of an air raid so that a middle-aged woman will stop focusing on the stress of their current situation and fix his knitting.

I wouldn't characterize this book as a romance, but I think Andrews's work as a romance novelist really serves her well. The best romance novels focus on their characters, on the bonds and interactions between them, and while Andrews has a gift for describing the minutia of day-to-day life in wartime (some of the war work scenes are very reminiscent of her memoir, which was so good that Ian McEwan simply plagiarised it) she never loses sight of the people involved in the story. The framing device of an American reporter surprised by English phlegm and resilience is familiar, but in Andrews's hands it's not trite, perhaps because she spends so much time and affection on her other characters - worrying about whether they should have left their "next of kin" in the hands of an elderly aunt who will be devastated to receive the official notification of their deaths, desperate for a nap of longer than half-an-hour, caring for each other and the people around them with an affection borne of love and desperation and fatigue and stubbornness. And as I mentioned above, Andrews avoids the hackneyed technique of making us care about characters in order to make us care about their deaths: some live, some die, and because of the abbreviated timeframe of this book, to a certain extent they all remain in uneasy limbo. (The last lines contain a vague promise that our two main characters will be okay, but that's about it.)

[Lillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving engaging story. One of her best.

I discovered Lucilla Andrews late in my reading career and am thankful. All her novels are well written and engaging; however there are a few that rise above this level to achieve truly moving and memorable status. This book is one. The characters are well drawn, the relationships varied and interesting, the romance is deeply satisfying as a reflection of the best in human nature. What raises this story to a higher level is its placement within the time and location of the London Blitz. This is the best way to gain insight into the realities that student history books neglect and current history seems to have forgotten. I will be rereading this novel annually I am sure.

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book differed a little from the author's other WWII novels because much of the story is told from the point of view of an American journalist. This works well because his initial skepticism about Britain's ability to withstand Germany's attacks allows her to show how precarious the situation really was without having any of her British characters appear cowardly or doubting. The descriptions of the terrors of the Blitz are, as with her other books, sometimes a bit too real; a more modern author would probably be a lot more graphic in their descriptions of the destruction, but her more subtle approach is in many ways more horrifying, because it leaves so much to the imagination.

[Flo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Uninteresting srory

I don't know why because I have loved Lucilla Andrews' books until this one which I found bad. Too many descriptions of hits on the hospital, hits on London to the point where it got simply boring. The love story is in the last place of importance. We never got the tension one gets in her previous books of does he love me or does he not and how will he tell her. I skipped many many pages. Not for me.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrews brings you right into the midst of the endless blitz on England and particularly London. The rage, fear, determination and endurance displayed by the population are seen through the eyes of an American journalist who was sure they’d surrender under the onslaught any minute and was both amazed and appalled by their unified spirit under horrific conditions. Andrews manages to be honest about their flaws while still admiring their strengths. It’s an eye-opening book that hit me hard.

[Linda Hendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much an eye witness account of the time. My copy has a better cover of him and her beside a bombsite. Just having covers of nurses does not do justice to several of L Andrews books. This one shows us the point of view of the American reporter as well as of the nurse.

[Linda Hendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Health Service before the NHS and during the blitz. Yes Lucilla lived through it.