A Chelsea Concerto Quotes

“Coming so soon after the King’s broadcast praising the ARP, this speech by Mr Churchill was a tonic to the fainthearted, the weary, and the pessimistic, as were all his speeches. They did something for me which is indescribable. The reports from neutral papers at this time that the evacuation of school-children from Berlin had already begun did much to strengthen the statement that we were battering the Germans. The children were being sent to Austria and East Prussia.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“Perhaps it was that the idea of a Ministry of Information was alien to us after our free Press, but everything done by this new Ministry seemed very comic. We British do not like scraps of advice and information handed out to us as pamphlets. We like to read them in the paper which we choose to read. I stuck the pamphlet on the wall and it never failed to amuse me when I was depressed”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“At this same time Sally’s young husband returned after having suffered horrible experiences when his ship had been torpedoed. More horrible to us was the knowledge that both these young men like thousands of others would have to return to their diminished units, and would undoubtedly be sent overseas again.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“I had a number of German and Austrian refugee friends in London and they kept on telephoning in consternation as the news grew more and more disquieting. To them it was incredible that we had not heeded the growing threat from the country from which they had been forced to flee.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“But the whole shipping future was in the balance – thousands, like them, having suddenly decided to go home, it was impossible to get on any boat. They were in despair, but there was little I could do to help them. Many families were already sending their children out of London, carloads could be seen, toys, perambulators, dogs, cats and birds all piled in with them or balanced on top of them.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“Casualties don’t choose their place of annihilation – the bombs choose them – anywhere – anytime. You must be prepared for anything.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“The Blackshirts sometimes held meetings at the top of Chelsea Manor Street near the coffee-stall. I loved to stop and heckle them. Their manners reminded me of their fellow Brownshirts in Germany. It was safer to be accompanied by a male when attacking them, Mosley’s followers, like Hitler’s, having scant respect for the fair sex.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“WE WERE HAVING a grand-scale Civil Defence exercise in Chelsea. It was June 19th, 1939. We all thought the idea very silly – we’d had one scare the previous year – and now it all seemed childish. We’d filled sand-bags, dug trenches, fitted thousands of gas-masks, only to throw them all away in an excess of relief when Chamberlain returned from Godesburg with a respite from Hitler. The scare of war had largely died away because the public had decided that it should die away. There would be no war – and the forlorn abandoned gas-masks on rubbish heaps, and the bursting sand-bags seeping over pavements and streets, were witnesses to the public’s decision.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto

“had a quality of never having grown-up yet being completely mature.”
― Frances Faviell, A Chelsea Concerto