The land fit for heroes

I’ve been running through a bit of WW1 and WW2 but there was the aftermath of WW1 from which Europe, and even America only recovered in the late 1930’s. The stories of that time are either doom and gloom or stories of heroism in some form. I was doing a bit of a memoir when I realised there must be a story among the unmarried lady teachers I had in primary school. In the thirties they were forced to retire when they married but these women had lost sweethearts in WW1 and adopted us, their unruly pupils as a kine of family. One in particular was determined we would not accept poverty as a natural consequence of growing up in a mining village and I started to put together bits and pieces my father had talked about and some memories of schooldays and researching things that were news in the post WW1 period and into the twenties. I took the main character as someone who had lost her fiance in the Royal Flying Corps in 1918 and took the promise the politicians had made when the men went off to the trenches ‘A Land Fit for Heroes’ as the title. I’m not saying it’s a great book but it did let me pay my own tribute to those teachers.