Salute to the Village
Folly Books is proud to announce the release
on 15 February 2010 of Fay Inchfawn's 1943
wartime classic
Fay Inchfawn was one of Britain’s most prolific women authors of the inter-war years with over thirty published titles and sales in excess of 650,000 books worldwide.
Salute to the Village is a first-hand account, written from the viewpoint of a moderately affluent middle-class family, of the impact of the Second World War upon the little village of Freshford on the Wiltshire/Somerset border.
As in countless other villages at the outbreak of war, Freshford’s residents dreaded the knock of the billeting officer, bringing ill-kempt, working-class evacuees from London or groups of notoriously troublesome ‘Brats from Bristol’. Yet when the inevitable finally happened, the villagers welcomed the newcomers with open arms.
More strangers arrived in the village in the spring of 1940. Workmen appeared, building concrete pillboxes along the riverbanks, while ‘a steam excavator was at work digging a mighty trench which was part of a scheme of fortifications to protect our nearest seaport’. In the meadows barricades were built to deter enemy gliders landing the invasion troops that were expected any day.
There were other inconveniences too: shortages of everything, nightly blackouts, the tedium of fire-watching and the sudden disappearance of direction signs at road junctions for miles around.
Freshford’s greatest test came in April 1942 when the nearby Georgian city of Bath was attacked on two successive nights by German bombers as part of the Baedeker campaign. For weeks after, hundreds of bewildered evacuees – families bombed out of their homes or afraid to return to the city for fear of further bombardment – sought refuge in the village, often sleeping in barns or under hedgerows.
Illustrated with 16 line drawings by A E Bestall
This new edition includes an introductory biography of the author and descriptions of the real-life places and people mentioned in the text, along with eight pages of photographs.
Price: £9.99 post free to UK mainland addresses
Buy both books together
Price: £17.50 post free to UK mainland addresses
About the author
Fay Inchfawn was the pen-name of Elizabeth Rebecca Daniels who was born in Portishead, near Bristol, in 1880.
In 1914, shortly after her marriage to Atkinson Ward, she moved to Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire and pursued a literary career that saw her become one of the most prolific women writers of the inter-war years.
Literary success was followed by financial success, and in 1927 the Wards purchased Innisfree, a substantial and secluded early Victorian villa on the border of the villages of Freshford and Limpley Stoke near Bath.
Fay Inchfawn died in 1978 at the age of 98 and is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's, Limpley Stoke.
