The Very Thought of You - Softcover

1944: Three girls join a touring variety group and travel through Europe, entertaining the troops as World War II draws to a close

In the wake of D-Day three very different women join a touring variety company, performing to factory girls, hospitals and serving troops.

Catherine's husband has been reported missing in action and she needs a job to support her mother and daughter.

Della, a Liverpudlian show girl, is ambitious for fame and hides her problems behind a devil-may-care attitude.

Frances, titled but impoverished, will do anything to keep the family home safe for her brother, a POW in the Far East.

Travelling from show to show, the three women form a strong bond. But when they follow the advancing army through France, their friendship deepens as the company is stalked by lies and betrayal, and it’s clear that nobody will come home the same.

Previously published as Imperfect Tense.

Mary Fitzgerald was born and brought up in Chester. At eighteen she left home to start nursing training. She ended up as an operating theatre sister in a large London hospital and there met her husband. Ten years and four children later the family settled for a while in Canada and later the USA. For several years they lived in West Wales, northern Scotland and finally southern Ireland until they settled again near Chester. Mary had long given up nursing and gone into business, first a children’s clothes shop, then a book shop and finally an internet clothes enterprise.
Mary now lives in a small village in north Shropshire close to the Montgomery canal and with a view of both the Welsh and the Shropshire hills.