Jacky Hyams

World War Two is finally over. Millions all over the country are starting to wonder if peacetime really is much of an improvement on the War. Food shortages, endless queues, power cuts, rationing and freezing winters make it extremely difficult to make ends meet as husbands return from battlefields to families they hardly know.

Yet some East Enders are living large... in a bombed out damp and squalid Hackney slum, one family are leading a life of luxury, a loadsamoney world funded by illegal betting, where virtually everything is available, thanks to a thriving black market. The Hyams family has a retinue of unofficial servants. They take seaside holidays in posh hotels and dine on the finest foods and delicacies money can buy...but at the core of their daily life, an ever-growing nightmare lurks, threatening to wreck their luxurious existence.

Through the darkest days of the Second World War, an elite group of courageous civilian women risked their lives as aerial courier pilots, flying Lancaster bombers, Spitfires and many other powerful war machines in thousands of perilous missions.

The dangers these women faced were many: they flew unarmed, without radio and in some cases without instruments, in conditions where even unexpected cloud could mean disaster.

In The Female Few, five of these astonishingly brave women tell their awe-inspiring tales of incredible risk, tenacity and sacrifice. Their spirit and fearlessness in the face of death still resonates down the years, and their accounts reveal a forgotten chapter in the history of the Second World War.

People are shaking off the memory of the drab austerity years after the Second World War. Ration books are now history. The good times have finally arrived. Families like Jacky Hyam’s are starting to be tempted by the incredible new household goods in high-street shop windows: TVs, fridges, washing machines, electric heaters, now widely available on credit. And Wimpy bars and frozen fish fingers are changing the culinary landscape.

Now, for the first time ever, teenagers are being wooed as never before, consumers in their own right. It is a dramatic cultural shift that sparks a huge rift between the generations. For Jacky all these tempting changes can only lead her in one direction - an all embracing desire for freedom - and a growing determination to break free of the traditional East End way of life.

They were the super rich of their times, pampered beyond belief - the early 20th century Edwardian gentry, who lived like superstars, their every desire or need catered to by an army of butlers, servants, footmen, housekeepers, and grooms. Class, money, inheritance, luxury, and snobbery dominated every aspect of the lives of the upper crust Edwardian family.

While below stairs the staff inhabited a completely different world, their very lives dependent on servicing the rich, pandering to their masters' every whim, and rubbing shoulders with wealth and privilege. While privy to the most intimate and darkest secrets of their masters, they faced ruin and shame if they ventured to make the smallest step outside the boundaries of their class-ridden world.

From manners and morals to etiquette and style, this book opens the doors to the reality of the era behind TV's favourite stately home.