When the nation's men returned

In London at the launch of her new book, her head was constantly swivelling around to make sure they were all being properly looked after.

When journalists descended upon them, seeking to hear their remarkable stories, Ms Summers became distinctly nervous. But the anxiety was perhaps also mixed with just a touch of jealousy.

After spending months finding these women and encouraging them to reveal so much of their private lives, it was unsettling to see them unburdening themselves to assorted hacks.

The Oxford author's new book may be entitled Stranger in the House. But she is unlikely to write anything that will lead to as many friendships and insights into the lives of so many different families.

For it tells the stories of scores of women left behind to cope when their menfolk went to fight the most destructive war in history, and what happened when the servicemen returned years later to try to resume family lives.

The book all stemmed from an idea she had on a train journey from Oxford to London, on her way to meet an editor.

Her previous book The Colonel of Tamarkan, had told the story of her grandfather, Philip Toosey, the officer who had built the Bridge on the River Kwai.

What had most affected many people in her tribute to this forgotten British hero, was the section describing his struggle to adjust to post-war life. Letters poured in from women wishing to thank her for tackling this thorny issue of returning heroes.

Julie well remembered feeling troubled herself when, over a late-night glass of wine, her mother described her reaction as a ten-year-old, to seeing a man who was her father but a complete stranger.

The war hero had hugged his daughter but she backed away.

As Julie's mother, Gillian, said: "I had no recollection of any man showing me affection. It honestly took me years before I was relaxed with him. Now I think how sad that must have been for him."

Julie learnt this was response was not uncommon.

A woman of similar age to her mother, Patricia Mark, recalled taking one look at her newly-returned father and instantly telling him he should go straight back to Siam.

"As I stared out of the train window," Julie recalled, "I suddenly began to think what it must have been like to welcome home a man who had been away for years; a man who had experienced the horrors of war and who was now expected to get on with life, to build a career, to take up with a family he hardly knew any more and live in a country ravaged by years of war and rationing."

But then she began to imagine what it must have been like for the women, faced with sharing their lives with men damaged by years of fighting, imprisonment or long separation from their families.

In search of the answer, she set about finding and interviewing more than a 100 women who were on the 'receiving end' of demobilisation.

Julie, who lives in Iffley with husband Chris and three sons, appealed to wives, daughters and mothers of servicemen to contact her, through a story in The Oxford Times and a Women's Institute news letter.

She was to be taken aback by the avalanche of replies.

They came from women of all backgrounds — from a lady-in-waiting to the late Queen Mother, to a widow in Abingdon.

For many, it proved an almost therapeutic experience to tell stories and explain feelings that they had kept bottled up for decades.

It is estimated that over a period of two years, more than four million servicemen came home. Yes, there was the joy and relief. But some men were uneasy about their freedom from discipline, and uncertain about fitting back into civilian life. And they found their women and children had changed too, in some cases literally beyond recognition.

Julie was to be given detailed and vastly different accounts of the long-wished-for homecomings.

There were women who had assumed their fiancees had died, only to find them reappearing after they had married someone else, women who had had illegitimate children following wartime affairs, and the steadfastly optimistic, who were rewarded with loving reunions.

Many of the women who helped Julie joined her at a book launch held at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Among them were a group of women from Oxfordshire who supplied some of the most heart-wrenching and intimate accounts.

Jean Hammond, who now lives in Witney, had been able to recall in detail the dramatic moments when she first set eyes on her father after the war.

"He was walking up the long garden path to our shared house in Sonning Common. My mother, Charlotte, was so overcome with emotion that she fell down the stairs when she saw him coming towards the house."

She had only been two when he left. But she had known she had a father because she used to kiss his photograph every night before going to bed.

She now recognises that it must have been difficult for her father.

"It seemed to me that he had difficulty cottoning on to the fact that this slightly stroppy eight-year-old was not the cuddly little toddler he had left behind all that time ago."

Her father had been taken prisoner in 1940 and housed in Stalag XXA in Germany.

She was never to establish a close relationship with him.

When he spoke of the past it had seemed irrelevant to her.

"Now I kick myself that I didn't listen to what he wanted to tell me and I wish I had asked him more questions so that I might better have understood his situation," she now says. "I know almost nothing about his family background and even less about his war."

The absence of a father during what should have been the happiest years of childhood is a recurring theme.

While Marion Platt, from Rose Hill, came to adore her outgoing father, Bill Hillman, who had served in Italy, the war clearly contributed to violence in other people's relationships.

Three out of every four letters or contacts Julie made while writing the book were from families of former Far East prisoners of war.

"The psychological effects of their captivity was so little understood that it often took decades for them to come to terms with it," she says.

The children of these men, like Jan Roberts, frequently had traumatic childhoods. She recalls her father's violent mood swings: "Dad was kind and gentle but then would turn in a flash and use his hands, his belt, sometimes using the buckle end. My mother used to say it was not my father who was beating me, but the Japanese.

"Many times I went to school with belt marks. As a child I was frightened that I would not be believed about where the marks came from and I didn't like to undress at school.

"On one occasion, when I was five, my father was beating me with a bicycle pump and mother tried to stop him. She was hit and broke her finger, after which she swore she would never get involved again."

While some of "her ladies" live within a mile of Iffley, the historian travelled to northern Scotland and even Australia in pursuit of new material.

In Julie's view: "Almost no one came back from the war unchanged, one way or another. Women changed. Often they had either moved back in with their mothers or gone out to work."

And away from the home many enjoyed, or became victims of, an unprecedented sexual freedom that had one of the greatest impacts on family life.

A massive increase in illegitimate births was a direct result of wartime affairs.

One woman described in the book her state of mind before meeting her husband, who had spent four years in a German prison camp, having had a baby in his absence.

She says: "I read about the sufferings of prisoners. I feel I cannot face my husband and let him know I was disloyal. He may forgive me but how can I greet him, ill and crippled, with this child?"

But mothers of legitimate babies like Ena Mitchell, who settled in Abingdon, faced years of hardship, too.

Ena received news that her husband had been killed in Belgium shortly before her fifth wedding anniversary.

Despite having been left to bring up a two-year-old daughter, she recalled: "I never received any help, any counselling, any communication at all after that initial letter from the War Office.

"When we moved to Abingdon and I realised how difficult it would be to find somewhere to live, I sat in the park and wept."

In the early 1970s, Ena was prominent in setting up an Oxfordshire branch of the war widows' association, and has always insisted her contact with other widows provided great comfort.

Her involvement opened many doors. She has sat on a sofa in 10 Downing Street and taken tea with The Prince of Wales.

Down the years Julie's own family has certainly inspired her writing.

Apart from being the grand-daughter of the man who built the Bridge over the River Kwai, she is the great niece of Andrew Sandy Irvine, the Oxford student, who with George Mallory may have conquered Mount Everest 30 years before Edmund Hillary.

Her book about the the doomed 1924 expedition and the efforts to find Irvine's body is to be turned into a television drama documentary.

Her new book could make for a lengthy series. No one would think about those joyful homecomings in quite the same way again. As one wife, now in her nineties commented: "When their war ended, our war began."