Scandalous Women welcomes Guest Blogger Kate Lord Brown

Scandalous Women is pleased welcome author Kate Lord Brown, whose new book The Beauty Chorus came out this month:

Synopsis: New Year's Eve, 1940: Evie Chase, the beautiful debutante daughter of a rich and adoring RAF commander, listens wistfully to the swing music drifting out from the ballroom, unable to join in the fun. With bombs falling nightly in London, she is determined that the coming year will bring a lot more than dances, picnics and tennis matches. She is determined to make a difference to the war effort. 5th January, 1941: Evie curses her fashionable heels as they skid on the frozen ground of her local airfield. She is here to join the ATA, the civilian pilots who ferry Tiger Moths and Spitfires to bases across war-torn Britain. Two other women wait nervously to join up: Stella Grainger, a forlorn young mother who has returned from Singapore without her baby boy and Megan Jones, an idealistic teenager who has never left her Welsh village. Billeted together in a tiny cottage in a sleepy country village, Evie, Stella and Megan must learn to live and work together. Brave, beautiful and fiercely independent, these women soon move beyond their different backgrounds as they find romance, confront loss, and forge friendships that will last a lifetime.

When I read a tiny obituary about a remarkable woman who had flown Spitfires during the war, I had to know more. Why don’t people know about these amazing women, I thought? As I researched in archives and museums across the country piecing together the historical details for my novel, I was blown away by their bravery and modesty. There was no glass ceiling for these girls – the sky was the limit.

Some of the men didn’t like it – they said they should do jobs ‘more befitting their sex’, but with remarkable ability and quiet determination these women fought for equal pay and equal terms, a first I think in history. They were mentored by two incredible women – Pauline Gower (who had taught French to pay for her flying lessons), and Jackie Cochran (a formidable American aviator, an orphan who had battled her way to the top – she started out as a beautician, married a millionaire, and singlehandedly recruited and shipped over some of the finest American women pilots to help the British Air Transport Auxiliary).

Coming up with fictional characters to equal the real women was no easy task. Among the ranks of the women pilots, there was Amy Johnson – who had flown half way round the world with only a tennis racket and an evening dress in her flight case. Then there was Audrey Sale Barker, who had crash landed in Africa, and calmly handed an SOS note written in lipstick to a passing Masai tribesman.

I came to admire these women for their strength and bravery – they flew all kinds of planes, anywhere, without radio and without arms. They came from all countries and all walks of life – mothers, grandmothers, debutantes, graduates, trick flyers and even a stripper. They ‘did their bit’ with enormous grace under pressure – and to me, it was a story that had to be told.

Kate Lord Brown has worked as an art consultant for palaces and embassies in Europe and the Middle East, and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was a finalist in UK ITV’s People’s Author contest in 2009. Her debut novel ‘The Beauty Chorus’ has just been published by Atlantic. She lives in the Middle East with her pilot husband and young family. http://thebeautychorus.blogspot.com  Purchase the book on Amazon: