Delicious silk underwear and a love story inspired by war
In 1942, Lieutentant Tony Moore wrote to his wife from Cairo where he was stationed with the British Army. He had sent Zippa (short for Philippa) some blue silk to make delicious underwear and couldn’t wait for the day when he could see her in it. ‘I do so adore buying things for you my darling darling one. It is the only thing I like spending money on.’ Meanwhile Zippa, stuck in a bomb-smashed East End of London, responded to her young husband telling him that she had just ‘bought woolly knickers now – huge!’
These crossed-wires tell you all that you need to know about the young couple who had got married two years earlier after meeting as London air raid wardens during the first weeks of the war.
Tony was 21, just down from Cambridge, and of a highly romantic turn of mind. Zippa was 25, from a middle-class bohemian background, who dreamed of becoming a professional dancer and had already been on stage at the Old Vic.
Tony was deployed to north Africa and for three years the young couple communicated by letter. There were thousands of men and women in this situation, but what makes Tony and Zippa so special is their ability to express themselves in ways that leap across the decades and grab you by the throat. In this moving, funny book, their daughter, Julie Hankey, marshals their correspondence to tell an exquisite story of love, hope, distance and, ultimately, disenchantment.
You could see the warning signs from the start. Tony was a romantic who spent his time in the desert dreaming of his elegant, dancing wife as Ginger Rogers. In fact, Zippa did spend her days dancing, but not in the way he imagined. She had got a job organising entertainment for Londoners hiding from the Blitz in the Tube stations. Every night she lugged her gramophone player into the inky depths to teach frightened people, young, old, in uniform and mufti, how to distract themselves from the terrifying bombs exploding overhead.
In early 1943 Zippa gave birth to her first child, conceived on one of the last nights before Tony went overseas. The young father-to-be greeted the news with obvious ambivalence. ‘Tell me, when do they cut teeth, start to walk, start to talk etc… when does she start to recognise people?’ he writes anxiously.
Another time, he wants to know how long before Rosalind is ‘reasonably house-trained’. Above all Tony doesn’t want Zippa to lose her looks or her figure by becoming a mother.
By this point Hankey thinks that her parents were engaged in ‘making each other up’. Zippa was becoming ‘a creature of Tony’s imagination’. Although Zippa didn’t know it, Tony had embarked on an affair with a clever young French woman working in north Africa as a translator. Simone even looked a bit like Zippa. It transpired that Tony had asked her to give him a year in which to extract himself from his marriage so that he would be free to propose to her. Sensibly, Simone’s ultra-Catholic mother whisked her away to marry someone else.
All this makes Tony sound awful. But the great strength of this humane book is that Julie Hankey doesn’t assign blame or take sides in her parents’ marriage. She is quite clear that Zippa was not the right person for Tony.
The Moores eventually divorced, one of the many thousands of couples who discovered that a marriage contracted during wartime was hard to sustain in the cold, hard light of peace. Tony quickly remarried (although not to Simone), while Zippa stayed single during her long and fulfilled life.
‘Their letters tell a story of love, hope, distance and, ultimately, disenchantment’