From high society to the horror of the front line

Anita Leslie could have spent the war safely at her family castle. Instead she risked her life daily rescuing the wounded. But then she WAS Churchill’s cousin ...

YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM

Don’t get sunburned in Africa, men hate it — that was the chief piece of advice Anita Leslie’s mother gave her when, in August 1940, the 25-year- old Anita joined the Mechanised transport Corps and took a ship to Africa with 60 other women ambulance drivers.

Before setting sail, the girls were given a lecture on Virtue in tropical Lands, then blessed by the Bishop of St Albans and snapped by Press photographers. ‘And now three girls waving spanners…big smiles… very nice.’

the ship’s officers were mystified as to why these pretty girls should volunteer for such work. they guessed the reason must be ‘broken hearts or dull husbands’.

For happily single Anita it was neither, but rather a thirst to do her bit for the war effort and to learn about the world. Learn about the world she certainly did: the best and the very worst of it.

Shehappened to be a first cousin once removed of Winston Churchill — as a child she had been dressed in ‘dear Winston’s’ old baby clothes — and some of the sturdy, optimistic, un- self- pitying Winstonian spirit pervades this gripping and increasingly horrifying memoir.

the mixture of Anita’s grand connections and her un-grand war work gave her a unique experience of the war. one minute she’s driving an ambulance full of badly wounded soldiers to a military hospital; the next, she’s dining with General Alexander (who had 12 nations under his command) in an Italian villa and sleeping in a luxury guest tent: ‘the best day off in the whole war.’

the memoir is written in the style of a good letter home: concise, brisk, funny, vivid and honest. At the beginning it’s easy to be lulled into a sense that taking part in the war was the most hilarious fun ever. In Syria in 1941, for example, Anita did a spell of work delivering the troop newspaper, the eastern times, through snow and mud to units living in intense discomfort.

the paper was ‘set by Arab boys who couldn’t read a word of english. If a line got dropped they reset it by guesswork. headlines were back to front and words upside down’.

the paper was full of news of grouseshooting and yacht regattas, issued by the Ministry of Information to cheer the troops.

Sometimes Anita played truant from the eastern times and went skiing by moonlight all over Lebanon with a group of off-duty submariners, under their commander Philip Ruck-Keene. After D-Day Anita felt pretty sure

war would be over in a month. how wrong she was. In August 1944 she was transferred to the French Army as an ambulancière — and if you think the British girls were vain, worrying about their sunburn, they were nothing compared to the French girls.

one in Anita’s ambulance, even in the heat of battle, ‘never let an hour pass without setting her hair with lotion from a bottle. the steel helmet made life very difficult’.

the chief ambulancière, Jeanne de l’espée, insisted her girls should not neglect their make- up, because nothing cheered a wounded soldier up as much as being tended to by a girl wearing lipstick.

As she drives the ambulance towards Germany, picking up the wounded, Anita’s account becomes important reportage. She happens to be a keenly observant writer,