Happy Publication Day to Wartime with the Tram Girls by Lynn Johnson.
About the Author
Lynn Johnson was born and raised in The Potteries. She went to school in Burslem, the setting for her novels, and left with no qualifications. Like Ginnie, she had ambitions. In her own time she obtained a BA Hons in Humanities with Literature from the Open University, and a Diploma in Management Studies from Staffordshire Polytechnic and became a Human Resources Manager with a large County Council.
She began to research her family tree and it inspired her to write short stories, one of which became the basis for her debut novel, The Girl from the Workhouse, the first of The Potteries Girls series. The second book in the series, Wartime with the Tram Girls was published in March 2021. Lynn is a member of the Romantic Novelists Association and the Society of Authors.
Although Lynn still has a close affinity to The Potteries, she now lives in Orkney with her husband and six beautiful cats.
Follow @lynnjohnsondots on Twitter, Visit Lynnjohnsonauthor.com
About the book
July 1914: Britain is in turmoil as WW1 begins to change the world. While the young men disappear off to foreign battlefields, the women left at home throw themselves into jobs meant for the boys.
Hiding her privileged background and her suffragette past, Constance Copeland signs up to be a Clippie - collecting money and giving out tickets - on the trams, despite her parents’ disapproval. Constance, now known as Connie, soon finds there is more to life than the wealth she was born into and she soon makes fast friends with lively fellow Clippies, Betty and Jean, as well as growing closer to the charming, gentle Inspector Robert Caldwell. But Connie is haunted by another secret; and if it comes out, it could destroy her new life.
After war ends and the men return to take back their roles, will Connie find that she can return to her previous existence? Or has she been changed forever by seeing a new world through the tram windows?
Constance becomes interested in the suffragette movement, which is the beginning of her coming-of-age and the first step to changing her view of the world she lives in. Stepping into the world of those who have previously served her and are deemed to be under her in the class hierarchy, it's a move full of hard lessons, but also one that teaches her more than she can imagine.
How frightfully misinformed and obsessively coercive people were about the men - young or old - who didn't go to war. It is abundantly clear when Constance fulfills her feather duties. Judgemental and terribly blinkered with only a strange version of patriotism and anger to fuel their small acts of silent destruction.
The author gives a good insight into the vast difference between upstairs, downstairs mentality and the way those differences melded and changed during the 20th century. Goals, needs and opinions became more of a common goal, which in turn led to a revolution of sorts in the way the class structures were perceived and those people perceived themselves.
Women marched for women, men fought beside each other as equals and Constance emerges as Connie with all her new experiences with humility and as part of something bigger, as opposed to one of the smaller elite.
It's historical fiction that gives readers a good feel for the many changes the world and women went through in the early 20th century.
