A Chelsea Concerto - Softcover

Faviell, Frances

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911413775 ISBN 13: 9781911413776

Publisher: Dean Street Press, 2016

Synopsis

‘Take off your coat,’ said the doctor. I took it off. ‘And your dress,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous – the folds may catch in the debris and bring the whole thing down.’ I took off the dress. ‘Fine,’ he said shortly. ‘It’ll have to be head first. We’ll hold your thighs. Go down and see if it’s possible to give an injection. Can you grip the torch with your teeth?’

Frances Faviell lived in Chelsea before and during the London Blitz, having became a Red Cross volunteer when World War II began. Chelsea was particularly heavily bombed and the author was often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events through 1940 and 1941. Her memoir evokes an unforgettable cast, Londoners and refugees alike, caught up together in extraordinary and dangerous times – not forgetting the ‘Green Cat’, a Chinese statuette, standing on the author’s window sill as the home’s talismanic protector.

Frances Faviell’s memoir is powerful in its blend of humour, tenderness and horror, including the most haunting ending of any wartime memoir. A Chelsea Concerto is reprinted now for the first time since 1959, with a new introduction by Virginia Nicholson.

‘Irresistible reading. There could be no more graphic account of what one first-aid worker and her small party witnessed and did during the London Blitz ... while characters are sketched in with a novelist’s art, the impression left is one of stark truth.’ Birmingham Post

‘I am so happy that A Chelsea Concerto is back in print. It is a gem of a book, one of the best personal memoirs of WW2 on the home front, written with an artist’s eye for detail and immediacy.’ Kate Atkinson

About this title

About the Author:

Frances Faviell (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hungarian academic and travelled with him to India where she lived for some time at the ashram of Rabindranath Tagore, and visiting Nagaland. She then lived in Japan and China until having to flee from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. She met her second husband Richard Parker in 1939 and married him in 1940.

She became a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Phoney War. Due to its proximity to the Royal Hospital and major bridges over the Thames Chelsea was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. She and other members of the Chelsea artists’ community were often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events throughout the Blitz. Her experiences of the time were later recounted in the memoir A Chelsea Concerto (1959).

After the war, in 1946, she went with her son, John, to Berlin where Richard had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration (the CCG). It was here that she befriended the Altmann Family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1911413775
• ISBN 13: 9781911413776
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252