HMS Unicorn Online Talk - Life as a Wren

Join HMS Unicorn for a fascinating story of one woman’s experience of World War II – “Life as a Wren: A Story of the Second World War”.
Finlay Raffle (HMS Unicorn) speaks with author Vicky Unwin about her book "Love and War in the WRNS: Letters home 1940-46". The book is based on the letters of Vicky’s mother Sheila Mills who joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service in 1940.

Sheila was a clever, middle-class Norfolk girl who wanted to escape the shackles of secretarial work in London, her unhappy childhood, and her social-climbing mother. Starting with Sheila’s first posting to Scotland at the start of the war, the letters chart her progress through the ranks, first to Egypt and, later, to a vanquished Germany.

“Love and War in the WRNS" offers a tantalising glimpse into the rarefied world of the Wrens and, perhaps more importantly, a vivid sense of what it was like to be a young woman living through such tumultuous times” - Evening Standard.

Vicky Unwin is an author with a long career in both book and newspaper publishing, centred round her African roots, and is currently the chair of Wasafiri Magazine and a Caine Prize Council member. She has always been fascinated by family secrets and began researching the story behind The Boy from Boskovice: a father’s secret life (Unbound, January 2021) shortly before her father’s death in 2012. Vicky writes extensively about living with cancer at healthylivingwithcancer.co and is a Trustee of Transform Drug Policy Foundation campaigning for the decriminalisation of drugs after losing her daughter to a ketamine overdose in 2011. She lives in London.