Muriel Spark's seventh novel,
The Girls of Slender Means(1963), takes place in bomb-damaged London between VE Day in May and VJ Day in August of 1945. The girls of the title live at the May of Teck Club, an establishment founded by Princess May of Teck during the First World War to provide safe and cheap lodgings for well-bred young ladies working in London. During the Second World War, thirty or more young women in their twenties take advantage of the club's subsidised rent for much the same reason. Various strands of the narrative come together on 27 July when the club, the windows of which had been blown out three times during the blitz, is finally destroyed by the explosion of an undiscovered bomb which ruptures the gas main beneath the building.
Everyone in that era 'made do'. The
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Citation: Scullion, Val. "The Girls of Slender Means". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7137, accessed 25 November 2024.]
