Pilot and Pacifist

Esdaile Carter uses contemporary letters and documents along with modern histories to tell the story of Jack, the pilot of a Halifax heavy bomber and Freda, a Quaker pacifist. Most of the events take place in 1943, when the Battles of the Rhur and of Berlin were beginning. The letters describe the lives of Jack, who flies mainly to Germany from RAF Melbourne near York, and of Freda, who lives in the bombed-out East End of London and works in the Friends Ambulance Unit office in the day and in air-raid shelters in Wapping by the river Thames at night. In 1944 Freda is posted to Cairo and travels to Syria. She is then sent to Naples and Rome. When the war ends, she is back in London.