Technical Virgins

In her best-selling first volume of autobiography, Cowslips and Chainies, Elaine Crowley remembered her childhood in 1930s Dublin with great warmth and poignance. In this delightful sequel she recalls her years as a young woman serving in the British army ATS after the Second World War. This is a memoir of leaving disease-ridden Dublin for a world she imagined to be a Tír na nOg of the young and healthy; of being a ‘Paddy’ in England; and of passionate friendships and romances. With her inimitable novelist’s eye for detail, Crowley weaves a fascinating tapestry of her years as a ‘technical virgin’, coloured by vivid descriptions of army rations (inedible), fashion (Maidenform bras, the miseries of the ATS uniform), social trends and sexual mores. Crowley re-creates a vanished world that will touch a chord in all who were once young.