'It was a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. I stood on the verandah, just trying to make my mind think: 'War - we're at War'. It was unreal.' In September 1939 Mary Angove from Plymouth was barely sixteen. A time-honoured sex divide that allocated home-making to women and world affairs to men found her, and millions like her, unprepared for the century's greatest conflict. We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. This book tells the story of the women's war, through a host of individual women's experiences. In 1942 Cora Johnston is grieving over the death of her young husband, torpedoed in the Atlantic; Aileen Morris is intercepting Luftwaffe communications during the siege of Malta - and Clara Milburn, whose son was captured after Dunkirk, is waiting, and waiting .

In conditions of 'Total War' millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed. Then came peace. 'When their war ended, our war began . ' In 1945 women's brief encounter with trauma, risk and independence seemed to give way to traditional values. In austerity Britain it was back to queuing, coping and making ends meet. In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson unravels an extraordinary decade through the eyes of women, paying tribute to their pioneering contributions to our national story. She tells how they loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared; how they re-made their world in peacetime. And how they would never be the same again .