Lancaster author’s words endorsed by forces sweetheart Dame Vera Lynn

She lived on Park Avenue and stayed throughout the school holidays with her aunt in Windermere while her father served in the British Liberation Army and her mother went out to work to pay the bills.

More than 60 years on, Jenny’s poem, ‘Brief Encounter’, merited inclusion in the poetry anthology, Poems of the Poppies, published 2010 by SilverWood Books to raise funds for the charity FLOW for All which helps those affected by war.

It earned her a seat at the table three places from Dame Vera at the launch in the Grand Hotel, Brighton.

Jenny’s inspiration for the poem was her memories on the journeys between Lancaster and Windermere and of the famous Carnforth station tea ladies who patrolled the platform handing jam jars of tea to the soldiers wishing them ‘Good luck. Safe return’.

Her father received one on his way to a Normandy beach in 1944. He got back. But Jenny’s mindset remained that of an abandoned small child who had survived the war on ‘half a parent’.

Then in 2000, on a visit to the Western Front and the Normandy beaches, she was jolted out of it by sad remembrance tokens - like the card attached to a little bunch of wilted flowers: ‘Dear Daddy I loved you so’.

She set about raising funds for the British Legion with, among other things, several booklets and two SilverWood books: ‘Aftermath, a poetry and short stories collection to mark the centenary of the start of World War 1’, and ‘In Our Fathers’ Footsteps’, a biography based on her and husband Paul’s experience of war to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War.