We Did What We Could

Three girls who are best friends in an English school love to pull pranks, including setting the headmistress' car on top of a footbridge. Maggie becomes a journalist, a personal assistant to an Air Marshall during the Battle of Britain, and then a military journalist. Agnes is trained as a nurse, serving in London during the early months of the Blitz. Ellie, whose father is a Dutch diplomat, studies language and theater, living in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. From helping a midwife's daughter become presented to the King as a titled lady to a dramatic rescue as the climax of the book, the three girls become women, suffer loves and deaths, using their wits and talents as best they can.

Maggie's first love is an RAF Spitfire pilot. They are in a car crash that kills her boyfriend. She later marries a man she has seen as a best friend. Because she crew up on a large estate, her father, a Peer of the Realm, insisted that she and her brothers be self-sufficient. She excels at most things, especially driving any vehicle, without thinking any of it is special. She learns a lot about war-time censorship and violence along the way. Agnes is the heiress of a tea company. She had a major fight with her parents, reconciled with them, just before they die in the London Blitz. She goes to nursing school, succeeding by copying the bullying behavior of her mother. She falls in love with an RAF pilot from Poland who dies in an air battle. As a nurse in the RAF, she becomes a front line combat nurse. Ellie gives birth to a boy one year before the War begins. She, along with her university tutor, her grandmother, a housekeeper, and a couple who used to work for her husband's family survive as one household. In an accident with her brother who is a Nazi collaborator, she is blinded. Meanwhile, Agnes has fallen in love with her Polish boyfriend's brother. As a team, Agnes, Maggie and 2 others rescue Ellie by secretly going into occupied territory and using their driving and nursing skills to make the trip successful.

From her first full-time job in Columbia University's Oral History Department to a 5-year career as a librarian, and now as an Episcopal priest, Nancy has been listening to people's personal stories. Helping people with their research and her own passion of studying history led to a desire to mix stories he has heard with the facts of written history. Travel and photography keep her and her family busy when she isn't reading.