This image is the cover for the book Moonlight and Roses

Moonlight and Roses

The year is 1934 and Albert, a singer, meets Dorothy, a pianist, because another pianist has broken his thumb. As children they had grown up during the First World War and had known the Depression, but they were young and life was full of music. They married in 1936 and their daughter, Barbara, was born in 1937. Life looked good but Albert was an Army reservist and was called up at the outbreak of the Second World War. His letters to Dorothy from France form the basis of this book. Fortunately, he survived Dunkirk and was posted to Stars in Battledress, entertaining the troops for the duration of the war.
The book shows the privations on the Home Front and the morale of the British people despite the dangers and hardships of war. Life was no easier after the war, but with the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the New Look, colour came back into everyone's life. The Festival of Britain in 1951 was the icing on the cake. And with the National Health Service being created and new homes being built, the dark days were past and life could only get better.

Barbara Kendall-Davies

Barbara Kendall-Davies’s career began as a professional singer in 1965 and ended in 2012. In 1998 her monograph of Pauline Viardot Garcia was published in France and led to a two-volume biography, The Years of Fame and The Years of Grace, volume I published in English by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2004, and volume II by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2012.
In 2019 her debut novel, Truth Will Find a Way was published by Austin Macauley and in 2020 the same firm published the first volume of a joint autobiography entitled Love and Music.
Moonlight and Roses is based on her father’s letters to her mother during World War II.

Austin Macauley Publishers