This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 1853810908 . Shortly before the Second World War, a column by 'Mrs Miniver' appeared in The Times, the first of many recounting the everyday events of a middle-class London family: Mrs Miniver's thrill at the sight of October chrysanthemums, her sense of doom when the faithful but rackety car is replaced, the escapades of her unpredictable young children, and, as war becomes a reality, the strange experience of acquiring gas masks and the camaraderie of those early days. Published in book form in 1939, and later an enormously successful film, Mrs Miniver became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, with Churchill exclaiming that it had done more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships.