One pair of hands: Unimpressed by the world of debutante balls, Monica Dickens shocked her family by getting a job. With no experience whatsoever, she gained employment as a cook-general. Monica's cooking and cleaning skills left much to be desired, and her first few positions were short lived, but soon she started to hold her own. Monica discovered the pleasure of daily banter with the milkman and grocer's boy and the joy of doing an honest day's work, all the while keeping a wry eye on the childish pique of her employers. "One Pair of Hands" is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining insight into world's both upstairs and down in the early 1930s.The happy prisoner: The happer prisoner is a partly paralysed victim of Arnhem learning with the hep of his nurse to re-establish himself at home amongst his family, also recovering from the ravages of war.Mariana: "First published about 1940, this novel was written by a great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. The story is about one terrible night during which a woman waits to hear whether her husband has survived the sinking of his ship by a German sub. Mary recalls idyllic childhood summers spent at the family's country house - playing with cousins, riding ponies and, in later years, fox hunts and dances. "Kate and Emma: Monica Dickens's novel opens in a Juvenile court in London. One of the young offenders is a sixteen-year-old girl, Kate, who is described as being in need of care and protection. In the court is a girl only slightly older, Emma, daughter of the magistrate. From her experience of going around with a social worker on his calls she knows that adolescents and, more important, small children are daily subjected to neglect and brutality and that "care and protection" cannot be prescribed like National Health aspirin. She meets Kate again, by chance, in her Uncle's supermarket where she is learning the business from the bottom up. And between these two girls, from different backgrounds, with very different parents who have different personal problems, there springs up a friendship which is deep and, for a while at any rate, beyond misunderstanding. Each girl has her way to make in life, each has her love, hate, despair and hope, each the complications of parental control sapped by the inner knowledge of marriages that no longer work.One pair of feet: Considering herself unsuited to any other co ntribution to the war effort, Monica Dickens chose nursing. This account of her experiences includes descriptions of the gaol-like nurses' hostel and the austere matron.