War novel prefaced the (American) first edition of 1941, Powys comments "the beginning of the fifteenth century […] saw the beginning of one of the most momentous and startling epochs of "transition" that the world has known". This was written in May 1940, and "[t]here can be no doubt" that readers of the novel would have "registered the connection between the actions of the book and the events of their own world". "Fair Stood the Wind for France" is a 1944 novel by H. E. Bates, which is concerned with a pilot of a Wellington bomber, who badly injures his arm when
H. E. Bates provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and this was exemplified in two volumes of essays entitled "Through the Woods" and "Down the River". Both have been reprinted numerous times. He discarded his first novel, written when he was in his late teens, but his second, and the first one to be published, "The Two Sisters", was inspired by one of his midnight walks, which took him to the small village of Farndish. There, late at night, he saw a light burning in a cottage window and it was this that triggered the