These Wonderful Rumours! is the diary of May Smith, a twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher who was living with her parents in Swadlincote, Derbyshire at the outbreak of World War Two. Her diary, preserved by her son Duncan, shows her to have been a born writer: insightful, witty and honest, capturing both the terror and the mundanity of life on the Home Front, from the horror of falling bombs to the rationing of silk stockings and the despair of a perm gone wrong.

Both funny and moving, These Wonderful Rumours! follows May as she navigates her way through sometimes irksome days at school; air-raids and evacuees; a loyal, steadfast beau and a charming, ever-so-slightly rakish one; tennis matches and club dances; the difficulties of buying a dress when down to the final coupon; and, most challenging of all, falling in love.