Poppy Cooper, A Post Office Christmas (Hodder & Stoughton 2021)
1915. With Christmas approaching, Post Office Girls, Milly, Nora and Liza, are working harder than ever at the Home Depot to get letters and parcels to the troops on the front line.
Milly is transferred to a different department. Was it because of her poor background? Her suffragist leanings put her out of sorts with her posher workmates. She misses her friends, but takes solace at her local suffragette group ELFS, and makes a new friend at work, ex-soldier Jack.
Coming home from a meeting, Milly is accosted by a drunken soldier and saved just in time by fellow suffragettes, Hilda and Elise. The police believe his side of the story.
Milly takes up the cause of a miscarriage of justice.
It makes one’s blood boil to remember how women were treated—the pay differential, being accosted in the street at night, not being listened to by police, having to sit in a separate section of the pub to avoid catcalls, always being the ones in charges of tea and refreshments—not to mention multiple children and the ever-present threat of the workhouse.
All the while, Sylvia Pankhurst has ruled ‘no militant action’ due to the war. But the ELFS ‘girls’ have better ideas, and Milly takes some people into her confidence that she shouldn’t have done.
The royal family’s visit goes off without a hitch, after Milly and Jack save the day. The jolly Christmas tale ends well, and revelries spill out onto Euston Road. Looks like our boys will be getting their parcels, after all.
It’s not often one finds a novel that deals with the working lives of working-class people—the ‘girls’ relationships with their workmates and supervisors, what they actually do in order to sort the post, how they spend their lunchbreaks.
This is Book 2 in the Post Office Girls series.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
Susie Helme 
Leave a comment