Florence 'Flo' Smith - Now & Then

It's 1969 and a woman looks back on her life in London. From the Boer War to The Summer of Love, Flo Smith, daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow and grandmother recalls with horror, humour, tears and joy those turbulent times at home and in the world beyond her front door.

The show is based on the book of the same name written by Christopher Saul and taken from the real-life audio recordings he made of his paternal grandmother, Flo Smith, when he was a drama student working on his dissertation. He sat in her cosy living room in North London, drinking copious amounts of tea and listening avidly while spool after spool of his tape recorder was filled with her recollections.

Flo told of her Victorian childhood, her marriage to a young man who was later seriously wounded in the First World War, her struggle to put food on the table for her hungry children in the 1930s, and her harrowing experiences of the London Blitz.

For the times, it was a common enough story and yet, for all that, a unique one too.