Once the war was over, there was quieter but no less compelling drama in the adjustments people made as they realised that life would not go back to the way it was pre-conflict. The post-war servant shortage was given an unforgettable twist in Josephine Tey’s strange and magnificent The Franchise Affair (1948), in which two respectable middle-class women, a mother and daughter, are accused of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl and forcing her to cook and clean for them. One can sense the intensely private Tey’s fellow-feeling for Marion Sharpe and her mother, whose desire to keep themselves to themselves is regarded with suspicion by their local community.