WHEN SYDNEY receptionist Betty McKee was just 22 she boarded a British aircraft carrier to sail across the world and begin married life with a man she'd known for just two weeks before they were engaged.
It was July 1946, and Betty and Eric would stay together for the next 40 years. But others among the 650 Australian war brides aboard HMS Victorious wouldn't be so lucky. One was a widow before the six-week journey's end. Others received telegrams that read, 'Not wanted, don't come', and were put off at the next port and sent home.
This month, almost half a century on, British writer Jojo Moyes saw her grandmother's former home town of Sydney for the first time while in Australia to publicise her latest book, The Ship of Brides, which is a fictional account of her grandmother's journey.
Moyes' story of four brides who share a cabin is the second of her books to be inspired by McKee, after Sheltering Rain, her first published book. It begins with a Coronation party in Hong Kong in 1953 at which a young woman falls in love at first sight, is engaged within a day, then doesn't see her fiance for a year.
That Hong Kong connection is no coincidence. Moyes, 36, is a former Sunday Morning Post reporter, from there moving back to London to join The Independent, for which she returned to Hong Kong to cover the handover.
Moyes knew McKee, now 82, was a war bride. But a little more than two years ago she learnt how her grandmother travelled to Britain and she became convinced there was a novel to be written about the journey. But it would take the reporter in her to dig out the plot.