In a time of war ‘you had to make the most of life,’ veteran Joan Frost said

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The life of Joan Leslie-Carter (later Joan Frost) in Britain during the Second World War could be the basis for a romantic adventure series. In a period when death could come from the sky at any time, she was philosophical about how to live. “In those times you didn’t know how long anything would be, so you had to make the most of life,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir.

Mrs. Frost, who died on Oct. 9, just 11 days shy of her 110^th birthday, was a publicity officer for the Royal Air Force Fighter Command, among many other jobs, including working in the Film Branch of the Air Ministry, which made propaganda films.

“I always liked to say that I helped to win the Battle of Britain,” she joked in her memoir. “The RAF fighter pilots won it and I worked for them in 1940.”

She spent the war in and around London, during the time of the Blitz, the German bombing campaign against London and other cities. She returned home from work one day to find the house across from her family home heavily damaged. On another occasion she convinced her brother and his wife to stay over at the family’s suburban house because of an air raid. That night their apartment in London’s Kensington district was destroyed.

During her five and a half years in the Royal Air Force, she was stationed in many places, including fighter bases near London, which were targets of German air raids. Death was commonplace. Many of the pilots who went out on sorties never returned. Central London, where she also worked, could be just as dangerous. Historians say that in wartime people grow accustomed to danger.

“I was never frightened during the war. I was very lucky,” Mrs. Frost wrote in her memoir. “We would go into a little room under the stairs when there was an air raid on, but I was never there during a bad one.”

While many Londoners took refuge in the London Underground (the subway system), she preferred take her chances above ground.

“My mother said she went down in the Tube during an air raid. But it was so horrible she never did it again,” her daughter Alix Harvey said. She also said the war was the most exciting part of her mother’s life.

“She had lots of boyfriends, or so she said,” Ms. Harvey added. Her mother was a gregarious, outgoing woman, and one base where she worked was near a pub and dance hall. She was at the bar to buy a sherry when: “Standing there was this absolutely sensational Norwegian fighter pilot.”

She dated him for a while, but broke it off after realizing he probably had a wife in Norway. “I never went out with married men,” she wrote.

She also mentioned that at one stage a married sergeant who she kept turning down refused to recommend her for a promotion, but she managed to outwit him.

As for the Norwegian, he was shot down over Dieppe but survived.

Joan Muriel Olive Leslie-Carter was born in Hampshire, England, on Oct. 20, 1915, the second of two children born to Lillian (née Marks) and Lionel Leslie-Carter. Her father was a reporter before the First World War and enlisted in the Royal Engineers. After the war he stayed in the army and he and his family moved to France for four years in 1919. He was charged with “cleaning up the mess” left by four years of war.

Young Joan loved France and was a lifelong francophile.

When the family returned to England, her father became editor of a trade magazine, the Kinematograph Weekly, which covered Britain’s thriving film industry. Joan went Clapham High School on a scholarship. When she graduated at 18, she wanted the go to university but her father convinced her she could learn more on the job, which was how most British journalists entered the business. Joan landed a junior job in film publicity, something she couldn’t know would shape her role in the coming war.

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“I had to go around Fleet Street to all the newspapers with still photographs to publicize the films,” she wrote. “The first film I publicized was Bride of Frankenstein.”

She then went to work at Elstree Studios as a publicity manager. During the coronation of King George VI in 1937, she recalled, several Australian winners of the Victoria Cross were brought to England. She arranged to have their photo taken with a group of chorus girls from a film that needed publicity. It made the front pages.

One person she worked with was George Brown, father of Tina Brown, who became editor of both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.

Joan was on holiday in Switzerland when Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact on Aug. 23, 1939, and everyone knew there would be war. She made it back to Britain and joined the Royal Air Force, where the women were in a separate group called the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).

At first she worked as a clerk until her experience as a publicist was discovered. She was then put in charge of finding stories of pilots and others to feed to newspapers that were hungry for news. She also helped recruit more women to the WAAF.

“We were needing lots of new recruits and we had to do lots of publicity to get them. I had to go round to all the fighter stations. I had a front-page story nearly every week, I’d have the WAAF who worked with the Polish squadron and every time a Polish officer was shot down and had used his parachute, he would bring flowers to the parachute packer so I had a picture of him giving the flowers. Then there was an opera singer in one of the fighter stations who was using her voice to tell the pilots how to land and I had a picture of her taken.”

There was work and there was romance, including the man she fell in love with at first sight. It happened on a double date, though the man who caught her eye was with her friend. He was Surgeon-Lieutenant Cdr. John Frost, a Canadian surgeon who had studied in Scotland and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy.

“In England whenever there is a dance you have a Paul Jones, where the men go around outside the women and when the music stops you dance with whoever is in front of you. When the music stopped, I pushed two girls aside and danced with John,” she recalled.

At this point, Joan was an officer in charge of recruiting at Victory House in London. “We needed girls so badly at this point in 1941.” After a preliminary interview she sent the recruits to a medical officer. She remembered one woman who was turned down because she had a heart murmur. “Mainly because her husband was killed two nights [earlier] in the Air Force.”

It was right after that incident that Joan went on her first date with “My Canadian.” It was to a nightclub in Regent Street. “We got up to dance and the music was: ‘I don’t want to set the world on fire. I just want to start a flame in your heart.’” Years later, when she was living in Canada, she wrote about that night and that song in a CBC contest and won first prize.

The couple were married in April, 1943.

Mrs. Frost recalled in her memoir that her mother once embarrassed her by calling her Canadian husband a “colonial.” She replied, “Oh, you must never say that again.”

After the war, the couple moved to British Columbia where he became a surgeon at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. Mrs. Frost was busy on many volunteer committees, and when her husband retired she gave classes called the Happy Hostess, which aimed to get people to relax and enjoy hosting a dinner or other event. Men and women attended. She also wrote cooking columns for the Vancouver Sun and other papers.

Her days as a film publicist came back to her in 1952 while at a lodge on Galiano Island, in B.C.’s southern Gulf Islands. Across the room she spotted the British journalist Mackenzie Porter, who had also moved to Canada.

“I hadn’t seen him since we met at a prewar cocktail party celebrating a film opening at London’s Savoy Hotel. He was the film critic at the Evening Standard and I was in charge of publicity at Associated British Pictures at Elstree,” Mrs. Frost wrote. Mr. Porter was writing an article for Maclean’s magazine and was staying with people who didn’t drink alcohol. He was dying for a gin and tonic. She found gin but no tonic.

“Instead of gin and tonic, we toasted our old acquaintance with gin and the children’s Kool-Aid! Not quite up to the Savoy standard.”

Mrs. Frost’s husband predeceased her in 2007. She leaves her four children, Nick, Lindsay, David and Alix; five grandchildren and three great-granddaughters.

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