Saplings (1945) opens in the summer of 1939 in Eastbourne where the Wiltshire family is on holiday, the children playing on the beach in front of the grand hotels which line the front. This is the Cavendish Hotel on the Grand Parade (1870s) as it was before WWII bomb damage to one side which was then rebuilt in a different style (it is still there). In a way, it reflects the theme of novel which considers 'the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of families' like the Wiltshires. Eastbourne is also, of course, where Tirzah Garwood grew up and later met Eric Ravilious.

Bandstands were enormously popular throughout Victorian Britain, especially in  resorts where they were the focal point for outdoor entertainment and concerts - at one point Brighton and Hove had eight along the sea front. The Stevens family in The Fortnight in September (1931) prefer a beach position near the Edwardian bandstand in Bognor Regis; it has recently been renovated and is still just as important a feature of the promenade as it was when RC Sherriff was writing the novel inspired by his own holiday there. 

This week's theme on the Post is seaside architecture, prompted by the holiday season and by the recent publication of 20th Century Seaside Architecture: Pools, Piers and Pleasure Around Britain's Coast by Kathryn Ferry. as well as the fact that so many characters in fiction from Jane Austen's Persuasion onwards spend time at the seaside. The long Promenade forms the backdrop to Jane's restorative stay in Blackpool with Mrs Briggs in High Wages (1930), with Blackpool Tower (built 1894, seen here in 1920) then, as now, the resort's central feature. 

Doris Zinkeisen (above, standing, with her sister, 1954) was widowed in 1946 and moved to Suffolk, where she lived with  her twin daughters Janet and Anne Graham Johnstone, neither of whom married and both of whom became well-known children's book illustrators. There she returned to painting theatrical high society subjects until her death in 1991. She is remembered for the unusual parallel artistic career she shared with her sister (something her own daughters replicated) and the way their work "encompassed the extremes of twentieth-century experience: from the glamour and pleasure of high society and theatreland, to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust". 

In her role with the British Red Cross, Doris Zinkeisen was one of the first artists to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated by the British Army in 1945. She had been commissioned to record what she saw for the British public, and her painting 'Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945 (1945, IWM) is one of the most shocking images of war. This is Doris with the painting on her easel in 1945.

In 1945 the Joint War Organisation commissioned Doris Zinkeisen to work as a war artist recording the activities of the North West Europe Commission in supporting the post-war repatriation, relief and rehabilitation of prisoners of war and civilian internees. She travelled by lorry and air to different locations and painted in a temporary Brussels studio. This image shows the British Red Cross relief team issuing comforts to prisoners of war at an air strip in Brussels before repatriation (1945, British Red Cross).

Doris Zinkeisen and her artist sister. Anna (1901-76), both won scholarships to the Royal Academy Schools, and pursued successful careers as designers and society painters. In WWI they volunteered as VADs and again in WWII with St John Ambulance Brigade at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington. It is the contrast between the glamorous worlds of theatre, film, and galleries, and "the stark realities of wartime hospitals and post-war relief efforts" which makes Doris's work in particular so interesting. "Brushstrokes from the front lines'' concentrates on her time as one of the few female official war artists. This is is Casualty Reception (c1942, Museum of the Order of St John).