The Imperial War Museum has an extraordinary collection of photographs of women workers in the First World War: on the Post this week five reminders of what an extraordinarily privileged life we Persephone readers lead as we go on holiday/return from holiday/lie in a hammock/wonder what to have for lunch. Of course our lives are not all bread and roses, far from it; but by comparison they are. And these women workers of a hundred years ago were something else. The caption reads: ‘Three women brick workers pose for the camera with their shovels and their wheeled skip for conveying clay from the mills for silica brickmaking, somewhere in South Wales.’