Vere started her first diary in 1924 when she was an English teacher in Florence. This is one of the original war-time diary entries, written on filofax-sized pages. Later she began to use A4 pages that she would fasten together and send off in bundles to her friends and family; originally just to her cousin Lucy in what was then Northern Rhodesia. Few Eggs and No Oranges, originally published in 1976, is dedicated to her, the ‘sender of innumerable parcels of food throughout the war’.