Clare Martel

Clare Martel (played by Emily Richard) is the daughter of Dr Philip Martel and Olive Martel in LWT series Enemy at the Door. She works in the Almoner's office at the hospital and is determined to oppose the Germans at every opportunity. She and Peter Porteous are going out, although both of them refuse to get engaged and settle down, given the current situation with the war.

Biography
Her mother says that Clare was always moody and difficult, and we see some occasional tension between her and Olive (although when the worst happens, it's Olive that she turns to) while she gets on more easily with her father. She's also very close to her brother Clive and when he returns to the Island, kills a German Luftwaffe pilot to protect him, an event that combined with the Occupation and her and Peter's failed plan to get some Naval photographs out to the Allies helps to cause her depression.

At the end of the series, she is still living with the nuns in seclusion, no other real treatment being available in the circumstances, and refuses to see her father or Peter, although she has started seeing Olive again.

Behind the scenes
The tie-in novelisation states that Clare Martel is twenty, that she left school at 16 (in the summer of 1937, indicating a birthdate somewhere around autumn 1920) and after locking herself in her bedroom for a week, eventually emerged to declare that she wanted to work at the local hospital. It also would suggest that she goes out with Peter because they look great together, and she feels she has a stronger personality than he does. She is described in some detail:"... she was a fascinating creature, impetuous, generous and beautiful... The extraordinary eyes, for instance, rueful and accusing, unfathomable dark depths gazing out at the hostile world like a night creature caught in blinding light - these eyes were quite wrong for her face. They were made for something altogether more elegant and longer and bonier.  Her mouth, which in childhood had been joyful, now seemed stricken by a terrible hurt and unable to remember how to shape itself for laughter.  She had become a grave, withdrawn girl long before war was declared.""But it was such eccentricities in Clare's appearance that created the fascination. So if one was not impressed by a conventional prettiness one was enraptured by the mysterious blend of vulnerability and resilience in her character.  She was stunningly feminine, highly intelligent.  From all her contemporaries she stood alone, not because she was the most dazzling to look at but because she was indisputably the most interesting. Clare Martel was twenty years old and incomparable."