After living in Salisbury, Dorothy left the city as a journalist. She had a few small pieces published in the Times and Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, but nothing with her name on it and nothing that was seriously newsworthy, as at the time women wrote the cookery sections and were not permitted to write on serious matters. The young journalist manages to persuade the editor of The Times to help her get a passport. She then bought a bicycle and with her notebook and pencil, boarded a boat for France to report from the front line in World War One.