Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, 1969.

Charlotte Mary Makepeace is a new student at a boarding school in England.  The school is big and confusing, and there are so many new people to meet that she immediately feels overwhelmed.  Starting life at a new school can be intimidating for anyone, but things are about to get particularly strange for Charlotte.

An older girl, Sarah, helps Charlotte to find her room and choose a bed, recommending a bed by the window.  Charlotte is a little puzzled at why Sarah singled her out and helped her, and the other girls are jealous that she got to the room first and got first choice of the beds.  Still, Charlotte is grateful.  She is exhausted, and she feels like she isn’t herself.  When she wakes up in the morning, she really isn’t herself.

The room where Charlotte sleeps is called the “Cedar” room, and when she first enters the room, the name puzzles her because there are no cedars nearby.  However, when Charlotte wakes up in the morning, there is suddenly a large cedar outside the window.  The tree did not grow during the night.  In Charlotte’s time, the cedar is gone, but Charlotte is now back in the past, when the cedar was still there.  Things in the room are arranged differently, although Charlotte’s bed is still in the same place, and instead of seeing her roommates, Charlotte finds herself alone with a girl she has never seen before, who calls her “Clare.” 

Charlotte is very confused.  Earlier, she was feeling like she wasn’t herself, and now she has the sense that maybe she has really become someone else.  Charlotte doesn’t notice any differences about herself in the mirror, but the other girl doesn’t seem to notice that she’s not Clare, whoever Clare is. The girl just keeps talking to Charlotte as if they already know each other.  The other girl’s name is Emily, and it turns out that she is Clare’s younger sister.  Charlotte finds herself feeling toward Emily the way that she feels toward her own sister, Emma.

Charlotte is forced to go through the rest of the day, her first at boarding school, as Clare.  People keep talking about “the war,” and Charlotte doesn’t know what war they mean at first.  When she went to bed, it was the 1960s.  At the end of a very confusing day, she returns to bed in the Cedar room, where she finds a diary with the name “Clare Mary Moby” written on it and the date, September 14, 1918.  The diary really makes Charlotte realize that she has spent the entire day in the past, and she further realizes that the war everyone was talking about is World War I. However, there is nothing else for Charlotte to do but go to bed.  When she wakes up in the morning, she is once again Charlotte.  Emily is gone, and Charlotte is back in her own time with her regular roommates.  However, it quickly becomes clear that this was not just a dream, and this strange incident repeats itself each day, after Charlotte sleeps in the same bed.

Whenever Charlotte shifts to take Clare’s place in the past, she loses a day in her own time, which helps to convince her that she is not dreaming when she is Clare. Every other day, Charlotte switches places and times with Clare, and she sees the school as it was in the past, toward the end of World War I.  Apparently, Clare is living Charlotte’s life whenever Charlotte is living hers, and nobody around them seems to have noticed the switch.  Charlotte has no idea why this is happening, other than the fact that she and Clare happen to be sleeping in the same bed, in the same room.

Charlotte is fascinated by her trips to the past, but they are disorienting.  She now has two sets of names to learn, the people in the past and the people in the present.  There are different school rules in the past, too, and she was still getting used to the rules in her own time.  Charlotte and Clare also need to do some of each other’s homework for classes, and there are some things they can’t do.  Charlotte can’t write an essay about Clare’s holidays because she has no idea what Clare did on her school holidays, and Clare is very bad at arithmetic, giving Charlotte bad grades.

The next time she makes the switch, Charlotte learns that Clare and Emily do not usually sleep in the Cedar room.  Because of the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, girls have been shifted around as the sick ones are quarantined.  Meanwhile, in the 1960s, Clare has created a new diary in an exercise book with Charlotte’s name on it.  In the book, Clare has written a letter to Charlotte about their situation.  She asks Charlotte to look after Emily when they’re together and to write messages back to her.  Clare doesn’t think they should tell Emily about what’s happening. Clare worries that Emily will be confused and frightened.

However, Emily soon discovers the truth, and Charlotte comes to rely on her as the only person in the past who knows who she really is. Emily notices differences between the way Charlotte behaves and the way that Clare behaves, but they are uncanny in their resemblance and behavior in other ways. In many ways, Emily is bolder than both Charlotte and Clare, although her boldness is often to the point of being brash or callous. She is sometimes impatient with Charlotte and Clare’s softer natures, but their apparent softness is due to their greater sense of life’s consequences and their sense of responsibility for Emily. Emily finds talk of the war and bombings exciting, but Charlotte and Clare are both aware of the dangerous reality. As Emily gets to know Charlotte, she points out the ways that she and Clare are similar yet different, and she says that the more time Charlotte spends in 1918, the more like Clare she is becoming. Charlotte worries about the resemblance between her and Clare and how natural it is becoming for her to act like Clare.

In the present, Charlotte is initiated into the usual pranks of a British boarding school by her new roommates, and in the past, she sees soldiers in World War I uniforms. In 1918, students whisper about whether a classmate with a German father could actually be a German spy, and Charlotte is introduced to air-raid alarms. In the 1960s, Charlotte’s roommates wonder about her funny moods, her odd need to be alone, and her reluctance to be friends and join them in activities. In both time periods, Charlotte is constantly afraid of giving everything away by saying something that would be out of character for the person she’s supposed to be or asking questions that she should already be able to answer if she were living every day in one time period. The one element that seems constant throughout these shifts is the bed that she and Clare share in the Cedar room. However, Clare and Emily will soon be sent to board with a family in town, only returning to the school as day pupils. When the Cedar room is turned into another quarantine room for the sick, Charlotte is trapped in the past as Clare, and she worries that she may never return home again. What will happen to her, and will she lose her identity as Charlotte, becoming Clare forever?

This book is a modern classic in children’s literature!  I decided that I had to read it because so many people have nostalgic memories of this book and have written positive reviews about it.  The Cure even did a song and music video inspired by the book. The song even contains words from the book in the lyrics. This is the original music video that goes with the song. (It’s also on YouTube.)

The book is the third book in the The Aviary Hall trilogy. It is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The other two books in the trilogy are also available on Internet Archive, but Charlotte Sometimes is often regarded as the best of the three and is the best known.

Note: Strangely, this book has three different ending, depending on the edition of the book. Older editions (the original and printings from the 1970s) contain the full text, and newer editions are cropped in two different places. The copies on Internet Archive are different editions and have different endings. This one contains the full text of the original. This one and this one have the endings that include Emily’s letter but not the final scene with Charlotte going home from school. The others don’t have the part with Emily’s letter at all. In order to learn the difference between these endings and the significance of Emily’s letter, you’ll have to read the part of my review that includes spoilers.

Further Thoughts

I was amused by the part where Emily laughs at the name Charlotte because she thinks that it’s kind of old-fashioned in 1918, yet Charlotte is from the future. Names often go in cycles of popularity, and certain classic names have comebacks at regular periods. Right now, in the early 21st century, the names Charlotte, Emma, Emily, and Clare (or Claire) are all pretty popular. In fact, Charlotte has seen a recent resurgence in popularity in the United States. Modern children reading this would actually find many of the names very familiar, thanks to a trend of reviving vintage and classic names. In fact, some of the 1918 names are more popular these days than some of the 1960s names, like Janet and Susannah. Don’t worry, they’ll have their turn again.

I also liked the part where Charlotte tries to consider whether she and Clare really look alike. Emily is a little vague about whether Charlotte and Clare really resemble each other, saying that she might have just seen “Clare” in her because Clare was who she expected to see and that she never really looked at her properly until she realized that she was actually Charlotte. Charlotte thinks about a time where she tried to draw herself by studying her own features in a mirror, but the longer she stared at herself, the more disconnected that she felt from the features she was seeing. This is actually a real phenomenon, and I’ve read other books where people have mentioned it. You can get some odd feelings by staring at yourself in a mirror for too long. I’ve tried it myself, and it can get a little eerie, especially if you look yourself right in the eyes and try not to blink. The longer you look, the more eerie it gets. That’s how that old sleepover trick, Bloody Mary, works. This is sometimes called the “strange-face illusion.” Although Charlotte is having a kind of identity crisis from switching places with Clare, this mirror phenomenon is something that anyone can experience.

Further Note: At the time that I first published this review, January 1, 2020, I hadn’t yet heard of the coronavirus, and I had no way of knowing that there was going to be an outbreak that would eventually turn into a pandemic. Now, in February 2020, I’d like to point out some things to anybody who is as creeped out as I am about this disease. (I had the images of the influenza in this story in my mind when I first started hearing about the coronavirus outbreak, and it didn’t do a lot for my peace of mind.)

Coronavirus and the 1918 influenza have some similarities and differences. Normal seasonal influenza has a death rate of approximately 0.1%. The influenza epidemic of 1918, colloquially called “Spanish Flu“, had a death rate of approximately 2.5%, and it was frightening because many of its victims had been young and apparently healthy before infection, and they died fairly quickly after becoming ill, in a matter of days. (I have more information about that down below.) It spread remarkably fast because of the mass movements of people between countries due to World War I and soldiers returning home toward the end of the war, to the point where it’s never been firmly established exactly where the virus originated.

The coronavirus (as of February 2020, estimates may change later) has a death rate of approximately 2.3%, and most of those deaths have been people who are very old and/or had underlying health problems. It’s bad, but oddly, also somewhat hopeful because, unlike the 1918 influenza, where it wasn’t always obvious who was the most as risk, we can tell ahead of time with the coronavirus who is most at risk, which is helpful for protecting people who are the most vulnerable. We know where the coronavirus started, and although it has spread to countries around the world, public health officials have been taking steps to quarantine people who have contracted the disease or who have been to regions with known infections. It has spread, but perhaps not as rapidly as the Spanish Flu because the 1918 public health officials didn’t understand what they were dealing with at first and didn’t take the steps that we are taking now. If there was any good side to the 1918 influenza epidemic, it was probably that it taught us a few things about how to handle pandemics, including what not to do when one is occurring. The two viruses aren’t precisely the same, but being aware of what we have learned from past experience may help us to stop the situation from becoming worse than it might be otherwise. I know that what is happening and what is probably about to happen is not going to be good because this is just not a good situation, and that can’t be helped, but what can be helped is how we respond to it and make use of what we already know. This current situation is not going to last, but what we do while the situation still exists is going to determine how well we come out of it.

This is not a good time for international travel, and if you can avoid traveling until this crisis is over, I would recommend doing that. If you are in a safe place, I recommend staying there until the crisis passes, and wherever you are, follow the instructions you are given by your public health officials. Before this is over, you may actually get the coronavirus. (I might, too, and I know that as I type this. I live in Arizona, and we’ve only had a few cases so far, but that’s so far.) Health officials are working on a vaccine, but that takes time, and it may not be widely available until next year. However, if you are not in one of the at-risk groups, you will likely survive the experience if you get it, and if you do what your health officials tell you to do, you can help yourself to recover from the disease and avoid spreading it to others. If you think you may be in one of the at-risk groups, follow the instructions that your doctor gives you and seek help (by telephone first) if you think that you may be ill. Try not to be too afraid because, although I know this all sounds scary, one of the first steps to handling difficult situations is believing that it is possible to handle them and taking the steps you know how to take. Take care of yourselves, and consider others as much as possible, too.

Further update: I am now fully vaccinated as of May 2021! I got the reaction that a lot of people got from the Pfizer vaccine; I felt like I had the flu for about a day after getting the second shot. But, after that, I was fine, and I recommend it to other people (provided that you aren’t allergic to anything in the shots – that seems to be the one real caveat to getting them). If you’re a conspiracy theorist, I have not experienced any weird mind control, and I don’t feel any different than I did before. I’m still reading and reviewing children’s books, making various random craft projects, listening to the same YouTube videos, and getting irritated with people I think are jerks, so my version of normal is still basically what it was before. I wouldn’t say that the pandemic is completely over yet because many people are still getting sick and haven’t had their shots, but having more people vaccinated is a good sign. My home state ended up being hit pretty hard during the worst of it, and we have seen some improvement since then because more people are being vaccinated. With vaccinations now open to people age 12 and over, I’m hopeful that there will be more improvement by the end of summer.

Themes and Spoilers

There is a lot more that I’d like to discuss about this book, but I wanted to save this discussion for the end because discussing this story and my opinion of it in depth reveals some major spoilers.

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

First, I love stories with historical background! When I was in school, my teachers didn’t cover World War I and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in detail. My high school history teacher, for example, was a major Civil War buff, and she spent so much time going over the major battles of the American Civil War and making us watch Gone with the Wind (which I had already seen and didn’t like because I never liked the character of Scarlett O’Hara) that she kind of rushed through the early 20th century with us, charging onward to World War II. If she said anything about the Influenza Pandemic, it wasn’t much, and it didn’t make much of an impression. In fact, I think that the first time I ever heard about the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (although I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of it) was through fiction, even though one of my own family members died in that pandemic. However, this was an important, worldwide event that came right at the end of the First World War, and it was shocking because the people who were frequently hit the hardest by the disease were people who were normally young and strong, the people who would usually have been the ones most likely to survive under normal circumstances.

No one knows precisely where and how the pandemic began, although people have attempted to go back through the records and isolate the first cases. This is more difficult than it sounds because the earliest cases of the influenza were lighter, not fatal, and people didn’t think that much about them at first. Also, because of World War I, the mass movement of people across countries due to the war, and the masses of troops returning from the front, the disease was spread farther and faster than it might have been otherwise. Charlotte Sometimes shows some of that real-life pattern. Early in the story, when Charlotte first begins switching places with Clare, a member of the school’s faculty in the past talks about how Clare and Emily were shifted from their old room to the Cedar room because they needed a room for the sick children at the school. At this point in the story, people don’t seem to be panicking about the illness because this was the first phase of the epidemic, when people were getting the earlier, less serious form of the disease, but it’s foreshadowing later events. At one point, Charlotte in the past is blocked from entering the Cedar room and returning to her own time because the disease has spread further through the school and the Cedar Room is also turned into a sick room.

This is a major spoiler, but after Charlotte finally returns home to her own time to stay, she learns that Clare is not alive in her time because she also became ill with influenza, the more deadly form, and she died not long after the end of the war and the end of their time-traveling adventures. At the time of her death, Clare was about thirteen years old and apparently healthy otherwise, which is in keeping with the way this particular illness affected many of its victims. There were a couple of factors which made younger people more vulnerable:

• Unprepared immune systems and the body’s overreaction – Young people may have had less exposure to less serious forms of the same disease from earlier years that would have primed their immune systems to respond appropriately when they encountered this influenza. The human body has certain natural defenses against diseases, like the way it can raise a fever to kill off invading germs with higher temperatures, but sometimes, a disease can strike so hard that the body overreacts to fight it (the technical name for this reaction is “cytokine storm“), causing more damage to itself. Sometimes, this can even happen to the point where the body’s own defenses damage the body itself so much that the person dies or develops a secondary problem, such as pneumonia, that could potentially lead to their death. This is an important factor to consider when evaluating why this form of influenza tended to kill otherwise healthy young people – their immune systems were the strongest and also less primed than older adults, so they were the most likely to overreact. This is where modern vaccines can help, providing the priming the body’s immunity system needs to properly cope with serious diseases it has never seen before.
• Secondary infections – The people who died of the influenza tended to die of the pneumonia that set in as a secondary infection in their damaged lungs, possibly partly as a result of the body’s overreaction. This was before the development of antibiotics like penicillin, which we use to treat such infections now. This is also where vaccines come in handy because people who can avoid getting sick also avoid developing secondary problems from the illness. Unfortunately, there was no vaccine available in 1918. It wasn’t even obvious to the medical professionals of the time what they were really dealing with, and they lacked medicines that could have helped because they were developed later.

This is basically what happened to Clare, an otherwise healthy teenager, when she caught the influenza. Clare, of course, is a fictional character, but her life and fate were based on real people of the time. This was part of what made the pandemic so scary. People of the time noticed that even people who otherwise seemed young, strong, and healthy were dying of this disease, and it was happening fast. If you read grown-up Emily’s letter to Charlotte in the longer endings to the book, Clare died in a matter of a few days after becoming ill. (This still sometimes happens, but in this particular epidemic, it was happening on a massive scale.) It was happening all over the world, in small towns as well as big cities, and there was nowhere anyone could go to escape it.

Because of the shocking spread of the disease and the tragic youth of many of its victims, the event has found its way into fiction, even children’s literature. Before it was depicted on the television show, Downton Abbey, it was named as Edward Cullen‘s impending cause of death if he hadn’t been turned into a vampire in the Twilight young adult series (he was also a teenager, although older), and it was also described in one of the books of the Sarah, Plain and Tall series, set in the American Midwest. (None of the main characters die in that story, although Anna becomes a nurse and the others fear for her safety, and they witness the burial of a baby who died from the disease, as one of my grandmother’s younger brothers did in real life.)

I added a note above, discussing some of the ways the coronavirus and the 1918 influenza were similar and different. What I’ve described regarding the 1918 influenza’s effects on younger people does not seem to be the case with the current coronavirus (as of February 2020). There may be exceptions, just like more typical seasonal forms of influenza occasionally become serious even in cases of normally healthy young people (I’m not an expert, so I can’t say what the chances of that are, it seems that an overreaction of the immune system is still a primary concern with the coronavirus), but the pattern for the coronavirus so far is that it is most dangerous to the very old and those with underlying health problems. In this situation, we can do a lot to help them by protecting those we already know are most vulnerable.

World War I (or, The Great War)

There are many other historical nuggets in this book besides the influenza epidemic. As I mentioned before, Charlotte learns about life in British boarding schools in the past, finding the discipline harder and the food not as good (possibly due to war rationing).

Some of her 1918 classmates are suspicious of another classmate, Elsie, whose father is German, and they talk about how their parents think that Germans living in England should be interned in camps to isolate them from the rest of the population because some of them might be spies. Emily asks what kind of information a schoolgirl like Elsie could possibly find to pass on to harm the war effort, and one of the other girls says that if one of them comments about a letter they’ve received from their father, saying that he is with the troops in France, Elsie could pass that to her parents, and they could pass it along to Germany. Emily says that’s silly because everyone knows that there are British troops in various places in France, and even Charlotte knows that all British mail is read and censored during this time. In other words, nobody could say anything specific enough in a letter to their children that would be a risk if little Elsie happened to hear about it. Elsie is also plainly uncomfortable with the other girls’ suspicions. Modern adults would see Elsie for what she is: a little girl, very much like the others, born and raised in England, with little personal connection to the country where her father was born. She’s been caught up in the circumstances of the wider world against her will, suddenly finding herself labeled as an outsider in the only home she’s ever known. As a child, there’s not a lot that Elsie can do about this situation, and one wonders if the adults would do anything to help if they knew about it. This was the level of wartime paranoia, and the children were getting it from their parents. It’s difficult for children to learn to behave calmly and reasonably when the adults in their lives are not doing so themselves.

The war is always present in the lives of the 1918 children. Charlotte is also forced to take part in an air-raid alarm at school. When she and Emily board with the Chisel Brown family, they talk about Arthur, their son who was killed in the war, and at one point, they hold a seance to try to contact him. This is also based on real life. There was a rise in spiritualism and spiritualist practices because of the war, just like there was after the American Civil War. When society has been through something traumatic and lost loved ones, they sometimes turn to practices like this for comfort and the hope of reaching out to the people they’ve lost. When Charlotte and Emily witness the seance, they hear Clare’s voice calling to Emily. The girls are not able to communicate with Clare further than that, and there’s no real explanation for why this happened. It’s before Clare dies in her time, and we never hear from Clare’s perspective at any point in the book.

The family, especially Mr. Chisel Brown, have bitter feelings about the war because of Arthur’s death. The bitter feelings are reflected in the way they speak. At one point in the story, Mr. Chisel Brown says, “Damned peace-talk, damned conchies (conscientious objectors – people who refused to fight for moral reasons), hun-lovers (German sympathizers). Should all be hanged, I say.” This is about the strongest language in the book. The girls’ bedroom at the Chisel Brown house has a rather horrifying anti-German poster in it called “Mark of the German Beast,” and when Mr. Chisel Brown thinks that the girls aren’t behaving themselves, he says that they have “hunnish manners,” using references to Germans as derogatory terms.

Different Editions, Different Endings

Another reason to explain about the fate of the characters is so I can explain how different editions of this book are different from each other. There are three possible endings to the book, depending on which edition you have. In all versions, the reader learns that Emily is Sarah’s mother, and that is the reason why Sarah singled out Charlotte and guided her to that particular bed at the beginning of the book, because her mother asked her to be nice to Charlotte and to help her, knowing what was going to happen with Charlotte and Clare.

Some of the more modern printings of the story omit sections at the end of the book that were part of the original story in which Charlotte hears from the adult Emily in modern times and where Charlotte heads home for Christmas at the end of the term. Even books that say they are unabridged (including the one that I have from Vintage Classics) sometimes include the letter and package from Emily but omit the part where Charlotte goes home on the bus with the other children, for some reason. I’ve seen all three ending formats, and each time one of these sections is cropped off the end of the book, it changes the tone of the ending and some of the subtle meaning of the story.

In books without the letter from Emily or the bus ride home, the ones with the shortest ending, the story ends with Charlotte finding Clare’s old diary hidden in the bedpost of their bed with her last message to Clare and no reply, and the book simply ends. It’s just kind of a sad reflection that Clare is now gone, and the adventures are over. Charlotte is just left with the memory of what happened with no further reflection on what’s it’s going to mean for her life in the future. I find this ending rather stark and unfulfilling, and I don’t know why this was done to the book.

In the first section of the book that is sometimes omitted, Emily writes a letter to Charlotte and sends her some toys that they were given as children in 1918: a bag of marbles, a solitaire board (the board game played with marbles as pieces), and some toy soldiers. Charlotte puts the marbles in a glass of water on her dresser (like Emily once did in the past because the marbles look bigger and shinier in water), the first personal touch that she’s given to her place in the dorm because she’s really only spent about half her time there, and she reflects on how her experiences as Clare have become part of her personal identity. She compares her experiences as Clare and the impact that it has had on her to the country’s experiences of the war and how it has changed life for all of them, far after the events were over. World War I changed the world and will remain part of history, just as Clare is now a part of Charlotte’s personal history. I thought it nicely summed up Charlotte’s feelings about how aspects of Clare have become part of her own personality, although there is one further point to be made about Charlotte’s future.

In the final section of the book, which is omitted the most often and is apparently only found in the oldest editions of the book, pre-1980s, Charlotte takes the bus home from school at the end of term after getting the letter and package from Emily. Charlotte is looking forward to Christmas, and she and other children chant a variation of the “No more pencils, no more books” rhyme. (Their variant doesn’t actually use that phrase, although it has the same format.) Charlotte reflects that the countryside doesn’t really look any different in modern times than it did in 1918 and remembers that this is Sarah’s last term at school, so she may never see her (and, consequently, may never hear from Emily) again. The ending that ends just after Charlotte receives the letter from Emily and displays the marbles leaves Charlotte considering how Clare and her experiences in 1918 will always be a part of her, but the bus ride ends with her feeling more comfortable that she is truly Charlotte again, even after these experiences, and will be heading back to her family and her life in the present day. She is changed, but she is now sure of who she is, without her earlier quandaries about her own identity.

Each time a little piece is left off the end of the story, it changes the tone of the ending, but I like the full ending that includes the bus ride the best because, while Clare and the past will always be a part of Charlotte, Charlotte has regained her sense of identity as herself. She is a changed person because of her experiences, but she is still her own person, and her life is going to continue in the present, not stuck in the past. I also think that the part with Emily’s letter is important for settling unanswered questions for both Charlotte and the reader about what happened after the time travel ended and Clare died. In older Emily’s letter to Charlotte, she says that she knows that Charlotte is the worrying type, like Clare was, and she wants her to know that there is no reason to worry about her or her younger self because of Clare’s death. Emily reassures Charlotte that, although she was upset at Clare’s death, her life has turned out well. After Clare died, Emily continued attending the school, staying with her aunt on school holidays. Her father rejoined her and her aunt later when he was finally discharged from the army. When she grew up, Emily got married and had four children, even though she had said as a child that she didn’t want children at all. Emily also tells Charlotte that she has decided to keep the doll among the toys they were given for herself because it reminds her of another that her family used to own, which is another change in her attitude. When she was a child, she pointedly preferred the toy soldiers to the doll.

I like the versions that included the letter from Emily because, otherwise, her story seems incomplete. I also liked the idea that Emily got married and had children even after saying that she wouldn’t. When she was young, Emily didn’t like the idea of having children because of the way she and Clare were bounced around to different homes and schools after the death of their mother. Young Emily didn’t think it was fair to have children and then die, leaving them alone and at the mercy of other people, but as adult, we can suppose that Emily came to realize that dying isn’t the expectation of most parents. Her mother’s death wasn’t something that her mother could have anticipated any more than Clare’s was, and people can’t live their lives based solely on what might happen. Presumably, Emily eventually met and fell in love with a nice, stable man who helped to convince her that they could manage to raise a family together. Emily doesn’t describe her husband to Charlotte in her letter or go into detail about what he’s like, but she says that attitudes change as people grow up and her life has been generally happy. Life often takes people in directions that they never predicted when they were young. Some people who want to get married and have children never do, for one reason or another (there is a teacher at the school whose fiance was killed in WWI in 1918, and she is still unmarried in the 1960s, having devoted her life to teaching), and some who never thought that they would do anyway. As long as a person can be satisfied with their life, even if it’s not the one they originally imagined when they were young, they’re doing pretty well. Knowing that Emily is satisfied with her life as it turned out gives the readers as well as Charlotte a sense of completion at the end of the story.

The Vintage Classics copy that I have also had an extra section in the back with a list of the characters in the book (helpful for the time jumps) and additional information about the author and World War I.

Magic or Psychic Phenomenon?

This brings us to the reason why Charlotte and Clare were switching places, another factor that is impossible to discuss without considering Clare’s ultimate fate. The book never gives an exact reason why it all happened in any version of the story, although the characters speculate about and draw a few conclusions. Their speculations appear in all of the books , even the ones with the shorter endings. Charlotte and Clare have some similarities in their names (they share the same initials and the same middle name) and lives (they are of similar age, their mothers are both dead, they each have a younger sister with similar-sounding names, and they just recently started going to the same boarding school in their respective times). They might possibly look alike since most people don’t seem to notice many differences between them. It’s possible that the physical resemblance might be a product of whatever magic or psychic phenomenon is causing them to switch places, but I don’t think so or at least not entirely because they are definitely physically switching places and not just transferring into each other’s bodies. We know that they are physically switching places with each other instead of moving into each other’s bodies because, in the final switch at the end, Charlotte accidentally goes to bed while wearing Clare’s bathrobe, and when she wakes up in her own time, she’s still wearing it, causing her to wonder what people will think in 1918 because Clare’s bathrobe has inexplicably disappeared. (This is not Freaky Friday, which was about a body swap.)

However, Clare and Charlotte never meet face-to-face and apparently never see pictures of each other, so Charlotte is entirely dependent on other people’s descriptions of how much she and Clare look alike. It seems that they look enough alike to fool people who aren’t really paying attention, but the people who know them the best and are the most observant can spot which of them is which, even if they can’t exactly articulate how. In real life, the author of this book was one of a set of twins, so some of this seems to be based on her own experiences with her twin and how one person’s identity can be tied to another. According to a blog the author kept, the school in the story is based on the boarding school that she and her twin sister attended in Kent. She does not identify this school by name, but she provides pictures, including one of the cedar tree on the campus that provided the inspiration for the cedar tree in the book, and the pictures are of The New School at West Heath, the school that Princess Diana also attended as a child but at a later date than the author. The school used to be called West Heath Girls’ School and is now called simply West Heath School (this page contains a virtual tour of the school that also shows the cedar tree by the playground – link repaired May 13, 2022). It now accepts both girls and boys and provides special help for children suffering from emotional disorders, learning difficulties, and other personal problems.

What I suspect is the final key to the switch, aside from their odd similarity, is that Charlotte and Clare also may have been in a similar state of mind at the time the switches began taking place that made them more vulnerable to losing their identities. This is speculation, but in the beginning, Charlotte was feeling out-of-place and not quite herself in her new school, and it’s possible that Clare was in a similar emotional state, putting them even more in sympathy with each other.

One of Charlotte’s 1960s roommates, Elizabeth, learns the truth of the girls switching places and comes to be friends with Clare, helping Clare in the present as Emily was helping Charlotte in the past. At the end of the book, Charlotte and Elizabeth become better friends and discuss what made the time switch possible. They discuss the similarities in Clare and Charlotte’s lives and the common dates when the switching began taking place, drawing a few conclusions about the switching and how it was able to happen. Part of what they conclude has to do with the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, but they also take into account the fact that Clare is dead in their time. Although they don’t use these exact words to describe it, it all seems to revolve around two souls that are kindred spirits, but also the idea that human souls cannot be duplicated or divided.

Personal identity is an important theme in the story. Charlotte often finds herself worrying about losing her identity as she is forced to pretend to be Clare and to keep up the pretense of being something like Clare even when she’s in her own time so that her personality won’t seem to shift too abruptly. She and Clare seem to have some similarities in their personalities, but Emily and Elizabeth, the only two people who ever know about the switching, both say that Charlotte and Clare aren’t exactly alike. When Charlotte worries that she’s losing her own identity, she tries hard to look for ways that she and Clare are different, which is difficult for her because, again, while Charlotte is living Clare’s life, she never actually meets Clare and has to rely on others’ descriptions of her personality. Even Emily and Elizabeth never see Charlotte and Clare side-by-side to compare. Charlotte is pleased whenever Emily comments that something she says or does isn’t exactly what Clare would have said or done in the same situation. Toward the end of the book, Charlotte tries to press Elizabeth more about the differences between herself and Clare, trying to clarify her own personality by what makes her different from Clare. Elizabeth tries to explain it by comparing the two of them to another pair of girls in their dorm at school. Those two girls are best friends and often like the same things and do similar things, but they are still very distinct people, like Charlotte and Clare are. It’s not an explicit answer, but it does show that Elizabeth can recognize Charlotte and Clare as different people, independent of each other, in spite of what happened and even though others didn’t notice the differences between them. Yet, the similarities between Charlotte and Clare, and perhaps their similar states of mind, seem to be central factors that allowed them to switch places with each other. Two very similar girls in sympathetic states of mind, happened to be occupying the same physical space (the bed at school) at the same time of year (the beginning of the school year), just years apart.

There is also the matter of Clare’s early death. Both Charlotte and Elizabeth are sad when they learn that Clare died back in 1918, but Elizabeth reasons it out, saying that it makes sense that Clare died and that Emily was Sarah’s mother all along. As Elizabeth explains, Charlotte couldn’t have remained in 1918 and grown up there to become Sarah’s mother (as Charlotte feared might be the truth) because, by the time she was an adult, she would also have been born into their time as Charlotte, and there would have been two Charlottes alive at the same time. If Clare had lived to adulthood and become a mother, there would also be two Clares alive at the same time when the girls started switching places. Both of those situations would have been a logical impossibility because no single person can be two different ages, child and adult, in the same period of time. Even if they were in two different bodies, it would be the same soul because it would be the same person, and there could not be duplicates of a unique, individual soul or personality.

I like it that the book takes the fascinating premise that, even if human souls can swap places with each other or be accidentally confused for one another, they are still unique, individual, and whole, separate from each other, indivisible, and impossible to duplicate. As Elizabeth puts it, Clare was the only one who even could have made the journey through time to swap with Charlotte (or anyone else occupying that bed) because there was no living Clare in the 1960s to create a paradox, just as there was no Charlotte in past because she hadn’t been born yet. If Clare was not already fated to die young, the time journey would have been completely impossible. This is also the reason why nobody else switched places while sleeping in that particular bed. Not only did they not happen to have a similar counterpart occupying the same space at a different point in time, as Clare and Charlotte did, but everyone else who slept in that bed survived and was present in both the past and the future. Elizabeth says that it’s like Clare was a kind of ghost, although she was very solid and alive throughout the switching and her death from influenza took place after it was over. The idea bothers Charlotte because that would have made her a kind of ghost when she traveled back in time, too. Is it possible for someone to be a ghost before they’ve died?

There is no complete answer to that. Part of what makes the book fascinating is the possibilities it raises and allows the reader to consider. There are no magic spells in the book. There is a seance scene, as I mentioned in the section about WWI information, during which Emily and Charlotte hear Clare’s voice instead of the young soldier killed in the war that the family was attempting to contact. However, the main phenomenon of the story doesn’t seem to rely on magic so much as some kind of psychic phenomena – kindred spirits who happened to be sharing a particular space and ended up sharing each other’s lives across time.