Mystery of the Strange Traveler by Phyllis A. Whitney, 1951.
This book was originally published under the title The Island of Dark Woods.
Laurie Kane and her older sister, Celia, are traveling by train without their parents to visit their Aunt Serena in New York. Aunt Serena has invited the girls to come stay with her while their parents are traveling in Asia for one of their father’s newspaper assignments. In her letter to the family, Aunt Serena hints at exciting things that are happening. She used to be a schoolteacher, but she says that she’s starting a new business, and the girls can help her with it, although she won’t say what it is until they arrive. Also, Aunt Serena has recently moved to a new house. When their father sees where she’s living now, he’s intrigued because it’s the location of their “ancestral mystery.” He would tell the girls the story himself, but Aunt Serena says in her letter that she would like to be the one to tell them about it. There father says that Aunt Serena loves being tantalizing and mysterious. Laurie, who loves mystery stories, wonders about it all the way to New York.
Aunt Serena lives in a wooded area on Staten Island, near Clove Lakes Park. She has a small red brick house with another outbuilding on her property that she says used to be an old cobbler’s shop. Her new business idea is to turn it into a small bookshop. Laurie loves it immediately because she loves books. She wants to be an author herself, and Aunt Serena says that she might even get a chance to meet her favorite author, Katherine Parsons, because she lives in the area. Celia is the practical one, and she asks Aunt Serena all the practical questions about how she plans to get people to come to her little shop when there are no other stores around them to draw customers in. Aunt Serena says that she’s not expecting her shop to turn into a big business. It’s more of a small hobby business to bring in a little extra money and also be a fun activity.
Laurie and Celia begin unpacking some of the books that Aunt Serena will sell in her small shop, and Laurie is pleased to see a collection of books by Katherine Parsons. On the back of one of the books, there’s a picture of the author and a short biography. Laurie is pleased to note that Katherine Parsons is left-handed, like herself. There are times when Laurie has difficult with things because she’s left-handed, and she feels a kinship toward the author because she shares that trait.
Meanwhile, Celia has noticed that there is a boy next door, moving the lawn. Laurie is more interested in books than boys, so she doesn’t find this exciting news. Celia tries to get the boy’s attention, but he seems to be ignoring her. When he does seem to notice the girls, he turns away quickly, like he wants to avoid them. Celia points out to Laurie how the house where the boy is looks very different from the rest of the houses around it – big, old-fashioned, dark, and creepy. Laurie comments that it looks haunted, and their Aunt Serena surprises them by saying it is.
The boy, Norman, lives with his grandfather, Mr. Bennett, in the old house. Mr. Bennett is a difficult man, and Aunt Serena admits that she got on his bad side when she first moved to the area by asking him if she could buy his house. Aunt Serena admits that she didn’t actually want to buy Mr. Bennett’s house; she was only using her inquiry as an excuse to talk to him and maybe get a look inside the house. However, Mr. Bennett took offense at the inquiry.
There is another boy in the neighborhood called Russ Sperry, and he’s friendlier. His mother sends him to bring a cake to Aunt Serena, and Aunt Serena says that she hopes he will be friends with the girls and show them around. Russ stays awhile to have some cake and chat, and he mentions that Norman Bennett’s father is in South America because he has a job there, which is why he’s staying with his grandfather. Aunt Serena says that Norman’s mother is dead and that his father rarely comes home. She doesn’t approve of the lonely way Norman’s grandfather seems to be raising him because it seems like Norman doesn’t have any friends. Laurie thinks that Norman’s loneliness is at least partly his own fault because he seems to avoid contact with people when she and Celia try to approach him. Celia decides that Russ is cute, but Laurie finds herself intrigued by Norman, not because she wants to flirt with him but because there’s an element of mystery about him.
The girls try to ask Aunt Serena more about what she means when she says that the Bennett house is haunted, but she says that she would rather talk about that later. She gets the girls busy unpacking their belongings, arranging things in her shop, and talking to Russ about the area. Russ helps to explain the geography of Staten Island, and Aunt Serena tells the girls more about the history of the area. Aunt Serena mentions that there are dances in the park on Wednesday nights, which sounds exciting to Celia. When Laurie spots Norman passing by, wearing riding clothes, Russ explains that there are a couple of stables in the area, where people can rent horses. There are plenty of things for the girls to do in the area, and Aunt Serena begins planning an opening party for her bookshop, with Katherine Parsons there as a special guest to sign her books.
Laurie is excited about the party and the opportunity to meet Katherine Parsons, but she continues to think about the mystery of why Norman seems so unfriendly. Soon, other strange things start happening. One night, she sees a light in Aunt Serena’s bookshop, as if someone were sneaking around in there. However, when Laurie goes to wake Aunt Serena to show her, the light is gone, and the next day, there aren’t any obvious signs that anything in the shop was disturbed.
When Laurie has a chance encounter with Mr. Bennett, where she asks him if he’s ever seen the ghost that haunts his house, he says, no he hasn’t seen it. The ghost is supposedly a phantom stagecoach, but Mr. Bennett doesn’t believe it exists. Once Laurie knows that there’s supposed to be a phantom stagecoach, she tries to press Aunt Serena for more details, but Aunt Serena refuses to tell them the rest of the story until she can tell them on a gray, stormy day, when the atmosphere is right.
When a stormy day comes and Aunt Serena agrees to tell the story, she allows Celia and Laurie to invite Russ and Norman over to hear it, too. Norman comes to hear the story without his grandfather’s permission because he’s always known there was some story about the house, but his grandfather hasn’t wanted to talk to him about it. When Aunt Serena tells the ghost story, the connections between the Kane family and the Bennett family become clear.
About 100 years before, there was a stagecoach route that ran through this area. One stormy day, a stagecoach was passing through the area, and one of the passengers, a woman with an infant daughter, was seriously ill and had become delirious. The stagecoach driver sought help at the Bennett house. The Bennetts brought the sick woman inside the house, along with the infant daughter. The stagecoach driver sent a doctor to tend to the woman, but she died in the Bennett house. They had no idea who the woman was and were unable to trace her origins or family. If the woman had a husband or the infant girl had a living father, the man never showed up to inquire after his wife or to claim the baby. All the Bennetts had do go on were the meager possessions the woman was carrying with her, and the little girl herself, whose last name was unknown but the mother had called “Serena.”
At this point, Serena explains that this Serena was the ancestor of the Kane family, the great-grandmother of Celia and Laurie. Since nobody was able to discover where she and her mother came from or locate any relative, the Bennetts adopted the first Serena and raised her until she grew up, got married, and moved away from the island. However, local people still tell stories about the terrible day when the first Serena and her ill mother were brought to the area, claiming to have seen a ghostly stagecoach pull up to the Bennett house and a ghostly woman get out.
Laurie is intrigued by the mystery surrounding her family’s origins. Aunt Serena shows them some of the belongings that the first Serena’s mother had when she died, which have been passed down as heirlooms. There was a doll with doll clothes, a woman’s dress with bonnet and gloves, a sewing kit, a fan, an old novel the woman must have been reading at the time, and a purse containing a very old coin. The old coin is another oddity about this strange situation because it dates from before the Revolutionary War and would have been long obsolete by the time the woman died during the 19th century. Is it still possible to solve a mystery that’s about 100 years old? Will Laurie and her family ever learn who their ancestors really were? Why does Mr. Bennett not want them to visit his house or talk about the old mystery or the ghost story? Does he know more about them than he wants to admit?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Themes
The mystery in the story unfolds slowly, which might make people who are used to faster-paced modern stories a little impatient. Aunt Serena takes quite a while from the time when she first mentions that the house next door is haunted until she actually explains what the ghost is supposed to be and what the mystery surrounding their family is. However, Aunt Serena values atmosphere, so the story could appeal to people who don’t mind a slower-paced mystery as long as it has a good atmosphere.
When the mystery does begin, some parts are resolved quickly and others are more of a puzzle. The idea of an orphan with an unknown identity and a hidden past is always intriguing. The light in the bookshop at night, on the other hand, turns out to be less of a mystery, and Mr. Bennett’s reluctance to discuss the ghost story and the old mystery turns out to be nothing sinister. Mr. Bennett doesn’t really have any hidden knowledge about the orphaned child or her dead mother. It’s just that he’s a very reclusive person who craves peace and quiet so he can work on his private projects. He also has some resentment toward the Kane family because, while they used to be very close, Laurie’s grandfather was the one who inspired Mr. Bennett’s son to take a job in another country, which is why Mr. Bennett and Norman rarely see him. By the end of the story, though, things get patched up between them.
Every time the matter of the mysterious orphan and the question of whether or not the house is haunted by her mother is raised, Mr. Bennett has had to deal with a bunch of people and reporters stopping by his house, harassing him with questions and asking for tours of the place, and he’s sick of it. He doesn’t want Aunt Serena or the kids raising the issue again because he doesn’t want to deal with everybody’s questions anymore, and he has no more information to give anyone. As far as he’s concerned, the mystery is unsolvable because he thinks whatever trail there might have been has long since grown cold, and if it were ever possible to learn the dead woman’s identity or the real origins of the child, someone else would have figured it out a long time ago. However, Laurie tells Mr. Bennett that she thinks that there’s still a chance to figure it out, and that plays into one of the major themes of the story.
The Atmosphere and Location
The atmosphere of the story is pleasant, with Aunt Serena’s cheery little house decorated with bowls of wildflowers and her little bookshop. Aunt Serena greatly believes in establishing atmosphere, creating scene, and setting a mood. On the stormy day when Aunt Serena finally tells the girls the local ghost story, she makes it a point to set the atmosphere for the story by making popcorn and lighting candles.
Like other books by Phyllis Whitney, this story is set in a real location and uses some of the history of that location. The original title of this book came from the original Native American name for Staten Island, Monocknong, which the fictional author in the story, Katherine Parsons says means “The Island of Dark Woods.” Mr. Bennett disagrees, though, saying that it actually might mean, “The Place of the Bad Woods,” and they debate about different possible translations and meanings of the phrase. The history of the Staten Island plays directly into the story because it turns out that Laurie’s ancestors were involved with the historical events of the area, particularly Santa Ana’s stay on Staten Island after the Battle of the Alamo in Texas that was part of the Texas Revolution against Mexico.
A couple of other points I’d like to make regarding history are about race in the story. Toward the end of the book, Mr. Bennett hires “a young colored woman” as a housekeeper. “Colored” is a dated term in the 21st century, but this book was written in the 1950s, when that was considered one of the more polite ways to refer to black people. The popular terms we use now (“black” as the informal generic term and “African American” as the formal term specific to black people of African descent who live in the United States) came into use after the Civil Rights Movement as people tried to distance themselves from older terms as a way to shed the emotional baggage associated with them. The housekeeper, Anna, becomes friendly with Laurie, and she offers her a new perspective and some helpful advice about a different approach to tracing her family’s roots. Anna enters the story late, so she doesn’t appear much, but she is helpful, and I didn’t notice anything particularly stereotypical about her, although I suppose the idea of a black person in domestic service might be kind of cliche.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that American Indians are referred to multiple times in the story when the characters discuss the island’s history. The characters always refer to them as just “Indians” instead of “American Indians” or “Native Americans”, which is typical of the 1950s. At one point, Celia and Laurie are discussing their role in the island’s history. Celia talks about how she was glad that she wasn’t around then because there were massacres and “the Dutch kept buying the island from the Indians and the Indians kept taking it back.” However, Laurie says that was “because the white men cheated them.” I appreciated that Laurie acknowledged that, and I think that this exchange not only highlights some of the stereotypical views people had in the 1950s about Native Americans and history, but also differences between the ways Celia and Laurie look at other people. I have more to say about that below, but Celia tends to cling toward accepted views and the general social rules of society while Laurie has a talent for empathy and looking at situations from another person’s perspective. I’ve noticed that the author, Phyllis Whitney, has used this technique in other books of hers to subtly challenge stereotypes, pointing out that different groups of people have their own perspective and their own side of the story.
This book is fun for book lovers. Laurie’s favorite author, Katherine Parsons, is fictional, but the story captures the spirit of book lovers. It turns out that Norman is a book lover, too, and Laurie is able to draw him out and bond with him over their shared love of books. Aunt Serena also praises Laurie for her ability feel empathy for other people, a quality that she believes comes partly from Laurie being a book lover. After all, readers are accustomed to the idea of seeing circumstances through the eyes of someone else and experiencing their thought processes when they read a story. Aunt Serena believes that one of the benefits of reading it that it helps to cultivate a person’s skills in using empathy to understand other people and that readers carry that technique over into the real world.
I will say, though, that Laurie’s story took an unexpected turn. Laurie is a book lover, but through her association with Katherine Parsons, she unexpectedly realizes that, while she’s always dreamed of writing stories and being published, she doesn’t actually like the writing process. She enjoys the stories other people have written, and she has a knack for understanding characters, whether real or on the page, but she’s surprised to realize that the routine of writing doesn’t appeal to her. She feels a little sad at the realization because it means giving up an old dream but also a little relief because her life is now open to more possibilities that she might like better.
The Sisters and 1950s Social Rules
I also enjoyed the relationship between the two sisters in the story. They get on each other’s nerves and fight with each other sometimes, but they also care about each other and make up with each other after fighting. Celia, as the older sister, is more interested in boys than Laurie is, and she has all kinds of social rules about how to talk to boys and how to get their attention. Laurie knows that Celia and her friends talk about these things a lot, but Laurie doesn’t really understand all of their little rules and thinks a lot of them sound silly, like the idea that girls can’t invite boys to things but have to wait for the boys to ask them or that they should pretend like they’re not too interested in a boy so the boy will approach them first. This book was written in the 1950s, so a lot of Celia’s social expectations about how girls and boys should act around each other sound dated, but I enjoyed Laurie questioning Celia’s rules.
Laurie thinks it more important to know about what specific people like and how to appeal to them as individuals than to adhere to more general social rules. This is especially apparent when the girls try to get Mr. Bennett to let them in his house and talk to him. When the sisters compete to ingratiate themselves to Mr. Bennett so they can get access to the house and talk to him about the mystery, their different approaches play on their concepts of social rules and human empathy. Celia tries a very conventional approach, trying to appeal to Mr. Bennett in a general way, but Laurie decides that “Mr. Bennett was too much of an individual to be governed by rules that worked for most people” and tailors her approach to him as an eccentric individual.
Celia’s idea is to make some homemade cupcakes and take them to Mr. Bennett as a gift because she believes in the old axiom that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. As Laurie suspects, though, this approach falls flat because Mr. Bennett isn’t interested in baked goods. Laurie has a better idea of what Mr. Bennett really likes because she has talked to Norman about him, and she decides that the way to get his attention is to demonstrate a shared interest in something he likes. Knowing that he likes nature more than anything else, she starts putting together a collection of interesting leaves and asks Mr. Bennett if he can help identify them. Mr. Bennett isn’t really impressed by her collection because she didn’t mount the collection properly, most of her collection is very common leaves that he thinks she should be able to identify if she knew anything about trees, and she also included a sample of poison ivy, which she should have known better than to touch. However, he is sufficiently amused by her efforts and her mistake to talk to her for a few minutes.
No Man is an Island
One of the major themes of the story is that “No man is an island”, meaning that people do need other people. Aunt Serena is concerned that Mr. Bennett’s obsession with solitude is hurting his grandson because he’s making it difficult for Norman to make friends. Mr. Bennett has forbidden Norman to bring any other kids to the house because he doesn’t want to deal with the noise and disturbance. Because she’s been a teacher, Aunt Serena knows that Norman needs more opportunities to socialize with his peers. Mr. Bennett doesn’t even seem to pay much attention to Norman himself because he’s too absorbed in his own work.
What Laurie points out to Mr. Bennett when Mr. Bennett tries to tell the kids that the old mystery is unsolvable is that a group of people working together can accomplish more than any one person, working alone. They don’t have many clues to the past, but just because they don’t all make sense to any one of them doesn’t mean that parts of them wouldn’t make sense to different people. By pooling their knowledge and consulting other people, they could still put together the pieces of the past.
Along the way, Laurie also makes Mr. Bennett realize that there are many things he doesn’t know about Norman. Even though he and Norman have been living alone together for a long time, Mr. Bennett hasn’t paid much attention to Norman or things Norman has been doing. Norman has felt lonely and neglected, although he hasn’t wanted to admit how much. When Mr. Bennett realizes that Norman is an artist and has been developing his skills to an impressive degree without him even seeing any of Norman’s projects, he realizes that he has been too absorbed in his own concerns and starts to make an effort to learn more about what’s happening in the lives of the people around him. This is a similar situation to a grandmother in another of the author’s books, Mystery of the Angry Idol.
#9 The Mystery of the Eagle Feather by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1995.
Timothy is excited because he has a chance to meet his pen pal, Anthony Two Trees, for the first time. Anthony is a Native American, and he will be dancing at a powwow. Timothy’s cousins get to come along on the trip, too.
Soon after they arrive, though, they learn that someone has been taking pieces of the dancers’ costumes, like fans or headdresses made of eagle feathers. Who could be taking the costume pieces and why?
The costume pieces and the eagle feathers they contain are very expensive, and the kids realize that the thief might be thinking of selling them. It is illegal to deal in eagle feathers because eagles are an endangered species. Even the Native American dancers have to write to the government in order to get eagle feathers for their costumes from eagles that died in zoos. Therefore, the costumes are expensive and require a lot of effort to put together, and losing them is a real blow. The rarity and cost of the feathers might prove to be a temptation to a thief.
The theme of the story is self-control.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this story. I understand the fascination kids have with Native Americans and their costumes and dances. I felt like that when I was a kid, too, but there’s also an element of cringe to it. The cringiness comes from kids (and even adults) who get wrapped up in the fascination of the appearance of other people’s traditions and treat them more like playing dress-up than traditions with deeper, underlying meaning and significance or depicting Native Americans as being stereotypes from old movies and books rather than real, living people.
Fortunately, I was pleased at how this story shows that Timothy’s friend, Anthony, is a regular boy who shares his interest in baseball. They emphasize that Native Americans don’t live in tepees any more, and they don’t treat the Native American characters like stereotypes. I enjoyed some of the facts the story provided about Native American dances and costumes, like the regulations regarding the use of eagle feathers.
Princess Hyacinth by Florence Parry Heide, illustrated by Lane Smith, 2009.
For reasons nobody understands, Princess Hyacinth is not affected by gravity, and she floats upward anytime she is not restrained or weighted down.
It’s a real problem because, while it’s difficult enough when she floats up to the ceiling of the palace, if she were allowed out of the palace without something weighing her down, she would simply float away.
Princess Hyacinth’s parents go to great lengths to make sure that she is always secured to something or weighed down with special weighted clothes and a very heavy crown.
Of course, being weighted down all of the time makes life difficult for Princess Hyacinth, too. She wishes that she could go outside and play and swim with the other children, but she can’t because she can’t be outside without the weights. There is one boy in particular who comes by her window with a kite with a crown on it and says hello to her, but it would be difficult for her to go out and play with him.
Then, one day, when Princess Hyacinth is particularly bored and tired of being weighted down, she persuades a balloon man to tie a string to her and let her float among his balloons. At first, it’s fun, floating along as the balloon man walks through the park, but then, the balloon man is startled by a dog and accidentally lets go of her!
As Princess Hyacinth floats upward into the sky, she is thrilled because she has never felt so free in her life, but where will it end? How high can she go, and is there any way for her to get back? Fortunately, there is a way for her to get home, with the help of a friend!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
This story reminded me of a much-older story from the 19th century, The Light Princess, but this picture book is much, much less serious than that book. In The Light Princess, the princess is cursed, and the story is about breaking this curse that has afflicted her all of life. In this book, there is never any explanation about why Princess Hyacinth isn’t affected by gravity, and she is never cured. Instead, she makes a friend who helps her find a way to live with her condition and enjoy it.
I liked the art style in this book. I found it amusing that the king, queen, and palace guards are drawn in the style of the face cards in a deck of playing cards. Princess Hyacinth is a cute little girl, and when she’s wearing her heavy princess gear, you can almost feel the weight of it on her. In the end, there are still times when she has to be tied down, but she seems more normal, less weighted down, because she has found someone to help her deal with her condition.
It’s the summer of 1854, and Kirsten Larson is traveling by ship to America from Sweden with her family. There have been storms during the voyage, and the sailing has been rough. It’s crowded on the ship, and people have been seasick. On board the ship, Kirsten makes friends with another girl her age, Marta. The two girls play with their dolls together and talk about the things they’ll do when they finally reach America. The reason why the Larsons are traveling to America is that Kirsten’s Uncle Olav is already there. He has established a farm in Minnesota, and he has married a widow with two daughters. He wrote to the Larsons and asked them to join him and his new family in Minnesota and help on the farm.
When their ship finally reaches America, it docks in New York. No one is allowed to leave the ship until the health inspector declares that they are healthy. Health inspectors will not allow anyone with a serious, contagious disease, like cholera or typhoid, to go ashore. When they are allowed ashore, Kirsten’s father finds an agent to help them change their money at a bank and buy train tickets for their trip west. The agent, who is also from Sweden, will even accompany the family to the Mississippi River as a guide. The family needs help because they can’t speak English yet.
When they go to buy food in New York, Kirsten is accidentally separated from her father and gets lost. Because she can’t speak English, nobody understands what she’s saying, so Kirsten can’t ask for directions. Kirsten is frightened, but a kind lady sees her distress and tries to ask her what’s wrong. Kirsten can’t tell her, but then, she realizes that she can draw a picture, so she draws a picture of a ship. The lady leads Kirsten back to the dock, and she manages to find the rest of her family in the nearby Battery Park.
The next day, Kirsten says goodbye to Marta because the Larsons are leaving the city before Marta’s family. Because Marta’s family is also going to Minnesota, they hope that they will meet again there or somewhere on the way.
Kirsten has never seen a train before, and her first ride on one is frightening at first. The trip lasts for days, but finally, they arrive in Chicago. There, they will meet up with other pioneers heading to the Mississippi River. At the boarding house in Chicago, Kirsten reunites with Marta, whose family will also be traveling with them!
The pioneer families take wagons to the Mississippi River, and then, they board a riverboat. Kirsten’s mother worries because, when they boarded the riverboat, she was sailors burying a passenger who died of cholera. (A disease caused by ingesting contaminated food and water.) Cholera is a serious risk, and her worries are justified. On their third day on the boat, Marta becomes ill with cholera and dies from it.
Kirsten is distressed at Marta’s sudden death, but fortunately, the Larsons all make it to Minnesota. All along, Kirsten has been struggling with homesickness and is still grieving the loss of the only friend she had in America, but she is cheered when she is greeted by her new cousins, Anna and Lisbeth. With her cousins as her new friends, Kirsten thinks that Minnesota might come to feel like home after all.
The book ends with a section of historical information about immigrant families, like Kirsten’s.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
Although I liked the American Girl books when I was a kid, I didn’t like the Kirsten books, partly because of Marta’s death. I don’t think any of the other American Girl books has a child death in the first book. In fact, I don’t even remember any other children dying in any of the series, unless it happens in one of the newer books I haven’t read yet. It is realistic for a child to die while traveling west. Diseases like cholera were a real-like risk to pioneers. I’ve visited places along the old Oregon Trail, and I’ve seen the graves of real pioneer children who died of disease. There’s also a doll at one of the local historical museums in my area that once belonged to a little girl who died on the trip west. I know that children died on the journey west in real life, but it’s still depressing to read about, which is what bothered me about the Kirsten books. For this reason, I don’t think I read all of the Kirsten books when I was a kid, or at least, I don’t remember much about most them.
Reading this book again as an adult, I found it easier to deal with Marta’s death. I knew it was coming, so there was no shock to me. Marta’s illness is only a small portion of the book, and Kirsten doesn’t see Marta dead. We do get a picture in the book of the riverboat sailors carrying Marta’s coffin away for burial.
I always appreciate the sections of historical information in the back of American Girl books. This one discusses immigrants, the reasons why they wanted to move to a new country, and the conditions they encountered during their journey.
Earlier, when I covered Rasmus and the Vagabond, I mentioned that the characters hide in an abandoned village, and Oscar tells Rasmus that the reason that the village is abandoned is because, years before, the people in the village all decided to emigrate to America together, specifically Minnesota (a popular destination for Scandinavian immigrants). The Library of Congress has more information about Swedish immigrants and the major periods of immigration. Around the time that Kirsten’s family emigrated to the United States, Sweden was suffering problems from overpopulation, lack of adequate tillable farm land, and famine. We don’t hear the Larsons describe any particular problems they had in Sweden or suffering. We are told that they had a farm in Sweden with a house with a maple tree near the door and a barn, but we don’t know if the family was suffering in spite of owning the farm. The important point is more that conditions in general were bad in Sweden, so the promise of rich farm land in Minnesota was attractive to them. The historical information included in the back of Meet Kirsten doesn’t cover this information about conditions in Sweden. Instead it focuses on what immigrant families might pack to bring with them on such a journey and what the traveling conditions would have been like.
Double Trouble by Barthe DeClements and Christopher Greimes, 1987.
Faith and Phillip are twins and the only members of their immediate family who are alive. Their parents and their older sister were killed in a car accident. Faith was taken in by their aunt, but their aunt didn’t think that she could manage to care for two children, so Phillip was sent to a foster home. The story is written in the form of letters to each other (this is called epistolary style) after their separation.
Separating is cruel, especially when they’re orphans, but there is something about Faith and Phillip that other people don’t know. They have psychic powers, and they have the ability to communicate their feelings to each other with their minds. They have to communicate specific information to each other in writing because their psychic abilities only communicate their general mood and circumstances, but their psychic link to each other makes them feel less alone when they’re apart. Apart from dealing with their grief over the loss of their parents and the changes to their lives, each of them is also in a troubling situation.
In her first letter to Phillip, Faith tells him about a disturbing encounter with a teacher at her new school. Faith was selling candy with another classmate, Sue Ellen, to support the school band. Sue Ellen gets the idea of going by Mr. Gessert’s apartment. Mr. Gessert is their social studies teacher and is considered one of the cool teachers in school. Faith can tell that Sue Ellen has a bit of a crush on him. He buys one of their candy bars, and Sue Ellen asks to use his bathroom. When Sue Ellen seems to be taking awhile, the teacher goes to see if everything is okay, and he catches Sue Ellen snooping around. He gets especially angry when Faith is about to touch his cane near the door. He grabs both girls by the arm and throws them out of the apartment. Although snooping in someone’s private rooms is rude, the girls are startled by how angry Mr. Gessert is. Faith asks Sue Ellen what she saw in his apartment, and Sue Ellen says that she didn’t see anything. She had just started to open the door to a room when he found her. The next day, Sue Ellen brags to other kids at school about having been in the teacher’s apartment, but Faith is still concerned about how angry Mr. Gessert was.
When Phillip replies, he says that he can understand why the teacher would be annoyed at someone snooping through his stuff, and he tells Faith about his new foster parents, the Wangsleys, Howard and Cynthia. He’s now living in Seattle, about 50 miles from where Faith is living. Phillip also got picked on at school by a bully, but a girl named Roxanne spoke up for him. He thinks Roxanne is pretty, and he describes her aura as being indigo. (The twins also have the ability to see people’s auras and use them to learn things about other people.) His new foster parents don’t take his vegetarianism seriously, trying to convince him to eat meat. They say that God put animals on Earth for people to eat and that he has to eat like they do. Their house is shabby, and Howard keeps Cynthia on a tight budget. That surprises Phillip because he thinks Howard must be making decent money at the shipyards. He wonders how Howard spends his money, if it’s not on his wife or home. He knows that Howard and Cynthia belong to some kind of religious group and that, whenever they return from one of their meetings, they act strangely, and their auras are weird. He’s still grieving their parents and sister, and with all the stresses of his new home, the only time he feels better is when he’s using astral projection, to get away from it all.
The twins learned their psychic skills from their sister Madalyn and Madalyn’s friend, Roger, who is an archaeologist. Faith doesn’t quite have Phillip’s ability with astral projection, but she can sometimes get visions of other people and what they’re doing. She uses this ability to try to learn more about Mr. Gessert, and she sees that his cane is actually a gun. She watches him loading it. Why would a teacher have a cane with a hidden gun?
Faith is still angry that her aunt didn’t take Phillip, too. She also hesitates to ask her aunt for things she needs because she doesn’t want to seem like a charity case. She has a part-time job taking care of her neighbors’ dogs while the neighbor is on vacation, and she uses the money to buy a pair of second-hand boots. When Aunt Linda finds out that Faith bought second-hand shoes, she says that Faith should have told her that she needed shoes because she doesn’t want people thinking that she isn’t taking care of her niece. Still, after she cleans them up, they don’t look bad, and she gets compliments on them at school.
The next time she sees Mr. Gessert in class, he seems normal at first. He gives the class a lesson on the Donner Party of pioneers, who were trapped by a snowstorm and resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. (This is actually described in gruesome detail in the book. Some kids like a good gross-out, but I never did.) After Mr. Gessert describes all the gory details in class, one of Faith’s other classmates comments that Mr. Gessert seems crazy. Faith knows that he was telling them the truth about what happened, but she finds it disturbing how much he seemed to enjoy recounting all the grossest parts, and other classmates agree. Phillip is concerned about Faith’s description of the teacher, so he uses astral projection to spy on him, and he agrees that Mr. Gessert gives off weird vibes.
Both Faith and Phillip connect with other kids at their schools who have an interest in psychic abilities. Faith meets a boy named Jake, who is intrigued because his father has been reading a book about remote viewing, which is what Faith does. As Phillip becomes friends with Roxanne, who is interested in the topic of astral projection. When Phillip confides in her about his astral projection abilities, she asks him to teach her how to do it.
One day, when Phillip and Roxanne are at the library, they see Mr. Gessert there. Mr. Gessert has an interest in Spanish treasure, and there is a special exhibit at the library with some very valuable pieces. Soon after that, the Spanish treasure is stolen from the library. It doesn’t take a psychic to see that Mr. Gessert, who has already been established as creepy and suspicious, might have a motive to steal it, but he’s not the only suspect. Working separately, with the help of their friends, Phillip and Faith use their special mental abilities to get to the bottom of Mr. Gessert’s secrets.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Themes and Spoilers
There are a lot of metaphysical themes to this story with the kids exploring their psychic abilities. It is revealed that their old family friend, Roger, is a kind of archaeologist/treasure hunter, but he is regarded as unorthodox by his colleagues because he uses his psychic abilities to guide his discoveries. Roger is the one who taught the twins and their older sister how to use their abilities.
In the story, the people who are open to developing their psychic/spiritual/metaphysical sides are the heroes, and they thrive when they connect to other, like-minded people and share what they know with each other, helping each other to develop. However, there are unhealthy forms of spiritual development in the story. Phillip is unnerved about the Wangsleys and their religious group from the beginning because the Wangsleys always act strangely after one of their meetings. Initially, I was concerned that this group might be doing drugs or something like that, but that’s not the case. It’s a little vague exactly what group the Wangsleys are part of, but it seems to be a very conservative Christian group with a cult-like devotion to their leader, and the the Wangsleys have an unhealthy relationship with it.
I don’t think it’s an unhealthy group for being Christian, but it seems like devotion to this particular group encourages overly harsh discipline and emotional manipulation and that Howard and Cynthia’s relationship with each other is troubled because of disagreements about their level of devotion to the group’s standards. I sometimes think that people who don’t have a religion imagine that all Christian groups are like that, but I’ve been to various Christian churches throughout my life, and most are not like this. There are some extreme groups like this, but this is definitely an extreme group. It seems to be an isolated group that isn’t part of a larger denomination. It seems to have just one charismatic leader. I think it’s implied, although not directly stated, that the reason why Howard isn’t spending more money on keeping up his house is that he’s contributing a large portion of his income to this religious group. I’m a little suspicious about the money issue and the long periods that the group’s leader seems to spend in Hawaii, ostensibly on religious business. While it isn’t stated explicitly, and I could be wrong, I think there are some implications about the Hawaii trips and the money of this group that make them seem suspicious.
Besides the metaphysical elements, there are themes of children adjusting to loss and trauma and major life changes with the deaths of the twins’ parents and their adjustments to their new homes. Initially, Faith doesn’t have a very good relationship with her aunt. She’s angry that her aunt didn’t accept her twin brother and sent him into the foster system, and she finds her aunt’s manners cold. She doesn’t trust her aunt enough to ask for the things she needs, even basic clothing, and her aunt gets upset about that. Things improve between them when they learn to communicate more openly with each other. Aunt Linda does care about Faith, but she’s also dealing with her own feelings and uncertainties about raising her niece. She has never married or had children, and while she does want Faith living with her, becoming a single parent is a major adjustment for her.
The Wangsleys are completely unsuitable as guardians for Phillip. They don’t accept his vegetarianism and complain about having to make special things for him. They keep trying to convert him, both to eating meat and to their religious group. I feel like their religious affiliation should have been disclosed from the beginning and that there should have been some discussion between them, Phillip, and Phillip’s caseworker about the differences between their lifestyle and the lifestyle that Phillip is accustomed to living, so they could all reach an understanding about what living together would mean for them before he actually went to life in their house. Phillip does describe some meetings with the Wangsleys and his caseworker during his time with the Wangsleys, where the caseworker tries to mediate circumstances between them and offer suggestions, such as ways they can deal with Phillip’s vegetarianism. Cynthia does make some efforts to accommodate Phillip’s eating habits, but they’re kind of half-hearted, and the Wangsleys absolutely cannot accept that Phillip doesn’t want to join their religious group. They heavily pressure him to convert, and when they discover Phillip’s astral projection activities, they’re convinced that he’s having visions given to him by the devil and demons. They tell Phillip’s caseworker that they want to adopt him, but Phillip finally speaks out about what life with them is really like. In the end, Roger decides that he will take Phillip, and the Wangsleys are forced to relinquish him to his caseworker.
From now on, Phillip will be living with a family friend who understands him and shares his lifestyle, and there are even hints of a possible romance between Roger and Aunt Linda. The hints of romance with Roger and Aunt Linda feel awkward, partly because the kids know that Aunt Linda is about 10 years older than Roger, a significant although not insurmountable age gap. Mostly, it just feels awkward to me because it seemed like there had been a romance relationship between Roger and the twins’ deceased elder sister. Switching attention from the niece to the aunt, even if the niece is now dead, just feels odd. Although, it’s not definite that their relationship will really be romantic. It might just end up being friendly.
The authors, Barthe DeClements and Christopher Greimes, are a mother and son team, and the inspiration for this story came from their own shared interests in psychic phenomena and “nontraditional methods of expanding awareness.”
My Psychic Experiment Story
I remember reading this book when I was a kid, and I was fascinated with the idea of communicating psychically with other people or being able to do astral projection. I don’t really believe in all of the metaphysical ideas that the book presents, but I think most children go through a phase where they’re interested in things like ESP and try to test themselves to see if they can do it. I actually had an English teacher in middle school who tested the whole class for ESP after we read some science fiction or fantasy story, just for fun. I can’t remember which story that was now, although I don’t think it was this one. I think it might have been a story about a typewriter that predicts the future, although I can’t remember the name of that one. I didn’t do very well on most of the tests, although there was one in particular where I did pretty well. After thinking it over for about 30 years, I’ve decided that it wasn’t because I had any significant psychic ability. The one test I did well involved predicting another person’s actions, and I think anybody could do that fairly well if you know something about the other person’s personality. The teacher did say that people do this activity much better if they do it with close friends, implying that friends have a special connection to each other, but I think it’s more the case that friends understand each other’s thinking better.
I can’t remember whether I read this particular book before or after I was tested for ESP, but I think it was after. I still had an interest in the subject, and I remember, one night, I tried my own experiment in astral projection. When I did it, I had a vision of space aliens. It was probably because I was dozing off in bed at night, and I was going through a sci-fi phase at the time, but I got spooked. You see, the punchline to this story is that I grew up in Arizona, and the night of my experiment happened to be the night of the Phoenix Lights. I was so creeped out the next day, when people were talking about UFOs that I stopped the astral projection experiments. Although I’m sure that it was all a coincidence, just a dream brought on by my own fascination with science fiction and space aliens, I decided that, while I was curious about how such things worked, I didn’t really want them to work for me. I might have been a cowardly child with a habit of spooking herself, but I was also a cowardly child who decided that there was no point in continuing to do things that she knew would spook her. I had my fun with that phase, and then it was time to move on to my next obsession.
This story takes place during World War II and focuses on a child evacuee from London. The title of the book comes from a quote from Winston Churchill:
“Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror … for without victory there is no survival.”
Winston Churchill, May 13, 1940
It’s September 1939, and Liz Hawtin is an orphan living with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in London. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father was killed when he was hit by a car a few years earlier. Liz’s overbearing aunt is making her life miserable and has been since she moved in with her relatives. It takes Liz some time to realize why her aunt doesn’t like her, but it has to do with social class, political philosophy, one-upmanship, and her aunt’s sense of fairness and entitlement – what sort of people are “deserving” and what sort of people aren’t.
The main problem is that Liz’s father was into socialism before he died. In fact, he used to give public talks about it, and Liz would watch them as a child, although she admits in hindsight that she doesn’t entirely agree with everything her father believed. One value that she and her father definitely shared was the belief that education is important. Liz’s entire family is working class, including her father, and none of them have ever had more than just very basic education. Her father was a very bright man, but like other members of their family, he had to leave school early and get a job because their family was poor. However, he urged Liz to study and get the best education she could because he realized that higher education is the way to move up in the world and get better jobs and a better position in life.
Liz’s current situation when the book begins is irritating to her aunt because Liz has both the academic potential to attend a better school than the ones her own children have attended and because Liz’s father had the foresight to take out an insurance policy on his life that has provided Liz with enough money to attend this better school and to buy good school clothes and the extra equipment and books that this better school requires. Every time Liz has needed something for school, her aunt gripes about how much it costs and what a waste of time and money it is. Liz gets her aunt’s permanent wrath by telling her straight out that the insurance money belongs to her and not her aunt and that it was meant for her education. This enrages her aunt because she had labeled her father as the foolish, idealistic socialist who was undeserving, so the idea that, because of him, Liz has both academic aptitude and the money to support her education seems supremely unfair to her. On some level, she probably realizes that Liz’s more advanced education will probably help her to be more prosperous than the rest of the family, and she hates it and is jealous. She takes every opportunity to criticize Liz and to tell her that her time spent reading and studying is wasteful. She encourages her children who, like other members of their family, all have to leave school early to get menial jobs, to give Liz a hard time. The only members of the household who like Liz are her gentle cousin Rose and her uncle, but it’s difficult for them to stand up for Liz and help her because the aunt bullies both of them as well.
At the beginning of the story, Liz is fifteen years old, and she is faced with a difficult decision. She is getting close to graduating from her grammar school. She badly wants to finish, but she knows that the insurance money is running out. Soon, she will be faced with the difficult decision of whether to leave the school without graduating and get a job, which is bound to be the menial work that her cousins are doing. Her aunt has always resented her and is eager to get rid of her, so she wants Liz to get work and start supporting herself as quickly as possible.
When World War II breaks out, Liz’s life is changed forever, and Liz realizes that, ironically, the changes are going to be for her benefit. Because Liz is still a student, she will be part of the government’s program to evacuate children from London to protect them from bombings. None of her cousins will be evacuated, even though they’re not much different in age from Liz, because they are no longer students, but Liz will be sent to the countryside with the rest of the students at her school. The government will also provide money for her support and education during the period of the evacuation, so Liz realizes that she will be able to finish her education after all. Rose and Liz’s uncle are sad at her leaving, but her aunt makes it clear that she is pleased that Liz will be leaving very soon and that she doesn’t want Liz to come back after the evacuation period is over. Once Liz is finished with her education and no longer part of the government program, Liz will be on her own in the world. It’s both a little scary but also liberating for Liz. She doesn’t know where she will be staying during the evacuation, but at this time in her life, it’s really better for her to leave her aunt’s house, finish her education, and establish an independent life.
Before she leaves, she says goodbye to her grandmother in London. She worries what will happen to her grandmother, her uncle, and Rose when she’s gone. Her grandmother isn’t worried for her own sake because she’s lived through war before, and nothing ever seems to happen to her. Besides, she knows where the shelters are for safety, and she’s sure that she can take care of herself. Liz knows that, once she is gone, her aunt won’t be able to pick on her all the time, and things are bound to get worse for her uncle and Rose, but there’s nothing she can do about that.
When she arrives at school, she and the other students are told that they are being sent to a small village called Chiddingford in Oxfordshire. It’s such a small town that it doesn’t even appear on the map in their school atlas. There, they will be staying in the homes of people living in the village. The headmistress reminds them all that this will not be an easy experience for them. Many children are being evacuated along with them, and all of them will experience homesickness and difficulties adjusting to the place where they will stay. She urges all of them to be kind to each other and considerate of their hosts in Chiddingford. The girls in Liz’s form (grade) are also going to be paired up with girls in the lowest form because these younger girls are new to the school and don’t even really know each other yet. The headmistress thinks that the experience will be easier on them if they have an older girl as a buddy, like an older sister. Liz pairs up with a shy girl named Veronica, who is wearing a school uniform that is way too big for her. Her parents were trying to save money by buying her a uniform that she could grow into. It makes Veronica a laughingstock among the other students, but Liz sympathizes with her, knowing what it’s like to worry about money and to feel different from everyone else.
The students are excited by their trip into the countryside. The village of Chiddingford is already expecting them, although they had originally been told that they would be hosting a boys’ school instead of a girls’ school. Lady Brereton’s daughter-in-law asked her to pick out a boy from the arriving students who would be a good companion for her sons. However, since there are no boys on offer after all, and she knows little about girls, having only a son and three grandsons, Lady Brereton decides that she’ll pick out a girl from the evacuees in the same way she would pick out a dog, which is something she does understand. She chooses Liz because Liz has an alert expression and stands with her head up and a look of spirit and resilience.
Liz finds the move to the countryside disorienting, although she likes the peacefulness of it. Her reception at the Brereton house is disappointing because Mrs. Brereton had her heart set on getting a boy. She has three sons and is single-mindedly devoted to them. A girl simply wouldn’t do as a companion for her boys. In fact, she thinks that having a teenage girl in their house might well lead her teenage sons astray. However, people are commanded by the government to take in evacuees, and Mrs. Brereton can’t just give Liz back or trade her for someone else just because she’d rather have a boy. It’s awkward for both of them because Liz knows that Mrs. Brereton really doesn’t want her and that she tried to get rid of her.
Mr. Brereton is an historian, and he once worked at a college near Liz’s old neighborhood. He describes the history of the area and the type of housing there to his sons. The Breretons are a genteel, highly-educated family. They’re also the sort of intellectuals Liz’s father used to disparage, the ones who came to the college in their area and observed their lower-class living like scientists watching an ant colony and would leave, thinking that they understood their lives, when they had only ever seen them from the outside.
The youngest of the Brereton boys, Miles, makes fun of Liz when he finds out that her school doesn’t teach Latin because he says that she’ll never be able to go on to university. It stings because Liz is more educated than the rest of her family and is proud of it. She angrily retorts that she doesn’t want to go on studying forever because she wants to do something that will help win the war. Unknowingly, she’s prodding a sore point in the Brereton family because the eldest boy, Simon, wants to enlist, but his family would rather that he continue his education at Cambridge and become a doctor. Simon does want to be a doctor, but he also feels called to aid the war effort. He feels torn because his family is telling him that he should let others take care of the war while he goes to school and learns something that will make a difference later, but he feels guilty for staying out of it. His grandfather, Sir Rollo, who was a brigadier general, says that 19-year-old Simon is a man now and must make up his own mind about what he wants and what he’s going to do. Liz wishes that she hadn’t said anything about helping the war effort because she didn’t know that it was a sore point for this family, and she certainly wouldn’t want to influence Simon to do something that was dangerous or wrong for him. He seems too gentle and intellectual to really be a soldier.
When her teacher, Miss Garnett, comes to check on her, and see how she’s doing in the Brereton house, Liz says that she doesn’t think she fits in with this family. Miss Garnett advises her to give it time. Liz realizes that the Breretons are a tempestuous family, and it’s not really her fault for setting them off. They get set off by other things and people, too. Liz’s family back in London wasn’t the nicest, and they had their fights and spurts of meanness, but Liz feels like the Breretons are more unpredictable. She doesn’t know their history, quarrels, and sore spots, so she has no way of knowing what will set them off next.
Liz feels a little better after talking to the other girls from her school, comparing their host families. As she describes the Breretons to her friends, their absurdities jump out at her, making the whole situation seem more humorous instead of tragic. Mrs. Brereton doesn’t want her, which is hurtful, but she’s stuck with her anyway, which is funny. Young Miles keeps teasing her about not knowing Latin by shouting random Latin words at her, which don’t even make sense when translated. Miles is learning Latin vocabulary and can conjugate verbs, but he doesn’t really speak it as a language. Mr. Brereton, the professor, reads in the bathroom, which is the girls say is pretty normal, but what he reads are heavy historical texts, and he keeps a notebook and pencil in there, too, so he can take notes. The other girls laugh at the silly habits of the Breretons and tell Liz about their own host family. Three of them are sharing a room over a local shop, and the family that keeps the shop are certainly not intellectual. They have no books at all in their house, and they seem to be slow thinkers, who have only “one thought about every two hours.” Liz, whose source of pride back in London was being more educated than the rest of her family and most of the people in her working-class neighborhood, realizes that the Breretons’ higher intellectualism has been making her feel inadequate, like just a silly school girl. However, she and her friends are really more in the middle, doing better than some people, if not as well as others, and that’s not a bad way to be. Their learning isn’t over yet, either.
There are also some consolations to life with the Breretons. The live in an old, converted mill, and Liz has her own room next to the wheel house. Mrs. Brereton thinks of it as a rough room, very simply furnished and really more suited to a boy than a girl, but Liz likes it and is grateful that she doesn’t have to share a room with anyone else. When she doesn’t want to talk to the Breretons, she can go to her room to be alone and read, burying herself in Pride and Prejudice and other books she enjoys. When Miss Garnett sees Liz’s room, she also thinks it seems fun, and the water sounds from the millstream and waterwheel remind her of being on a ship.
There is one other member of the family that Liz hasn’t met yet, the Breretons’ middle son, Ben. Ben is 17 years old, and from the way his family talks about him in his absence, he’s something of a disappointment to his parents. Although he is two years older than Liz, they are about the same level at school, which is hard for his rigorously intellectual family to accept. He also has a tendency to get into various scrapes. None of them are truly shocking, mostly ridiculous teenage escapades. Liz knows that she’s seen much worse in her old neighborhood in London, but Ben’s family disparages his foolish and embarrassing behavior.
The reason why he isn’t there when Liz first arrives is that he’s taking a bicycle tour of Wales. His family starts to worry about him because he doesn’t return when he was supposed to. Then, they get a call that explains his latest escapade. In a wave of patriotism because of the starting war, he tried to enlist in the RAF, even though he was underage. At the recruiting office, he tried to avoid telling the recruiters much about himself, so they wouldn’t know that he was really too young, but he forgot that he wrote his name and address on the outside of his kit bag. The recruiters contact his parents and send him home. It’s the sort of well-meaning but thoughtless mistake that Ben often makes. His parents again disparage his thoughtlessness, and Miles makes fun of him, but Simon angrily tells them all off. He says that he understands Ben’s feelings of wanting to make a difference. Even if what he tried to do was clumsy and not well-thought-out, it was still noble. The grandfather of the family says that he and their grandmother certainly won’t make fun of him when he returns home. Liz gets the feeling like Ben might be more her kind of person than the other Breretons.
Liz and Ben get along well with each other when they meet. Liz learns that the room where she is staying used to be Ben’s art studio. Liz feels badly that she’s taken his space, but he tells her that it can’t be helped. He tells her that he wants to be an artist, although his parents disapprove. His mother doesn’t think that it’s possible to make a living off of art, and his father doesn’t think his paintings are any good. Because his father is an historian and an intellectual, he thinks of art in terms of fine art. He had another professor he knows, an art expert, take a look at Ben’s work, and he didn’t think much of it, so Mr. Brereton concluded that his son had no art potential. Ben’s family whitewashed over all the artwork he did on the walls of his studio before Liz arrived. Liz thinks this is terribly unfair because there are many different styles and tastes in art. Just because Ben’s father and one art critic didn’t like Ben’s art doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have talent. Ben is still determined to be an artist in spite of what his parents say. He and his brother Simon are very close and understand each other because neither of them quite fit their parents’ expectations and have different priorities from their parents. Liz understands how both of them feel because her family also never understood her or supported what was important to her. She comes to view both Ben and Simon as brothers and enjoys spending time with them. Ben takes her out on the river in the family’s punt, and during the winter, he teaches her how to ice skate.
The book continues through the next year and a half, through the developments of the war and the lives and education of Liz and the Brereton boys. Although Mrs. Brereton didn’t initially want Liz, the Breretons become fond of her as she shares in their lives, and they come to understand one another. Each of them finds a way to make a difference in the middle of war, and through the hardships they face together and their shared lives, they become a family. When Liz gets a letter from her grandmother that lets her know that Rose is “in trouble” in London, she and Ben make a daring trip into the bombed city to rescue her cousin. The book ends at the beginning of 1941, just after the New Year, with the war still going on, but by that time, each of the young people in the story has found a direction in life and hope for the future.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). Because of the themes and some of the language in the story, I would recommend this book for teens and young adults. There are descriptions of bombings, war deaths, a teenage pregnancy (Rose, not Liz), and some mild swearing in several places. The violent parts aren’t as graphic as some descriptions I’ve seen in other books, but there is definite violence and death, so it’s not really a book for young children.
My Reaction and Spoilers
The Atmosphere
This story could fit well with both the Cottagecore aesethic and Light Academia. In the countryside, Liz is living in an unusual, atmospheric house, a converted mill, and the descriptions of her room sound enchanting! In some ways, the beginning of the book reminds me a little of Anne of Green Gables: an unwanted orphan who is taken in by a countryside family that originally wanted a boy, and a girl who loves books and is determined to pursue an education and make something of herself. Liz is a true book lover, and the story mentions the books that she reads and loves, like Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier, and Beau Geste by P. C. Wren. Liz doesn’t just read because she is required to read for her classes but because she really enjoys books. She also comes to understand things from books she reads, like the war around her and the feelings of some of the Breretons from reading Shakespeare’s Henry V. The insights that people gain from reading are part of the reason why literature is regarded as one of the disciplines of the humanities, the areas of study that provide insight into human nature and human potential. Liz combines the insight and knowledge she gains from reading and what she perceives around her to better understand the world and other people. In some ways, she fits a little better with the intellectual Brereton family than she thinks she will at first.
Later in the book, after Liz has seen more of the war directly, she wonders if there’s really a point to continuing her education or if she should just try to get a job in a factory and do her part. Studying things like poetry and Shakespeare in class just feel pointless and irrelevant in the face of the larger, life-and-death events happening around her. She could relate to the themes in Henry V, but Romeo and Juliet begins sounding pretty silly to her. Her teacher persuades her to continue her education, telling her that the more educated she is, the better she will be as a worker and an asset to her country. At first, Liz doesn’t see how, and her teacher explains that she is learning mathematics, which are used for the construction and calibration of weapons. She is also learning biology, which would be useful if she becomes a nurse or has to care for someone who is wounded. As for things like poetry and literature, anything she studies will teach her humility and give her mental maturity and greater understanding of other people – the goals of the humanities. We don’t know about all of her long-term career goals by the end of the book, but along the way, Liz continues her education, takes on part-time jobs, and finds ways to help the war effort and the people she loves.
Evacuees, Social Class, and Socialism
The experiences of the evacuees in the story are very realistic. It’s important to note that child evacuations went in waves throughout the war, and Liz and her friends are part of the very first wave of Operation Pied Piper. When the war started, people expected that bombings would start almost immediately, which was why they tried to hurry as many children out of London as fast as they could. However, the book covers the real events and attitudes of the early war years, including the fact that the bombings didn’t begin as quickly as expected. When the bombings didn’t start right away, people started to think that the fear of bombings was an overreaction, and many families brought their children back to London from the countryside. Some called this phase of the war the “Phoney War” because people on the home front didn’t feel like there was a war really happening yet, and even on the front lines, there was relative quiet because the large scale operations hadn’t started yet. Liz feels more alone in Chiddingford when some of her friends from school return to London and leave her behind in the country. Liz knows that there’s no point in going back to London herself because her aunt won’t want her, and remaining with the evacuation program will allow her to finish her education. Of course, readers know that the Blitz is coming before the characters in the book do, and the people who returned to London will probably end up regretting it.
In real life, some of the children who returned to London prematurely were killed in the coming bombings, and others were sent away again in the next wave of evacuations. In the case of the kids in the story, Liz’s friends Annette and Naomi return to London, thinking that the risks of bombings were overrated. After the bombings start in the Battle of Britain, Liz’s grandmother writes to Liz and says that Naomi has been sent away again, this time to Wales, which was a destination for many evacuees. We never hear what happens to Annette.
The book did a good job of showing how evacuees and their host families experienced some awkwardness with each other because of their different lifestyles and social classes. Not only is Liz not from an intellectual family like the Breretons, but she also comes to realize that she lacks some of the table manners and social graces of people of their class. The book also explains how Liz and her friends speak differently from the Breretons. Liz and her friends are described as being “bilingual in two kinds of English.” When they’re with family and friends, they speak cockney English, but at school, they speak a more “posh” version of English. However, even their more “posh” English isn’t as high class as the way the Breretons speak because they are a family of people who have been to boarding schools and have higher levels of education. You can hear what a cockney accent sounds like, how it works, and the social significance it has from these videos:
1976: COCKNEY accents from the BCC Archive (about 11 min.) – The people talking would have been alive during WWII, some of them probably around Liz’s age at the time. Some of them talk about the differences between the way they talk and how younger generations speak.
The Story of COCKNEY the (London) Accent and its People (about 35 min.) – Explains more about the social history and cultural identity of Cockney people. This includes some of the historical information that Mr. Brereton, history professor, could recite, although Liz knows that doesn’t mean that he fully understands the realities of day-to-day life in the East End. Toward the end of the video, at about 27 min., there is a clip from a 1930s film as an example of how the accent used to sound because accents change over time.
The Breretons are using “received pronunciation” (RP), which is called “received” because people in England don’t tend to speak that way until they are taught to do it in the higher-class schools. It comes directly from having an education, particularly a higher education, so people who speak that way are immediately announcing their social class and education level with the way they speak. You can hear it and get an explanation of how it works from these videos:
Make Do and Mend (about 3 min.) – A 1940s educational film about making and mending clothes, to save on material for the war effort. Received pronunciation (RP) is also sometimes called “BBC pronunciation” because this is the accent that radio announcers would use. The announcers in this short film, one male and one female, are using 1940s RP.
1967: John REITH explains the “BBC ACCENT” (about 10 min.) – From the BBC Archive, about why the BBC particularly wanted its announcers to speak RP. John Reith was the Director-General of the BBC, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the late 1930s. During WWII, he became Minister of Information, and from there, moved to various other governmental roles. This interview was his very last appearance on television. It took place when he become Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The interviewer asks him about the reason why, during his BBC years, he wanted his broadcasters to speak with an RP accent. Basically, the logic behind RP was to put more emphasis on education and ability to communicate clearly rather than the speaker’s regional origin. Particularly in radio, where listeners only have the voice to rely on and no visuals to clarify anything, it was important to have an accent that would be as clear as possible to the general population, where there would be no confusing regional pronunciations and slang. In the video, John Reith specifically says that they didn’t want there to be any accents that would seem comical or irritating to the listeners by seeming overeducated, undereducated, or too regional. They also debate the social implications of this and the effect of television, which was relatively new technology to them in the 1960s. Both of the men in the video are speaking a kind of RP, although they’re not completely the same as each other. John Reith admits that his speech still has regional influences because he’s from Scotland.
The RP English Accent (about 9 min.) – About who speaks RP, how it sounds, and the social implications. It also mentions how there are people, like the presenter, who speak a kind of RP but still with regional influence, which is similar to the way Liz and her friends are learning to speak in their school. It also discusses how WWII changed the way this accent was perceived and who would speak it because of social changes.
RP (Received pronunciation) vs POSH ENGLISH (about 23 min.) – Explains the origins and evolution of RP and the differences between standard received pronunciation (RP) and the more high-class or “posh” version that the upper classes would speak and how regional accents influence even RP. It also explains that, although this accent was known for being used by radio broadcasters, during WWII, radio broadcasters started using more regional accents to make it clear that they were authentic British people because Germans broadcasting propaganda were speaking English with an RP accent. This is one of the factors influencing changes in professional and social views about different types of British accents.
Why does all of this stuff about accents matter? It comes back to social class and education, both of which influence people’s prospects in life. A person’s accent, particularly during the mid-20th century and earlier times, reveals their background and the type of level of education they have. (Less so in the 21st century, after the influences of mass media – tv and the Internet – which enable people to hear more accents than they encounter in person in daily life, changes to the education system, and changing cultural attitudes.) Schools of the time knew that and would make sure that their students could speak in a way that would make them sound as educated at possible. A person who sounded as educated as they said they were would sound more skilled and competent to potential employers, enabling them to get “white collar” jobs, involving more clerical or specialized skills rather than manual labor, and rise up in the middle class. People who only had the the minimal level of education, like Liz’s relatives, wouldn’t have this influence on their speech, and that could be a barrier to finding better jobs, keeping them at a lower, working class level.
Liz and her friends have been learning some RP in school, which is why they can speak more “posh” than the general cockney spoken around them in daily life, but the Breretons speak a higher level of RP because of their boarding school backgrounds and college educations, so even Liz’s more educated version of English isn’t up to their level of RP. Liz and her friends are learning to speak at a middle class level because they’re being prepared for possible white collar jobs and middle-class living. The students’ cockney families speak like the working classes because that’s what they are, and they’re less likely to move up in the world because listeners can tell that they don’t speak in an educated way. The Breretons speak like academics because that’s what they are, that’s what they’ve trained to be, they’ve had higher-class education, and they’re relatively upper-class or upper-middle class. Although the girls’ families think that the girls are learning to speak “posh”, and they are when compared to their relatives, the Breretons can still hear their background in their speech and know they’re not from the same class. This ability to almost diagnose someone’s background and education from a person’s accent influences the way people in the story and society of the time would think of each other right from their first meeting. Because they can tell some significant factors of a person’s background immediately, there was a tendency to jump to conclusions about a persons’ life, habits, and capabilities. Part of this story is about how they assumed too much before getting to know the details of other people’s lives and personalities, and that’s a factor that influenced social attitudes before and after the war. As the videos that I’ve referenced explain, the modern, 21st century versions of the dialects and accents in this story wouldn’t be quite the same as the ones the characters would have spoken in the 1930s/1940s because language evolves over time, but the videos will give you a sense of how the characters hear each other.
When Liz tells Lady Brereton that her father was a Communist, Lady Brereton is intrigued and fascinated but not overly shocked or disparaging. Liz is happy that Lady Brereton appreciates that he was a good and loving father and that Liz badly misses him even if his political views were unorthodox. Today, Britain is more of a democratic socialist nation than the United States, and the social programs of WWII, like the child evacuations, are part of the reason. Britain was a country that was very focused on social class, and before the war, the social classes seldom mixed. However, the war was a nationwide effort. People of all social classes were expected to do their part and work together, and programs like the child evacuations brought people of different social classes together in ways they had never been before. The result was that people of different social classes learned more about the ways other people lived, and because the evacuation system saved many lives and led to improvements in living conditions for some children from poor areas of the city, people in Britain became more interested in social programs to help the poor and create a more stable society. This isn’t the only reason for such social programs, but it was a contributing factor.
In the book, when Liz looks back on her father’s political views, she realizes that she shares some feelings with him but wouldn’t agree on everything he used to say, and that’s because of her own experiences. The social programs of the war helped her to continue her education and find a more stable life than the one she had with her aunt, but she also knows that she can’t rely on that type of support for everything and starts to look for ways that she can earn money herself and live an independent life. Her experience with and approach to social programs seems like a broader, more blended view. She has had experience with different social classes and different systems and can see the benefits and downsides of different ways of living.
For more information about the conditions and experiences of child evacuees, I recommend the following videos:
This series of interviews with former child evacuees is much longer than the other one, about 40 minutes long. Part of this one brings up the subject of racial minority children who were evacuated. Children of different racial backgrounds or ones who looked like they might be could be discriminated against by people who were reluctant to host them because of the way they looked, but there were also some nice families who were willing to host them.
An hour-long documentary about evacuees’ experiences, good and bad, with interviews with individual evacuees as older adults. It includes the experiences of evacuees who were sent overseas and not just to the countryside. It also covers the effects that the experience had on their education and how they found it difficult to relate to certain types of lessons, like poetry lessons, because the themes were so far from their wartime lives. It also explains what happened to them after the war was over and the long-term effects that their experiences had on t hem.
Explains what conditions were like for those who remained in London during the war and what the evacuees were escaping. Timeline Documentary. About 50 minutes.
For other children’s books about WWII and child evacuees, I have a list of WWII books with additional resources. For books about child evacuees, I especially recommend Carrie’s War (1973) and All The Children Were Sent Away (1976).
Education and Children
A detail that I particularly liked about this book was the explanation of the the 1940s British school system at the beginning of the book. I’ve seen other explanations of the British school system online (like this one from Anglophenia on YouTube), but the explanation in this book does help because the main character’s education and future prospects are a major part of the story.
The attitudes about class and education surprisingly still resonate today. The type of education a child receives is often determined by the economic level of their parents and the type of life that the adults expect that the child will lead. All of the parents in the story have their own notions about what the young people should be doing with their lives, but the young people know that the world is changing, especially because of the onset of war. The things they want to do and the things they will have to do no longer match their elders’ expectations.
Liz knows that getting a good education is vital to her future, where she will have to make a living by herself, even though her aunt tries to shame her for being grand about her education and tries to make her feel like she should just go out and get a job like her kids did. The Breretons are just the opposite, seeing higher education as the only path to a secure future, while their sons realize that there are more immediate problems shaping their world and posing real threats to all of their lives. Each of the young people come to realize that there are decisions that they each need to make for themselves to take charge of their lives and handle what life has given them, even if the adults don’t understand.
Overall levels of education in society have risen in the decades since World War II. Technically, where I live, children are only legally required to attend school through 8th grade, but in actual practice, almost everyone gets at least a high school education because even the lowest levels of jobs in our society expect a high school level of education or an employee who is working toward one. There is very little that anyone can do with only an 8th grade education in the 21st century, and almost everything that provides a living wage requires either a college degree or some kind of vocational training beyond high school. There are almost no jobs that will take a person with a minimal level of education and no prior experience.
In 1940s England, there were more opportunities for people with little education to get jobs, which is how Liz’s cousins get jobs even though they leave school at about age 14, but even then, there aren’t many opportunities for jobs that pay well and little opportunity for advancement. Rose later has problems when she gets pregnant as an unmarried teenager, and her cruel mother throws her out of the house, into the bombed streets of London with no way to make her living. Liz and the Breretons help her, but they worry about her future prospects. She has little education and has worked in a shoe store, but she doesn’t know much else and has no other experience. Without an education or other means of support, there isn’t much else she can do. She doesn’t even have very many domestic skills and can’t sew or knit. The end of the book implies that Rose will learn to manage because she decides that she is determined to keep her baby and find a way to support them both, learning whatever she has to learn along the way, and Liz’s teacher, Miss Garnett, will also help her.
Liz loves her cousin enough to take some risks to reach her during the bombings of London and bring her to Chiddingford, but she comes to realize that she has underrated her cousin for being less educated and a bit foolish in her life choices. On the one hand, she is irritated with Rose for her foolish love affair with a man who doesn’t really seem to care about her and marries someone else instead. She and Ben face some real dangers going to London to find her and get her out of the terrible situation she’s in, so a foolish choice on her part does create some risks and hardships for others. However, she finds out that Rose understands some things about life and human relationships that Liz is just now beginning to understand. The reason why she had that love affair was that she felt emotionally neglected by her hard-hearted mother and desperately lonely after Liz left for the countryside. Her choice of lover turned out to be a bad decision, but she was so starved for companionship and affection that she was vulnerable. Part of the reason why Rose is now determined to keep her baby and not place it out for adoption is because she saw the awful way her mother treated Liz as an orphaned child and how badly Liz was starved for affection. Rose’s mother was cruel to her as well, but much more cruel to Liz because Liz wasn’t her own child. Rose wants her own child to know what it is to be genuinely loved and wanted, in spite of the hardships and stigma of being a single, unmarried parent in the 1940s. Liz is touched that Rose truly understands that important emotional need just to feel loved and wanted by someone, something Rose’s mother never seemed to understand or care about. Rose might turn out to be a better parent than her own mother.
The feeling of not being wanted and only reluctantly accepted was one that real-life evacuees experienced, and I thought that was well-represented in the book. When Liz first meets Mrs. Brereton, she reminds her of her aunt. She puts her own children first and is so absorbed with what she thinks are in her family’s best interests that she sees Liz as an inconvenience and possible threat instead of the vulnerable girl she really is. However, where Liz’s aunt never warmed up to her after they lived together for years, Mrs. Brereton does become fond of Liz and starts to think of her as part of the family. With her elder sons going off to war, she admits that it’s a comfort to her to have Liz there. Liz shares in the family’s ups and downs through the war and really becomes one of them. Her attitude contrasts with Liz’s aunt, who is self-absorbed and ready to abandon any of the children in the family, including her own, when they become too much of an inconvenience to her. Mrs. Brereton is different. There are times when she is disappointed or worried by decisions her sons make, but they’re still her sons. Once she starts thinking of Liz as one of the family, she extends the same loyal affection to her. She worries about Liz when she disappears for a time instead of being relieved that she’s gone, and she even takes in her cousin when Liz brings her from London.
It’s hard to say how much of the differences because Liz’s aunt and Mrs. Brereton are due to their relative social positions and how much are because they have different personalities. I’m inclined to think that it’s a combination of both. I can see that Liz’s aunt may feel more precarious in life because she’s a poor, working class woman and feels less able to provide for an extra person or someone in a situation that might require some sacrifices, like her orphaned niece or pregnant daughter. However, Liz’s gran, who is part of the same social class, thinks that Rose’s mother has behaved horribly, both for mistreating Liz for years and for sending her pregnant and penniless young daughter out into the streets while the city is being actively bombed, so it seems that not everyone in that social group would have the same reactions to these situations, and some might be willing to make more sacrifices to help someone in desperate circumstances.
There are themes all through the story about the human need for affection and relationships with other people. Partly, the ability to build relationships with others is recognizing the need for them and being open to building relationships. Mrs. Brereton isn’t really open to building a relationship with Liz at first, and Liz and the Breretons don’t really understand one another, but relationships are also built through shared experiences. Not all of the experiences that the characters in the story share are positive ones, but facing difficult situations together can also be a bonding experience. Mrs. Brereton bonds with Liz and Rose because, even though it’s difficult for her at first, she comes to recognize how Liz supports her family in difficult circumstances, and she’s willing and able to help them through difficult circumstances in return, as a family. Liz’s aunt loses her relationship with both girls because she never develops that appreciation for them or willingness to share in their lives and troubles.
War
The war is always around the characters, and the story is shaped by it. I thought the author did a good job of representing the early events of WWII and how characters would have reacted to them as they actually happened. Each of the young people in particular wants to actively participate in the events that are shaping their world, even though Mr. and Mrs. Brereton would prefer to keep their sons out of it.
The grandfather of the Brereton family understands how the young people feel, having once been a soldier himself. Ben and his grandfather are very much alike, noble-minded and eager to participate. Liz joins Ben and Sir Rollo when they take Sir Rollo’s boat to participate in the Dunkirk Evacuation as one of the “Little Ships.” They know that British soldiers need help returning to England, and they hope to rescue Simon, who has joined the army, and others like him. They end up leaving Liz behind at Ramsgate because they decide that it would be too dangerous to take her the rest of the way with them. Sir Rollo is in bad health and probably shouldn’t be undertaking such a long-shot mission, but family love and his desire to once again be in the thick of things, making a difference, override any thoughts for safety. In the end, he helps save many people, and because of his prior experience in war, he is able to teach Ben how to avoid the floating mines and sandbars in their way.
However, he doesn’t survive the mission himself. He is killed by enemy fire, but Lady Brereton reveals that he knew he was ill and dying anyway. One of the pen-and-ink pictures in the book is actually of Sir Rollo after he got shot, and I was a little surprised that the book would show a blood-stained dead body in that way. It’s not overly graphic, even in the illustration, and because it’s a black-and-white drawing, it’s a less alarming than seeing someone with a red blood stain. Still, I think sensitive readers should be aware that it’s there. The book doesn’t sugarcoat the nature of war at all.
Lady Brereton knew her husband very well and loved his noble qualities. Although he didn’t tell her ahead of time what he and Ben were planning to do, she suspected that he was going to attempt something of that sort. He was a veteran of the First World War, and he wanted his last act to be something heroic, to feel like he made a difference again before he died. Ben is injured during the mission, but he and his grandfather still manage to save many soldiers. It’s Ben’s first view of war directly, and although it was a terrifying experience, it doesn’t change his mind about wanting to join the RAF. His parents finally agree to let him enlist after he finishes his school exams that summer.
At the time the book ends, none of the young people are killed in the war. We don’t know what’s going to happen to all of them by the time the war is over because the story ends in early 1941, but their experiences have made them all realize what’s important to them and given them the determination to do their part in the war effort. The overall situation by the time the book ends is that Britain is feeling like it’s largely fighting the war alone because France has fallen to Germany and is now occupied, and while Britain is getting some supplies from the US, the US would not fully enter the war until the attack of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. For a more detailed explanation of the war situation in Britain in 1940, I recommend the Timeline documentary 1940: When Britain Stood Alone In WW2 on YouTube. Understanding the general course of events in context adds depth to the story.
Toward the end of the book, there seems to be a romance developing between Liz and Ben. Personally, I like to imagine that Liz and Ben might marry after the war. I’d like to imagine, too, that Rose might end up marrying Simon and have a comfortable life as a doctor’s wife after the war. That’s left to the imagination, though.
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