This Place Called Home
an excerpt

We thought there could be no change as great as when my brother William went away to fight against Hitler and co. All too soon, however, we grew accustomed to his empty bedroom, the anxiety each time the postman walked up the garden path, the relief when the only news he brought of William was in his familiar handwriting: small, uninformative letters that told us that my brother was alive, or had been when the letter was written.

The twins, who were eight, soon stopped asking when William would return. They filled his place with play involving aeroplanes and guns, or hunting for spies in the coal shed. War was nothing but a game to them; a game where Violet invariably was the “Upright British Gentleman Soldier,” forcing Victor into the unenviable role of “Baddies.”

The Coopers, up at the farm, had taken in three evacuees around the same age as the twins from the London area. It was inevitable that, after William had been suitably forgotten, or at least relegated from beloved brother to long-lost letter-writer, the twins started their petition to Mother to “have one of our own,” as if the London evacuees were a litter of puppies. Long they begged, with infant tact, that Mother should “stick ‘em in our Willie’s room – he don’t need it any more.” Long Mother refused and ignored the childish heartlessness that would have her forget her firstborn so easily. Instead she would upbraid them for “picking up common, lazy language from those London children.”

At last Mother submitted, but not – despite what they may have thought – under the pressure of the twins. The Germans had begun their Blitz on the capital, and yet more women and children were packed into trains to who knew where. After a long talk with Mrs Grimshaw the billeting officer, a hard-faced woman with thick, dark eyebrows, mother relented and agreed to fill William’s room. The twins crowed with glee upon hearing the news, and were naughtier than ever, climbing up onto the roof of the coal house and terrifying Mrs Norman’s old cat that had climbed up there for some peace and quiet.

Imagine the children’s dismay when, instead of the scruffy-haired urchin of seven they had hoped for, the evacuee was revealed to be “older even than Willie” and unmistakeably expecting a child.