No one seems to know who she is or where she came from. On the backseat of the bus is a small child, unaccompanied, lost – little Pamela. What she isn’t prepared for is the unexpected emotional journey that begins as soon as she sets foot on the evacuation bus. She suspects her life is about to change forever, because that is what war does, and she is prepared for this, determined to remain calm amidst the chaos. One of the many swept up in this mass exodus is Ellen Parr. Caught in the grip of WWII, the residents of Southampton, England, are being promptly evacuated.
The war that changed everything.ĭecember, 1940. Nevertheless, as a testament to parental love and its relationship to the heartbreaking, healing, almost ungraspable passage of time, We Must Be Brave is a great success: richly observed, lovingly drawn and determinedly clear-eyed to the last.One woman. Also a little unevenly handled is the movement of the characters through time. the 30s and 40s are brilliantly evoked, as is the present century, but the period in between feels temporally unclear. It’s rare to find a novel in which everyday items are so carefully and luminously rendered, and the effect is powerful. Liardet is a masterful observer of the telling minutiae of life. She’s also good on the changes time wreaks in childhood, both on the child, who alters from one month to the next, and on the parent. Liardet describes beautifully the almost animal quality of that feeling, called up by the smell of a child’s neck, the curve of a chubby arm, even an outgrown dress.
This is a book suffused with parental affection: fierce, physical and almost inexpressibly tender. as well as being a deft social history, it is a love story. The writing is often dazzling.and this.lifts what might have been a sentimental story into different territory altogether.
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