Review: War and Displacement
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 20, 2014
Best to have a box of Kleenex handy when you read this book.Joan Fallon tells a heartbreaking story of war and its effects on a close-knit family. The Smiths, Ronald, Irene and their children Maggie, aged 11, Billy, aged ten and Grace, aged three, live in Bethnal Green, a neighborhood in London. They live in a row house, and theirs is the only blue-painted door on the row. Irene is pregnant. Ronnie is in France with the British armed forces. It is late May of 1940. The battle of Dunkirk is taking place in France. The Germans trap the British forces but then inexplicably halt. This gives the British the opportunity to evacuate their soldiers. Over 330,000 are successfully evacuated. Unfortunately, Ronald Smith is not among them. He has been killed by strafing from the German Luftwaffe.Hitler starts his Blitzkrieg and bombings are a nightly event in London. Many of the children of the city are evacuated but Irene resists the notion, wanting to keep her family together. When her time comes she goes to the Hospital, leaving the children in the care of her neighbor Kate, an Irish spinster and long-time friend of the family. Kate, a Catholic, takes the children to mass with her, where they meet her priest, Father McNally, and then she delivers them to their Episcopal Sunday school. The air-raid sirens sound. At the Sunday school the children are taken to the shelter where they will be safe until the all-clear signal. Kate never makes it home. The whole row of houses is bombed to smithereens.Maggie, Billie and Grace look in vain for Kate. They find their destroyed house. Maggie collects her jacket and a piece of the blue door as a remembrance of where she once lived. They go to the hospital looking for their mother, but she and their new-born brother have been evacuated. Hungry and desperate the children take refuge in the Church that Kate had taken them to that morning. Father Mc Nally takes them to an over-crowded Catholic orphanage. Believing that the children are actually orphans, and wanting to relieve some of the crowding, the nuns decide to send them to orphanages in Australia.Irene’s hospital stay has been extended because the baby, Leslie, has a heart condition and will need surgery. Her home having been destroyed, she moves in with her parents in Islington, a suburb of London. She has no idea what has happened to her children. No one has a clue.The children are well fed and well treated aboard the ship, but what will happen when they get to Australia and are placed in orphanages? Maggie gets her first great shock when Billy is separated from her and Gracie and placed in the Christian Brother’s farm clear across the continent. She and Grace are brought to an orphanage near Melbourne. Unfortunately, Catholic orphanages of the time were often places where discipline was enforced with the strap and by deprivation of food. The children are shorn of their hair and dressed in dowdy, ill-fitting uniforms. Their time is spent at school, prayers and chores. The word “Dickensian” comes to mind.Joan Fallon deftly evokes all of the pathos of war and displacement and their effects on human beings. This is one of the finest war stories I have read.