Some years ago I met a woman -- a woman cold, self-protective, unreachable. How much of her personality was the result of her experience as an early childhood evacuee from London to the West Country?
The is the story of a girl, Viv Byrne, who wants to escape her home; a boy,
…more Joshua Levinson, who dreams of a career of a jazz musician; two controlling women married to weak men; strict Catholics disapproving of intermarriage with Jews; and the damage done to children separated from their mothers in WWII England. Even though their new homes may have been pleasant, even luxurious compared to their city digs, often the children felt they had been thrown away, unwanted by their mothers. Viv's daughter Maggie was told her mother was dead; Viv was led to believe Maggie had been killed in the Blitz, even though she supposedly was safer in the country.
Some of the story has been told in other books, but Julia Kelly puts her own twist in The Lost English Girl. (less)