Rating: WORTHY!
Errata:
(Note that there were no page numbers and I do not trust the ebook "location" numbers to be valid across all platforms. However, a search of the book's text will find these based on the information I give below)
"...pull myself together, all the Derwent family, had known Henry since..." I trimmed this so as not to give away spoilers, but this entire sentence, taken as a while, made no sense.
"...the jeep slowed down and stopped next to us...the lorry..." It's either a jeep or it's a lorry (a large truck) - the two are not the same thing!
"Wren Writer’s" used when it should be "Wren writers"
"...William kept petering him with endless questions..."! This could be taken in several ways. I rather suspect though, that it should have read "pestering" rather than "petering".
"Aunt Beth said she’s wait for me" should be, I imagine, "Aunt Beth said she’d wait for me"
This is one of those books where names have been changed to protect the...whatever. 'Mary Arden' is not even the author's real name. While I can understand the need to protect the innocent from embarrassment, it does make one wonder, when so much is changed, how much of what's left is completely reliable. Note also that this is written British style with single quotes (') for speech instead of double quotes (") as Americans are used to.
It’s been seventy years since the end of World War Two, and this huge length of time - a lifetime - might make people wonder why it's worth reading any more stories about it. The answer is in the very fact that it has been a lifetime. We’re at the point now where nearly all of those who were alive during that war are dead. Very few are left, and it’s important to know their stories before it’s too late because soon there will be no one left alive who actively experienced those years, let alone remembers them.
This story in particular was fascinating to me because the woman to whom it belongs was so very young. She didn't sacrifice her life to the war as so many others had done, but she did sacrifice a portion of her childhood and of her formative adolescent years to it. It’s important for other reasons, too. She came from a very privileged background as compared with most children then, and her education was therefore much more than simply learning to do without the luxuries she had enjoyed, and lending a helping hand to the war effort. For these reasons and for the gentle, easy, candid, and very accessible way this story is told, I found this a very worthy read.
It was well-written, too. There are assorted errors of one kind or another that I spotted. This book could have done with another read-through before it was sent out to advance reviewers (as my copy was), although some gaffs are arguable, such as when I read, "...was the worst night of The Blitz, so far and I was very worried..." In that case it seemed to me the comma was out of place and should have post-ceded the 'so far' instead of preceding it, but that’s no big deal.
This 'landed gentry' perspective was particularly odious, especially when I read of her "coming out ball" which was attended by a young duchess because the king (he of The King's Speech) and the queen do not come to these anymore because of the war. She went on to describe the "hugest" cake. So these guys are celebrating their privileged status, wearing expensive gowns and jewelry, and eating giant cakes while others are scrimping and saving and having to suffer egg rationing. Frankly, this part made me sick, especially when I read this sentence later in the book: "my father would consider it inappropriate to hold anything too lavish during wartime". That said, to have gone through the horror that "Mary" did in so short a space of time, and to come out of the other end of it and take up the work she did with a positive attitude and good humor was commendable.
No-one can be blamed for the circumstances into which they are born, be they poor or rich, or anywhere in between, but the family's insistence that "Mary" got to finishing school and be "brought out" at a royal ball while World War Two was going on was amazingly blinkered. It was like this family was still living in Victorian times. That said, "Mary" took her own path in life and served in her own way. While the stories she told of her naiveté were often cringe-worthy, they were also often endearing. It was really quite eye-opening, and sometimes quite staggering to discover how sheltered and cosseted she had been growing up. She grew up fast, however, after joining the WRNS ("the Wrens"), and really got a real world education, and she handled it well - other than not knowing the difference between a union flag and a union jack - something which someone in the Navy, of all services, should know!
As the memoir begins, the threat of war forces the Arden family to return from their vacation in Normandy, not knowing what a site of horror those same beaches would be a handful of years hence, and before "Mary" knows it, she's working to feed and take care of the wounded coming back from Dunkerque, bandaging wounds, and scuttling into precarious shelter as Germans are bombing London. It’s not long before people she knows are dying.
One aspect of this book which turned me off was the frequent reference to ghosts and ESP. There are no ghosts. There is no ESP - not according to the best scientific evidence, and for someone to blindly believe in this stuff - her first thought, at one point, on hearing mice scuttling inside a wall was that it was a ghost, not mice! - and keep injecting these references into the text really took a lot away from the very serious and factual topic of the war. I could have done without that, frankly.
That said, there was humor which was very in keeping with wartime attitudes, and with "Mary's" lack of a real-world education. I was highly amused by this exchange:
...thought that I had better start thinking about what clothes I was going to take on my honeymoon, and asked Jane about what I should wear in bed. ‘Nothing you silly cow, that’s the whole point!’ Jane shrieked, ‘you are so naïve, Mary, surely you know what goes on by now, or I should say in!’
‘Jane!’ I exclaimed, ‘you haven’t have you?’
‘Certainly not!’ she said, ‘but Bridget has, and she told me all about it, in some detail I might add.’
One particularly hilarious comment from "Mary" was right after she first had sex with her new husband, and she exclaims, ‘Oh Duncan, why didn’t we do this before?’ Another was "She can't be pregnant she's not married." which "Mary" uttered after learning that her sister-in-law was pregnant. The sad thing is that the book ends so abruptly that we never do learn what happens to some of the people we have lived with through the entirety of the book - people such as Jane and the subject of this last comment. It would have been nice to have had one more chapter tying up loose ends.
Overall, I rate this a worthy read. I found myself readily drawn into the story, and wanting to read on, to find out what happens next. It felt a bit like reading a good thriller. It was an easy, comfortable, and very informative read, and I warmed to "Mary" very quickly. It's for these reasons, despite issues I had with some aspects of this book, that I recommend it for anyone whose interested in real-life World War Two stories and the handicaps with which privileged children are born.
