1939. Bombs threaten London and five small children step onto a rickety train, clutching their gas masks, heading to an uncertain future… When the war with Nazi Germany sends five displaced children to her door, Dodie Fitznorton knows life in her quiet village will never be the same. The baggage these little ones bring is far more than just their tattered suitcases.
My historical novels are all mainly set in the fictional Welsh town of Pontybrenin. It’s a small industrial town, bordered by hilly countryside, with narrow terraced streets of slate-roofed cottages of the type to be found in any South Wales Valleys community.
A few miles from town, twenty-four-year-old librarian Dodie Fitznorton lives with her elder sister in Plas Norton, a mock-gothic mansion built by an industrialist ancestor. Scarred by her own childhood experience of being sent away to boarding school at the age of four, Dodie is determined to ensure the evacuee children billeted at her home receive the best possible care.
But the children don’t always make it easy for her, especially the timorous eight-year-old Olive and her younger brother Peter, whose rudeness pushes Dodie to the limits of her patience.
When I researched the experience of evacuees for this story, I had access to a vast range of material, including autobiographies, history books, archives and websites. I was also fortunate enough to be able to draw upon the testimony of a real-life evacuee.
He had mostly enjoyed his experience of being evacuated along with his older brothers, but I had a strong sense that his brothers had a more challenging time of it, as they felt a heavy responsibility for looking after him in the absence of their parents. It was fascinating to talk to him and to get his “child’s-eye view” of evacuation, along with myriad tiny details, not all of which made it into the book, but which nevertheless fed my imagination.
I was also intrigued by references in the BBC People’s War archive and in Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45 by Stephen Bourne to children from a mixed-race family who were evacuated to the South Wales Valleys.
The references told me they experienced racism at first, but were later accepted into the community, and I just had to know more about this aspect of the Second World War which had never been brought to my attention before.
Through an appeal on social media I managed to find and speak to a descendant of this very family of evacuees. The hairs on my arms rose as she shared her family’s story with me, and I felt honoured when she gave me permission to draw upon their experiences as inspiration for my books.
So far I’ve used the insights to inform the experiences of the Clarke children after arriving in Pontybrenin in September 1939. It was painful to write about the microaggressions they face. In one scene they visit a sweet shop, where the shopkeeper turns up her nose in disgust and wipes a jar one of the children has touched; I’m sorry to say this was based on the experience of that real-life family. I can only hope my fictionalised account does justice to the authentic history.
Luisa A. Jones
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