Product Description
On the surface this is a family saga set over a couple of generations from 1944. The war is still going with rationing and the new threat of V2 bombs. The novel is set in Salisbury in a working class area and follows the Gartery family. Chrissie is eighteen and falls in love with a soldier about to go to Italy (Jim). They marry quickly and Chrissie became pregnant. The focus is on Chrissie, her mother and father, her two sisters Minnie and Lilian and Chrissie’s daughter Florence.
It is written in typical Davies style, with much more going on beneath the surface. The effects of war and a warrior culture are charted in terms of the lives of women and Chrissie dreads giving birth (especially to a boy child) in a time of war:
“ One night she dreamed … of giving birth to a ten-pound bomb, which slid out from between her legs in a trail of cold slime, and when she touched it the skin of her hand stuck to the freezing body. She woke the other girls in the dormitory with her screams. She would not survive. She realised this.”
Chrissie is admitted to a truly awful maternity home and gives birth to twins: a boy and a girl. She bonds with the girl, but not with the boy and she arranges for the boy to be adopted without telling her family or husband. The notion of the missing boy twin runs throughout the novel.
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