Great Reads for Great Readers

 

These Days, by Lucy Caldwell.

 

  

          April, 1941:  Doctor Philip Bell and his wife Florence live with their three children in a leafy suburb of Belfast.  As one would expect they are prosperous, able to have a housekeeper and a cleaning girl for several days of the week and all should be hunky-dory;   eldest daughter Audrey is in a deepening relationship with Richard, a young hospital Doctor; middle daughter Emma is a night-shift volunteer at the local First-Aid Post, and youngest child Paul, at thirteen, is dying to be seventeen so that he can enlist in the Air Force and blast those Germans out of the skies!  So.  Even though there is a World War taking place on their doorstep, they are all managing, so they are.

            Until German pilots drop incendiary bombs on the docks and industrial parts of Belfast to disable Britain’s war effort.  Belfast suddenly has its very own Blitz and the entire city reels in shock:  at the First Aid Post, wardens are bringing in people who should be in the hospitals, and the hospitals are dealing with corpses.  Belfast is not managing any more.

And neither is the Bell family:  Audrey has accepted Richard’s marriage proposal, partly because Richard was so distraught at the thought of losing her to the bombing (his declarations of love were irresistible!), but marriage means giving up a job in the Tax Office that she really likes – married women don’t ‘work’ after marriage – and the friends and workmates that she enjoys seeing.

Emma is still on the night-shift at the First-Aid Post which suits her admirably, for she has begun a passionate love-affair with her Supervisor, Sylvia.  She has never known such heady, ardent emotions and is prepared to devote the rest of her young life to Sylvia, and damn the consequences!  She can’t imagine what her prim and proper mother Florence would think if she knew – but Florence has secrets and longings of her own, memories of another war, and another love.           

Ms Caldwell moves her various characters expertly through their reactions to the first bombing and the second fire-storm;  she is a superb storyteller and from her thorough historical research recreates a searing, tragic  account of a terrible chapter in Belfast’s history, where the only certainty is that one’s life will never be the same.  No-one is immune to tragedy and woe:  it’s how they react to it that determines their lives.  ‘Belfast is finished’, said so many:  how wrong they were!  SIX STARS.