I raced through this book. It's an engaging story about a middle class Belfast story dealing with WWII, recently and shockingly arrived in their home city. Audrey is a clever office worker, walking out with a young GP. Lucy, slightly younger, is an a Air Warden, awash with emotions over a first love affair that must of necessity stay secret. We meet their parents and kid brother Paul, and become as consumed as they do by the four days of unrelenting bombardment of their home city. Involving, nuanced and thoroughly well told, this is a book I couldn't put down. ( )

The Belfast "blitz" of 1941 is described through the lives of two sisters in a well-to-do family living in North Belfast. Emma is twenty-one and a volunteer warden in the Civil Defense Service. Emma has fallen in love with Sylvia, a co-worker. Audrey works in the tax office and is engaged to Richard, a physician who works with their father, Philip, also a doctor. The wife and mother, Florence, is aware she is maturing into the mid phase of her life. It seems a secure marriage and stable family but in her memories she still yearns and mourns for a former lover, seemingly lost in the Great War.

After Easter, Belfast is bombed by the Nazi's, aiming for the industrial area in East Belfast, principally the shipyards. Many bombs go astray and casualties and property destruction are severe. Philip races to the hospital where he encounters scenes of horror, even to an experienced physician. Emma is deeply in love with Sylvia, envisioning a life together, hidden from the social reprobation their relationship would engender. Audrey finds a young girl lost in the havoc and brings her home until finally reunited with her mother. Audrey is anticipating her marriage to Richard, but you sense she is beginning to doubt that this is what she really wants. Emma is devastated when Sylvia is lost in a bomb blast. Audrey breaks off the engagement at the last minute.

There were four raids on Belfast in 1941. One raid was said to have had the largest fatalities after the blitz of London. Damage to property and infrastructure was colossal. Over 220,000 people fled the city during and after the raids. The author has an excellent sense of place of Belfast of the 1940's. ( )

There is nothing particularly "bad" about this novel. The writing is competent enough, and the author has clearly done her research, providing the reader with a sense of the 1941 Belfast Blitz. Having said that, I can't say I see anything particularly noteworthy or "good" about the book either. I stopped at precisely the halfway point due to complete boredom. Audrey and Emma, the twenty-something sisters at the heart of the story, failed to engage me in any way. Women's secrets and dissatisfactions have been done countless times before, though the same-sex relationship between Emma and her first-aid-post supervisor is, I suppose, a departure from typical WWII historical fare. Underwhelmed, I can't imagine bothering with Caldwell again. ( )

London, Liverpool, Hull, Manchester, Coventry, Exeter, Plymouth, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow (to name just a few) are the cities which immediately spring to mind when I think about the WWII blitz bombing raids, which caused such devastating damage to the UK’s manufacturing capacity and the deaths of so many civilians. However, until I read this well-researched novel I hadn’t read anything about the Belfast Blitz. Through a combination of reading this book and doing some subsequent research, I now know that in total approximately 1,000 people were killed, many more were injured and bombs hit half of the houses in the city, leaving 100,000 people homeless. During the Easter Sunday raid (the second of four carried out between 7th April and 6th May 1941) some 900 people died as a result of the bombing and 1,500 were injured: apart from in London, this was the greatest loss of life in any night raid during the Blitz.
Central to this gripping story, which explores the impact on civilians as they struggle to adjust to these harrowing events, is the middle-class Bell family: Dr Philip Bell, his wife Florence and their three children – twenty-one-year-old Audrey, working in the local tax office and engaged to Richard (also a doctor); eighteen-year-old Emma, working as a volunteer First Aider and tentatively exploring her developing attraction to Sylvia, a more senior volunteer and finally, their brother Paul, who is in his early teens and still inclined to see the war as a bit of an adventure. However, it is essentially from the perspectives of the three women that the story is told and I enjoyed the many ways in which the author very effectively used their personal experiences to explore a range of contemporaneous issues.
It’s human nature that during any crisis we are often forced to take stock of our lives, to question what’s important to us and what we need to do to achieve that. As the story begins to unfold it becomes clear that all three women are struggling to find ways to reconcile their inner feelings and desires with external expectations. Audrey is becoming increasingly ambivalent about her impending marriage. Although she loves (and is very good at) her job, she knows that she will have to give it up when she gets married and wonders whether she loves Richard enough to be prepared to make that sacrifice. Emma has fallen in love with Sylvia but knows that their tentatively developing sexual relationship, although not actually illegal, must be kept secret. Through Florence’s narrative, the reader discovers that she continues to mourn a long-lost love, feelings which have been reawakened by the death and destruction which now dominates all their lives. How each of them deals with their personal conflicts will be shaped by their experiences of loss on a greater and more devastating scale than they could ever have imagined.
Although I enjoyed how the author developed these main characters, what impressed me most about her storytelling was her powerful and deeply moving evocation of the impact of the bombing raids on individuals and on communities. She captured the fear generated as people heard the planes overhead and listened to the sound of bombs falling; of their shock as they emerged after each raid to find the landscape of their city changed almost beyond recognition; of the desperate plight of those who were now homeless; of the frantic search for news of family and friends who were missing; of the authorities struggling to deal with vast numbers of dead bodies to be retrieved and identified and of hospitals being overwhelmed as they tried to treat the injured. Without going into any gratuitously explicit detail, she captured the scale of the horrors faced by the emergency services and First Aiders as they dealt with the aftermath of each raid.
The fact that the book was divided into three parts (‘The Dockside Raid’, The Easter Raid’ and ‘The Fire Raids’) allowed the author to explore not only the cumulative effect of the destruction and its impact on the community, but also on how this came to shape the decision-making of the three main characters. Although no one in Belfast escaped totally unscathed, as the main targets (military, the docklands and manufacturing) were located in the working-class areas of the city, disproportionately it was the homes of the poorer families which were either razed to the ground or so badly damaged that they were uninhabitable. By using a number of different characters from these areas who had links with the Bell family, the author offered insights into the particular privations faced by people who had little to start with and ended up with even less.
I admired the way in which the author so effectively used her considerable research to add authenticity to her storytelling. Her descriptions of the two fire raids (close to 100,000 incendiaries were dropped, more than in almost any other raid in the UK) were so evocative that I could hardly bear to continue reading. The resilience of the community as they pulled together restore some semblance of order to their devastated city was in sharp contrast to an intervention from Winston Churchill. Apparently the morning after the Fire Raids he phoned to speak to Sir Wilfred Spender, the head of the civil service, to enquire about what was being done to protect Sir Edward Carson’s statue … I was delighted to discover that Sir Wilfred, much to Churchill’s fury, told him in no uncertain terms that all available resources were being deployed to ‘help remove the living from buildings condemned, and the deceased from the rubble’! A timely reminder that politicians being out of touch with the lives of their voters isn’t a new phenomenon!
Although explorations of many types of loss permeate this deeply moving story, it is also a paean to resilience, to the importance of family and community, to love and, ultimately, about a belief in regeneration and hope. The fact that it also taught me something new, and encouraged me to read even more about this period, has made this a much more thought-provoking and memorable read than I’d anticipated … always a bonus!
With thanks to Readers First and the publisher for an uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review. ( )