Reading a book that's provoked thoughts about the second world war in The View from the Terrace

I’m reading a lovely book, it’s called Coming Home by Rosamund Pilcher. It starts in the mid 1930s and basically follows the life of a young girl called Judith who, at the beginning is 14 and living with her mother and younger sister in Cornwall. Her father is in Ceylon. The whole family was there until she was 10 when her mother came home to have her sister and educate Judith in England. At the beginning of the book Judith’s mother and sister are going back to Ceylon and Judith is going to boarding school in Penzance. She makes a friend there and goes back to visit the friend’s family and, to cut a long story shory short, ends up living with them after her aunt, who she was left with, dies in an accident.

It’s a very long book, 785 pages. It follows Judith and her friends through the outbreak of war. Rosamund Pilcher is a wonderfully descriptive author and also creates the atmosphere so well that you feel transported to the time of the book. The vivid descriptions of the second world war and how it affected ordinary people has got me to thinking about my own family at that time

My parents married in 1933 but I wasn’t born until 14 years later. In the early years of their marriage they lived with my father’s parents at the pub my father later took over, but, when war broke out my dad had to go to work in the factory at the other end of the town to make armaments. He tried to join the RAF but was one year too old to fly and opted for the factory rather than a desk job in the air force. Mum told me so much about the war and in some ways made it sound like an exciting adventure. She spoke of the camaraderie, how everyone helped each other. She did tell me something of the upsetting things. She took in refugees and one family were from Coventry and had lost everything in the bombing raids, but, living in Shrewsbury, they didn’t see a lot of action.

What the book has made me realise is just how awful it must have been even for people who weren’t in the thick of it. The family in the book are in Cornwall so didn’t see much action either but Judith talks of going downstairs in the morning and not wanting to open the newspaper and read more bad news. I am thinking of how we feel when there is a terror attack, it must have been a little like that happening all of the time. There is one description of Judith’s view from the train when returning to Cornwall from her aunt’s house in Devon just after war had broken out. She looks across at Mount’s Bay and sees barbed wire on the beach. It must have been so frightening to be constantly preparing for invasion. They didn’t know that we would win the war or what their future would be. It’s strange but I’ve never really thought about that before but this book has brought alive for me what my parents must have gone through. It always seemed like a whole other world to me but it was only a couple of years before I was born.

Some of the young people in the book join up and some are killed. I won’t go into detail in case anyone decides to read it. Judith joins up herself and the action moves first to Portsmouth and London and then, after the war in Europe ends, she ends up back in Ceylon. Her family have gone missing. I haven’t finished the book so I don’t know how it ends. I was going to say that it would make an excellent TV series but when I looked up the book on the internet I discovered it had been made into one in the 90s. I have found it on You tube and will watch it when I have finished the book.

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