Reviewed by Emma Crowley
Hamburg, 1942 Seventeen-year-old Anna knows she can never tell her proud parents the truth about where she is going. She must hide the fact that she is pregnant, that the father of her unborn child is dead and that she is on her way to a special maternity home, where her baby will be given to a perfect family. She tells herself that this is the best solution. She doesn’t expect to feel the rush of love for her beautiful baby boy in the white blanket, or the devastation when he is snatched from her, never to be seen again.
Desperate to forget her grief, she sees an advert for a secretary in a prison, far away in the east. Days later, she leaves Hamburg, travelling eastwards by train, feeling as if a whole new life is about to begin. It is the biggest mistake she will ever make.
London, 2016 Ninety-year-old Anna sits on the edge of her bed, hands trembling, eyes brimming with tears, as she looks at the picture of the soldier in the newspaper. Her friends and neighbours know her as a kindly old lady who bakes cakes and always has time to listen to their troubles. They don’t know about the hated green uniform she burned, the memories of the prisoners she tried to help and the bombed and blackened city she once called home. But now the time for a reckoning has come, will revealing the truth free Anna or destroy her?
Many thanks to Bookouture via NetGalley for my copy of The Woman Outside the Walls to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.
The Woman Outside the Walls by Suzanne Goldring opens in London in 2016. Anna is in her 90’s and has lived alone for many years following the death of her husband Reg. Every morning she checks the suitcase under her bed which she has hidden for safety. This reassures her but now she thinks things are catching up with her and she must leave her home. For where she does not know but she has this sense of urgency that she must go. She heads for the local bus stop but many buses come and go and by the end of the day her neighbour Lauren is worried that Anna’s milk remains on her doorstep which is very unlike her. Lauren and her son Freddie find Anna in a state of confusion and distress. What she is saying does not make sense especially as she is speaking in her native German.
Lauren thinks there is a story to be told about Anna but as she has been such a good neighbour for so many years, and once babysat her children, she is loath to dig deeper in fear of causing upset and distress. But Anna known to Lauren as Margie has had a difficult and challenging life and the burden of the past is weighing heavily on her. The memories locked away inside her head haunt her. Can Lauren break through the stiff shell that Anna has created around herself and if she does is she only opening up a can of worms best left firmly closed?
The story moves back and forth between the present day and Germany during the war years. Lauren and her son Freddie are the link or catalyst that allow Anna who has gone through several aliases and is now known as Margie to try and break free from the shackles of perhaps guilt and the horrific memories and images she witnessed during the war. Freddie through studying German and learning about Anne Frank and the war itself bridges the connection between the past and present and both himself and Lauren were well used throughout the story. But for me it’s Anna’s story in the past as she assumes the alias Margarete/Etta that really had me enthralled.
Anna grew up in Hamburg with her parents and now in 1945 she has returned to the place of her birth but the city she once called home has been ravaged and destroyed by British planes. The author spares no detail in describing the sights that meet Anna’s eyes as she has travelled on foot a very long distance to reach the city where she hopes she will be reunited with her parents. That is not to be the case as her home is destroyed and the stench of rot, decay, filth and disease fill the air and the landscape is blackened and desolate. Those that did not die during the horrific bombings were left to more or less fend for themselves and Anna finds herself seeking shelter in a cellar with a group of young kids who have named themselves the Ausgebombten gang.
Said gang boasts a cast of quirky yet resilient characters and again no detail as spared in helping the reader to understand the extend of deprivation, disease and starvation that faced those left behind. That’s what’s really good about this story is that we often forget that the German population suffered deeply during the war too and Suzanne Goldring has provided a solid and balanced viewpoint making the reader stop and think that innocent Germans suffered too. The descriptions of the conditions the gang live in and what they were forced to do just to get by day by day, well really they were horrific and Anna feels she is a burden to them. She turns to something that would have her parents horrified but she needs to survive.
There is a secrecy and wariness about Anna that has her constantly on high alert and looking over her shoulders. I could sense that she was hiding something significant and the fact that she always mentioned ‘The Other’s’ made me think there was a lot more to her than she was revealing to any of the gang that she befriends. I desperately wanted to know who ‘The Others’ were and I had a small inkling but never grasped the full extent as to who they were and their significance until the big reveal came towards the end of the book. We are taken back to the early 1940’s where we learn Anna’s history and what caused her to leave Hamburg. She has many wounds in her soul that lie gaping and the war and her experiences only widened them further. I found Anna to be resilient as I read through the story and as she reveals more about herself I did feel sympathy for her but when the climax is reached it made me sit up in shock and revaluate things. Her beloved Reg saved her from torment and persecution but did her actions leave her with no sense of moral code or decency or was she just doing what she had to do to make it through the war years? Anna is a divisive character that is for sure and although as an old woman she came across as caring and free from fault when I read of her in the past I don’t think I was always endeared to her.
The Woman Outside the Walls is a good read that really gets the reader thinking. It would be an ideal book club read as it would inspire great debate, the themes of the book are well developed and explored and they raise many moral issues. It ends on what I would call a cliff-hanger of sorts as the reader is left to decide how the individual characters deal with what they have learnt. It’s up to the reader to form their own opinion on all the revelations and that’s why I think this would make a good book club selection. If you have a firm opinion of someone and then you subsequently learn details that alter that in some way be it big or small do you then change your opinion or does it remain the same? How can it stay the same given what you discover is shocking? Having finished the book I still can’t decide how I would have dealt with what I read but one thing I know for sure it’s not a cut and dry situation by any means. Suzanne Goldring has done a very good job of shining a light on Germany during the war years and how one woman’s experiences shaped her for the rest of her life. It’s an enjoyable read despite the subject matter and provides the reader with plenty of food for thought.
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