Emma's Review: A Child Far from Home by Lizzie Page

Reviewed by Emma Crowley

With the country on the brink of war, single mother Jean embraces her ten-year-old daughter, Valerie, before she puts her on a train to Somerset alongside hundreds of other evacuees. Jean promises Valerie that the war won’t last long and that they’ll be together again soon. But as the bombing gets closer to home, she realises this might be a promise she can’t keep…

Wrenched away from her mother and everything familiar, little Valerie soon discovers that life in the countryside isn’t as idyllic as she first thought. Every night she dreams of returning home to the arms of her mother. But when she learns her old street has been devastated by the Blitz, it’s like her heart is torn in two. With no home to go to, where does this little girl belong?

Meanwhile in London, the chaos of war has unearthed a heartbreaking secret from Jean’s past she has kept hidden from Valerie for years. A secret that has the power to keep them apart forever.

With their old life in tatters, and hundreds of miles between them, will this mother and daughter ever be reunited? And if they are, will Jean’s secret change Valerie’s life forever – and will Jean lose the only person she has left in the world? 

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Many thanks to Bookouture via NetGalley for my copy of A Child Far From Home to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.

A Child Far From Home is the first in a new series, Wartime Evacuees, from Lizzie Page. I had really enjoyed her previous Shillings Grange series so I was eager to see what new direction she would next venture in and I have to say this story was even better than that series. From the outset, I will say the only slight issue I had with this was that it was too long and could have done with ending a bit sooner as I found the last quarter or so just a bit stretched out. But apart from that I was completely surprised by how engrossed I became in the story. I had expected another traditional wartime family saga which I do enjoy but to be honest at times I read a bit too much of them and I can become a bit jaded with the subject matter but this was much more than that. The development of the characters from beginning to end was fantastic. Both mother and daughter Jean and Valerie go on such a journey through their separation and different experiences of war that what the author set out to do was more than achieved. As she mentioned in her end notes that she wished to explore the effect evacuation as on a mother and child relationship and boy did it have an effect.

Summer 1939 and rumours of war swirl around the country. Fear grows daily that if war is declared then the Germans will invade Britain and life will never be the same again. Jean Hardman lives in the basement flat of a house with her ten year old daughter Valerie. The Salt family live on the top floor with their four children and the Froud family inhabit the ground floor and have two children. Theirs is a little community where they work hard but their peaceful existence is about to be shattered. Jean is widowed and Valerie never knew her father but there is more to this story than meets the eye. Jean works as a cleaner in several homes across London and does her best to provide a good childhood for Valerie. As Germany invade Poland and soon after war is declared, Operation Pied Piper comes into effect. Children are evacuated from London and sent to live in the country where it was presumed to be much safer as the threat of bombs raining down upon London was quickly going to become a reality. Jean is torn in two but with her neighbours sending their children away she acquiesces and sends Valerie to Taunton in Somerset.

It’s clear from the outset that the choice Jean faced was not an easy one and she will have to deal with the repercussions for a very long time. Lizzie Page deftly weaves a story of secrets, abandonment, lies, hope, despair and longing and I found myself racing through the chapters and before I knew it I was at the last quarter of the book. My opinion of both Jean and Valerie changed several times over and it was thanks to the well plotted story and expertly developed characters that this was the case. Valerie arrives in Somerset as an innocent ten year old thinking it will be like a holiday and she will stay there for a few weeks but a few weeks turns into a few years. The innocence is quickly stripped away from her as Mrs. Woods who takes her in is not what Jean would have expected for her daughter. She is cruel, mean, horrid, nasty and foul expecting Valerie to sleep on the landing and spend every spare minute working in her hardware shop. Not to mention scant food is provided for a growing girl. The only solace that Valerie has is listening to the wireless and this will go on to play a pivotal role in her development and it’s the only hope she clings to in her darkest hours of loneliness and desperation. She misses Jean terribly but can’t tell her what she is going through which is in such stark contrast to her neighbour Lydia who seems to have fallen on her feet with Mrs. Howard and her son Paul who is often away at boarding school.

I felt nothing but pity for what Valerie was experiencing but I could sense there was an inner resilience within her that would see her through but that’s not to say she doesn’t put much of the blame on Jean for placing her in this situation in the first place. Jean has secrets and has kept them from Valerie and this will have a significant forbearing on their mother daughter bond as well as the enforced separation. This was all played out very well over the course of the book although as I have mentioned perhaps just stretched out too much towards the end. Struggling and enduring are two dominant themes for both Valerie and Jean and their contrasting experiences and emotions are deftly highlighted and explored. I do think Valerie was my favourite character and I wouldn’t have thought that at the beginning but she goes from a naïve young ten year old and blossoms into a remarkable young woman. Yes she is tainted in some ways but a change of fortune could very well set her off on the right path. But can the relationship she had with Jean ever return to what it was pre war or are they both undeniably changed forever?

Jean for me was a very divisive character, Yes I believed she made the right decision in sending her daughter away but overall I found her to be very fragile and vulnerable. She was tainted by decisions made in the past which will come back to haunt her and she never knows how to be strong enough and deal with them. I felt she could have done an awful lot more to be there for Valerie and keep communicating with her even though they were separated by many miles. Jean soon loses her cleaning jobs and finds a job as a clippie on the London buses where their motto is to always kept the city moving no matter what. As the bombs rain down day after day the stories that emerge from her time as a clippie were both horrifying and heart-warming in equal measure.

But yet there was an element to her story that I thought was dragging her back into the past that she had broken free from and here is where her vulnerability was highlighted. I thought she was being strung along and as she was quite frankly an emotional wreck for much of the story that she couldn’t see that what she was doing wrong. I felt she at times she purposefully left her relationship with Valerie slide as it was just too difficult for her. More of an effort could have been made but she choose to hide her head in the sand. In a way I had little sympathy for Jean because of how things developed between herself and Valerie and maybe because I don’t have children myself that I fell more on Valerie’s side. The chasm and disconnect grew even wider between them and I doubted that it could ever be breeched and repaired but perhaps as they say time is a great healer.

I really enjoyed A Child Far From Home and found the writing to be very strong. It’s an emotional read which really gets you thinking and I suppose in a way thankful that we have had not had to go through the same experiences. It serves as a reminder to never give up hope. I would definitely recommend this book and am already eagerly looking forward to book two The Wartime Nursery.