SPOILERS!!!
The day that changes everything is July 17, 1944. Millie and Grace are at the pond, enjoying the summer with her children and in-laws when Mr Shaker, the shop keeper that helps Babe deliver the telegrams that day, arrive. He has two wires to hand. Charlie and Pete have been killed in war, leaving the two women bereft.
The next part of the book takes place between June and August 1945. Claude has survived the war and returns home. He has changed, and Babe has noticed those changes even in his letters. The day that Claude returns home, he books a room hotel for him and Babe, but when Babe gets there, Claude is not waiting for him. After hours waiting for him, she gets a call from him. He is in a recruiting centre, and Babe begs him to leave the place and come to her. She is very nervous and scared, but Claude finally turns up. One of the consequences in the war is the three missing fingers in one of his hands, but Babe takes it in her stride and reacts just the way he needs her to.
Back home things are not easy. Claude is a changed man, and when they are together, Babe feels that he can’t see her as if she were just a body. Among his things she has found evidence that he has been with other women, but she tells herself that she needs to forget that as she can’t start imagining what the war has put him through. Babe is obviously disappointed because this isn’t the man she married, and I think she is very patient. The day on July 14, 1944 when news of the end of the war comes through, everybody is outside celebrating. When Babe goes home, she finds Claude hiding under the table, shaking with fear, and she has to soothe him, explaining that the explosions are just firecrackers from the celebration. The poor man is clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and in a way Babe has lost her husband in a different way. Millie and Grace have lost their husbands physically, but Babe has lost hers emotionally.
Grace is trying to cope with life without Charlie. Her grief is raw even a year after she got the terrible telegram. Her way of coping is framing countless photographs of Charlie and hanging them for her daughter to see. Her friends think that she is obsessed, and it is not a good thing. Grace swears that she will never get married again as there won’t be anybody like Charlie.
As for Millie, she is coping quite differently. After Pete’s death, she got a job at the local department store, and when the war ends, her boss hires her to show the new clothes in the shop like a model. It is after that meeting that Millie meets Al, her boss’s nephew, and they start dating shortly afterwards. In his letters Pete told her that should anything happen to him, she shouldn’t pine for him for too long and marry again. The problem here is that Al is a Jew, and this doesn’t sit well with her family and friends or with Al’s family. Millie doesn’t care and wants to marry Al. Grace thinks that it is wrong of her friend to marry someone so soon and a Jew on top, and she wants Babe to talk to her. I wonder if the friendship between these three women will remain strong and will suffer the consequences of the war.
I am enjoying the book. It is beautifully written, and it is very interesting to see how the war has terrible consequences for those left behind.
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