Plot summary

Now on the far side of middle age, Bill Rowan remembers back to his growing up period in suburban London during WWII, he ten years old when the war broke out. Beyond his father Clive enlisting and what his absence meant, Bill saw the war as an adventure, the specific events more anticlimactic for him compared to the fear driven into the populace of what could happen. Even with the nightly German air raids and bombs actually dropped in their neighborhood, he saw the bomb sites as a playground from which to collect shrapnel and with his newfound friends to destroy whatever survived the bombs. While his younger sister Susie was too young to comprehend fully what the war meant, his mid-teen sister Dawn went on as a teenage girl with raging hormones is apt to focus on, namely boys, or in wartime young men of the military variety, she often feigning the option of death compared to not being with someone, most specifically a Canadian soldier training nearby. And while Bill's mother Grace was ill-prepared emotionally to be without Clive, she had to grow up quickly to deal with leading the family through the changing times. With Dawn, Grace could see her own teen period a bit more clearly due to the war and what she would have done differently if she had to do it all over again.—Huggo