A Mother’s Journey by Donna Douglas: A fascinating portrait of everyday life on the home front in wartime - book review -

A young woman’s arrival in the Blitz-hit town of Hull sets tongues wagging… and Edie Copeland is hugging secrets to her heart as well as a suitcase full of her worldly goods.

Welcome to the first book in a drama-packed Yorkshire Blitz Trilogy from Donna Douglas, the York-based author whose popular Nightingale series brought a London pre-war hospital vividly to life, and won her an army of fans.

A Mother’s Journey launches this exciting new saga series and is based on Douglas’s research into the stories of Hull residents who lived through the war. Using diaries, letters and the heartbreaking accounts of children who lived through the Blitz, her aim is to ‘convey some of their fighting spirit.’

When pregnant widow Edie Copeland arrives at Jubilee Row in Hull, in June 1940, it’s just a day after the Luftwaffe have dropped bombs on the city’s King George’s Dock and only weeks since Britain saw its troops undergo the terrible events at Dunkirk.

Edie has left both her home and her job at the Rowntrees Factory in York after tragedy struck and is determined to make a fresh start. But she is a stranger to this coastal city and this street, and the secrets from her past have made her guarded and wary, and struggling to make new friends.

The difficult and bullying Patience Huggins, Edie’s fellow tenant at number ten Jubilee Row, makes it clear that Edie is unwelcome and is convinced that there is something suspicious about her.

Fortunately, the neighbours are a little more welcoming and Edie is soon made to feel at home by the Maguire and the Scuttle families, and their matriarchs, Big Mary Maguire and her skinny widow friend Beattie Scuttle.

Edie is worried that she may not have enough money to pay her rent and bills but as air raid sirens sound, and the war feels closer than ever, the community has to stick together.

Edie is also still hiding something, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can keep it up. Is the past going to catch up with her and will she still be able to call Jubilee Row home when the truth comes out?

Douglas brings us a vibrant cast of characters in this opener to what promises to be a captivating new series. From the double act of irrepressible Big May Maguire and her ‘thin as a whip’ friend Beattie Scuttle, to an entertaining supporting cast of family and neighbours, this is a danger-laced tale of love, loss, loyalty and camaraderie in the hardest of times.

Laughter and tears are never far away as Edie settles into her new home and discovers that friendship, kindness and sharing troubles in the present are sometimes far more important than trying to hide secrets from the past.

Laced through with no-nonsense Yorkshire humour, and lashings of rich, nostalgic period detail, this is a fascinating portrait of everyday life on the home front in wartime, with its hardships and uncertainties, and will leave readers counting down to the next visit to Jubilee Row.

(Trapeze, paperback, £7.99)