MAY 2025 READING
We Must Be Brave
by Frances Liardet
published 1/29/2019, GP Putnam's Sons
452 pp
ISBN 978-0735218871
Book Club Meeting
May 27, 2025, 7 PM
Hosted by: Mary Lynch & Char Jeffris
​​Snack provided by: Patti Finnerty
​Wine provided by: Cathy Enz/Char Jeffris
Book selected by: Char Jeffris
Accessibility
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Finger Lakes Library System
E-book​
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NY Public Library (cloudLibrary)
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Amazon (Kindle)
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E-audio book
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NY Public Library (OverDrive)
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Amazon (Audible)
On Loss- Frances Liardet on writing We Must Be Brave
"I am blessed by a child who came to me late in life, and I love this daughter of mine, who is now ten years old, inordinately. I am perfectly sure that all parents love their children inordinately.
But I don't simply laugh and smile on my daughter's birthday. I also cry. For there is another birthday that I commemorate by visiting a country graveyard in the South of England, the final resting place of my maternal grandparents, on which my first daughter's ashes are scattered.
She died just before she was born, a baby who had my hands and feet and her father's nose. I placed her with my grandparents because I know they will look after her until we all meet again."
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"It didn't take me long, after I first began to create the character of Ellen Parr, to realize that while I was writing about an English village during the Second World War, at its heart, I was writing about loss. Ellen, unlike me, is childless, so she never experienced my pain. Her pain is different: the child she looks after and grows to love, Pamela, is taken away from her at a young age to live far away. I have not known the pain of this kind of parting and I hope I never will.
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But what Ellen and I share, I know this, is the kind of awed longing, the pin-sharp memory for detail, the intense sense of preciousness and yearning, that goes with loving a child who has departed. The small things left behind, in my case it might be a pink baby blanket, in Ellen's case a pencil stub found twenty years later, chewed by milk teeth, are freighted with an almost wondrous power. So is this book about loss? Yes. But loss is not a gap or hole, not a crude absence.
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As Ellen and I discovered, a small girl may be gone, but she is never gone. She remains present in our memories and our love. Loss teaches us about one of the most enduring kinds of love, the love we have for the people we will not see again. And so we come to understand what endurance is. And so we value life. And so we grow."
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We Must Be Brave
The Guardian book review:
"Parental love is at the heart of a story grounded in the details of everyday life in an English village during the second world war"
"Domestic stories of women’s lives in wartime are common in genre publishing but rarer in literary fiction. From the off, Frances Liardet’s second novel, published 25 years after her first, distances itself from nostalgia and insists on its own terms. The writing is often dazzling – a child’s voice is 'clear, piping, like a twig peeled of its bark' – and this, too, lifts what might have been a sentimental story into different territory altogether.
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It is 1940 and a busload of bombed-out civilians from Southampton has arrived in the village of Upton, where Ellen Parr and her much older husband Selwyn, a miller with whom she has what’s described as a mariage blanc, are helping to find them beds for the night. The party includes a small, unaccompanied child, Pamela, whom Ellen volunteers to look after until her parents can be found, but as the war progresses the days turn to years. 'We began to mill barley flour along with the wheat, and then we had to mix potato flour with the barley, and Pamela was still with us.'
Although largely preoccupied with the war years, the novel ends in 2010, and as well as being a deft social history, it is a love story – that of the love Ellen discovers in herself for the little girl and its relationship to her own poverty-stricken childhood in the 1920s and 30s; how it changes them both, and what it costs.
This is a book suffused with parental affection: fierce, physical and almost inexpressibly tender. Liardet describes beautifully the almost animal quality of that feeling, called up by the smell of a child’s neck, the curve of a chubby arm, even an outgrown dress. She’s also good on the changes time wreaks in childhood, both on the child, who alters from one month to the next, and on the parent, who grows with them. At the start of the book Ellen wonders at the easy authority with which other people can get Pamela to obey; it is not long before she, too, can instil obedience with just her tone of voice.
Liardet is a masterful observer of the telling minutiae of life, from gestures and speech to the familiar things that surround us and from which we draw meaning. In We Must Be Brave, the way objects persist through time – a weathervane, a sheepskin, the painted-over holes in a windowframe left by long-gone blackout blinds – makes them into wordless talismans against impermanence, perhaps even death. It’s rare to find a novel in which everyday items are so carefully and luminously rendered, and the effect is powerful.” ​
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"With its long sweep, the book also charts the passage of time as it affects Upton and its surrounding landscape. In 2010 the mill where Ellen, Selwyn and Pamela lived has become a tea room, with a museum of old tools upstairs; the poverty-stricken rural village Ellen recalls from her childhood ('dark and dirty with long ruts of mud from tractors, dung from droves of cattle that ambled by') is 'clogged with sleek cars. Skirts of creamy gravel lap the spotless tarmac. Every window gleams, every stone is repointed.'
But the jump from the 1940s to the 70s, sketched in with a handful of unsent letters, needed more than the mention of flares, David Bowie and Cup a Soups to come to life; the 30s and 40s are brilliantly evoked, as is the present century, but the period in between feels temporally unclear.
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Also a little unevenly handled is the movement of the characters through time. While Ellen and her lifelong friend Lucy grow, learn, change and age convincingly, doughty Lady Brock at the Hall seems old at the start and old (albeit frailer) 30 years later; William Kennet, Lady Brock’s gardener, who was a friend to Ellen and Lucy when they were surviving poverty together as children, remains stalwartly middle-aged and unchanged all the way through.
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Most importantly, at the very end of the book the adult Pamela – whom we hear from at last in the first person – doesn’t quite convince: we are not given enough to tie the woman in her 70s to the beloved child we have been gazing at for so long through Ellen’s eyes.
Nevertheless, as a testament to parental love and its relationship to the heartbreaking, healing, almost ungraspable passage of time, We Must Be Brave is a great success: richly observed, lovingly drawn and determinedly clear-eyed to the last."
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DRYDEN BOOK CLUB
est. 2001