A Place to Hang the Moon

William, Edmund, and Anna Pearce are not terribly saddened by the death of their guardian, an emotionally distant grandmother. However, it does complicate matters. Who will watch them now on their school breaks? Their grandmother's solicitor decides the best thing for them would be to take a break from boarding school and join the other students who are evacuating from London. Perhaps they will find a family not only willing to house them temporarily but to keep them forever.

            After a long train ride with other students and their teachers, the three siblings are housed with a family with two older boys. The Forrester family had really wanted only a girl, but the three Pearces are unwilling to be separated. There follows some pranking and some bullying, but when the temporary school building is vandalized and Edmund is blamed, the supervisor is asked to find another home for the Pearces.

            The next home is with Mrs Griffith. Her husband is away fighting and she houses the children simply for the sake of the stipend,and for their use as domestic labor. After all, she has three little girls and a baby boy. But the squalid conditions at this home are very unpleasant and Edmund finally snaps when Mrs Griffith allows her oldest to tear up their special one-each books that they brought from London as comfort, to be used as toilet tissue. Edmund calls her a “miserable cow” and she slaps him, so they leave hurriedly.

            William, Edmund, and Anna take refuge in the church for the afternoon – it's open in preparation for the Nativity play that evening – and their librarian friend Mrs Muller takes them home for Christmas Eve. Mrs Muller is considered an “unsuitable” home for evacuees – there is some mystery about her absent husband and his loyalties, but they have developed a friendship with her by stopping at the library every day after school.

            After the Christmas break, they continue to stay on with Mrs Muller and one day in February she receives a letter. It informs her that her husband was killed the previous August in Berlin. The children help Mrs Muller (Nora) through the grieving process and then she helps them celebrate birthdays, and learn to ride a bicycle, childhood milestones they seem to have missed.

            Finally, in the spring, after planting a garden together, they gather up their courage and ask Nora if she'll be their forever home.

            Some children will be familiar with the situation of this novel from reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Edmund's name is a nod to that book. “Operation Pied Piper,” begun in the summer of 1939, evacuated more than three million children along with teachers, nurses, and expectant mothers from London and other urban areas to temporary homes in the surrounding countrysides.

            If you're looking for positive family relationships, the relationship between the three Pearce children is sweet and fiercely loyal. William is the undisputed leader and protector of his younger siblings and, though the weight of it is heavy, he shoulders the burden gladly and keeps the family together. To encourage the younger children, he tells them “bedtime stories” of what their parents were like. Being the oldest, he is the only one who has memories of them, but much of the content of these stories is made up, for he doesn't remember much.         The friendship the children build with Mrs Muller is redemptive and refreshing after heavy losses on both sides and we can't help but be elated for their happy ending.

            However, it is so important to take off our 2023 “lenses” and put on 1940 “lenses” to read (or write) a novel set in that time period. The modern sensibilities came through especially strong in one particular episode. William and Edmund are sent out by Mrs Griffith to make some money “ratting.” A local farmer is paying sixpence for every rat killed on his property. The rat-killing process is described in some detail with phrases like “their [rats'] shrieks filling the boys ears,” “sickening crack of the rat's body being broken in pieces,” and  “crunch of the rat's body.” The boys' reactions are described as “on fire with bloodlust” and “blinded now by tears.”  William even turns from the grisly scene and “heaved the contents of his stomach into the dirt behind them.”  In the greatest breach of believability, the narrator even compares the slaughter of rats with the scenes on the battlefields of World War II.

            You won't convince me that little boys in 1940, boys of 11 and 12, coming from war-torn London, dragging their gas masks from billet to billet, are going to react this way to the annihilation of some vermin that are threatening a farmer's livelihood and potentially spreading disease. It was a different time, and they probably felt as much remorse as I do when I step on an ant in my house. My thoughts were confirmed by another homeschool mom, who said her tween son, a midwest farmer's kid in 2023, was completely ambivalent to the rat-killing descriptions in this passage. This incident is not of staggering import, but its modern tone does interrupt the narrative for me.

Content Considerations

Edmund is described as being “luridly sick” during the train journey.

A “naked lady” is mentioned in the context of the schoolchildren discussing Lady Godiva with one of their teachers.

There's a dead snake in the bed prank and some bullies hold Edmund's head under the snow until he panics.

A (boy) baby pees while his diaper is being changed.

Edmund calls a woman a “miserable cow” and is slapped for it.

Descriptions of the clubbing death of rats are somewhat graphic (see above.)

And this odd, out-of-place sentence: “...there are surely special fires reserved down below for those who throw snowballs at small children.”