Set in strife-torn China during World War II, this women’s fiction will be admired by teachers everywhere and by Girl Guides or Girl Scouts. WHEN WE WERE YOUNG & BRAVE follows the uncertain times of the Japanese Army’s invasion and what it meant for a school for expatriates.
Elspeth Kent is wondering if she should go home to Britain due to the war, and suddenly the awful news arrives that the Japanese have entered the war as well. She’s left it too late. However, she is exactly where she is meant to be, in order to shepherd her flock. The internment of teachers and children seems unnecessary, but the British-run Chefoo missionary school soon has a set of guards who go around stealing everything they can and labelling everything else as the property of the Emperor. Worse is to come.
Nancy Plummer is one of the keen Chefoo School Girl Guides. The boys and girls here are children of diplomats, missionaries and traders. They have basic domestic work done by Chinese servants, who now don’t have jobs or enough food. Nancy and her best friends Sprout and Mouse, who have contrasting personalities, are only ten in 1941. They will be a lot older before the war ends.
If you don’t feel up to reading a book about a Japanese prison camp, I can only say that hard as it is, life is not as bad as for soldier prisoners of war. Nobody asked children to build bridges or trek through the jungle. On the other hand, as we saw in A Town Like Alice, guarding women and children was a very low-status job, so the Japanese took out their frustration with sheer nastiness and theft of aid parcels.
I enjoyed reading the Girl Guide sequences, with a constant emphasis on being helpful, cheerful and brave. The girls learn skills for badges and sing familiar songs. We also see the efforts made to maintain illicit communication with the outside world. Where I feel author Hazel Gaynor might have added another dimension, would be to give the voice of Shu Lan, a Chinese labourer who is moved along with the school and endures hardships. We get brief conversations, but she could have shown us more of her culture. That’s not the story Hazel Gaynor wanted to write, though.
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG & BRAVE shows that the tragedy of war leaves prolonged effects on all concerned, and the only way to escape is not to start the conflict. This dramatic story carries an essential message.
Their motto was to be prepared, but nothing could prepare them for war. . .
The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Came Home sets her unforgettable new novel in China during WWII, inspired by true events surrounding the Japanese Army’s internment of teachers and children from a British-run missionary school.
China, December 1941. Having left an unhappy life in England for a teaching post at a missionary school in northern China, Elspeth Kent is now anxious to return home to help the war effort. But as she prepares to leave China, a terrible twist of fate determines a different path for Elspeth, and those in her charge.
Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe at Chefoo School, protected by her British status. But when Japan declares war on Britain and America, Japanese forces take control of the school and the security and comforts Nancy and her friends are used to are replaced by privation, uncertainty and fear. Now the enemy, and separated from their parents, the children look to their teachers – to Miss Kent and her new Girl Guide patrol especially – to provide a sense of unity and safety.
Faced with the relentless challenges of oppression, the school community must rely on their courage, faith and friendships as they pray for liberation – but worse is to come when they are sent to a distant internment camp where even greater uncertainty and danger await . . .
Inspired by true events, When We Were Young and Brave is an unforgettable novel about impossible choices and unimaginable hardship, and the life-changing bonds formed between a young girl and her teacher in a remote corner of a terrible war.
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