These Days is set between April and May 1941, focusing on four days during which Belfast was subjected to intense bombing raids. The book is structured in three parts – The Dockside Raid, The Easter Raid and The Fire Raids. Through the experiences of the Bell family – sisters, Audrey and Emma, their younger brother, Paul, and their mother and father, Phillip and Florence – the author illustrates the impact of the raids on the people of Belfast.
When the novel opens, Belfast has so far escaped the intense bombing experienced by other UK cities so, initially, the concerns of the family are close to home.
Audrey, the eldest daughter, is due to marry Richard, a doctor who works alongside her father Phillip, also a doctor. However, she has started to have doubts about whether her feelings for Richard are strong enough and whether the direction her life is moving in is the right one. ‘I wish, Audrey says, impulsively. I wish – But she doesn’t know what she wishes.’
Emma, a volunteer at a First Aid Post, is attracted to one of the other female volunteers and has taken the first tentative steps towards an intimate relationship, a relationship that would be considered shocking by her family, possibly even by wider society, but which has opened up for her a whole new set of feelings. ‘She hasn’t known, ever, that it is possible to feel so – ardent.’
Although by all appearances happily married, unbeknownst to her husband, Florence secretly continues to pine for her first love, lost in the First World War. ‘How is it, she sometimes thinks, that this is her life […] It isn’t, she hastily thinks, that she’s unhappy, nor ungrateful with her lot; just bemused, she supposes, that this has turned out to be it.’
Everything changes when the bombing raids start, initially targeting the docks but later becoming more indiscriminate in nature. (Over the night of 4th and 5th May 1941, the so-called Fire Raids, nearly 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Belfast including in residential areas.) The experiences of the Bell family are a microcosm of the impact of the bombing raids on the city: loved ones killed or injured, people desperately searching for missing family or friends, families seeking to be reunited.
The descriptions of the death and destruction inflicted on the city are harrowing but horrifyingly realistic: homes and buildings demolished, people buried beneath rubble, bodies in their hundreds laid out in a makeshift morgue. I found it impossible to read the scenes of the aftermath of the raids and of people fleeing the bomb-damaged city without thinking of the dreadful scenes we are currently witnessing in Ukraine. ‘Cars, carts, bicycles, perambulators, batch chairs, even children’s bogey-carts, anything with wheels has been pressed into service, loaded with human and material flotsam, leaving the city.’
I found Florence’s compassionate and empathetic response to Phillip’s experiences tending to the injured and dying and the terrible images that are now seared in his memory, particularly moving. ‘It will never go away, she wants to say then. None of it does – the real or the imagined. Once you have seen those images, whether with your eyes or in your mind’s eye, they are etched there – seared into the body. They are there for ever and you can’t pretend otherwise.’
These Days is a compelling, hard-hitting depiction of the realities of war but also an illustration of the resilience of the human spirit, the instinct to rebuild and to carry on, in the words of Emma, come what may.
When the novel opens, Belfast has so far escaped the intense bombing experienced by other UK cities so, initially, the concerns of the family are close to home.
Audrey, the eldest daughter, is due to marry Richard, a doctor who works alongside her father Phillip, also a doctor. However, she has started to have doubts about whether her feelings for Richard are strong enough and whether the direction her life is moving in is the right one. ‘I wish, Audrey says, impulsively. I wish – But she doesn’t know what she wishes.’
Emma, a volunteer at a First Aid Post, is attracted to one of the other female volunteers and has taken the first tentative steps towards an intimate relationship, a relationship that would be considered shocking by her family, possibly even by wider society, but which has opened up for her a whole new set of feelings. ‘She hasn’t known, ever, that it is possible to feel so – ardent.’
Although by all appearances happily married, unbeknownst to her husband, Florence secretly continues to pine for her first love, lost in the First World War. ‘How is it, she sometimes thinks, that this is her life […] It isn’t, she hastily thinks, that she’s unhappy, nor ungrateful with her lot; just bemused, she supposes, that this has turned out to be it.’
Everything changes when the bombing raids start, initially targeting the docks but later becoming more indiscriminate in nature. (Over the night of 4th and 5th May 1941, the so-called Fire Raids, nearly 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Belfast including in residential areas.) The experiences of the Bell family are a microcosm of the impact of the bombing raids on the city: loved ones killed or injured, people desperately searching for missing family or friends, families seeking to be reunited.
The descriptions of the death and destruction inflicted on the city are harrowing but horrifyingly realistic: homes and buildings demolished, people buried beneath rubble, bodies in their hundreds laid out in a makeshift morgue. I found it impossible to read the scenes of the aftermath of the raids and of people fleeing the bomb-damaged city without thinking of the dreadful scenes we are currently witnessing in Ukraine. ‘Cars, carts, bicycles, perambulators, batch chairs, even children’s bogey-carts, anything with wheels has been pressed into service, loaded with human and material flotsam, leaving the city.’
I found Florence’s compassionate and empathetic response to Phillip’s experiences tending to the injured and dying and the terrible images that are now seared in his memory, particularly moving. ‘It will never go away, she wants to say then. None of it does – the real or the imagined. Once you have seen those images, whether with your eyes or in your mind’s eye, they are etched there – seared into the body. They are there for ever and you can’t pretend otherwise.’
These Days is a compelling, hard-hitting depiction of the realities of war but also an illustration of the resilience of the human spirit, the instinct to rebuild and to carry on, in the words of Emma, come what may.