Four British Red Cross nurses during the Second World War
A refreshing, feminist and uplifting tale set in the initial years of World War Two, A Girl Called Thursday, charts the lives of the Tilford family: mum, dad, Steve, Jenny, and Thursday (named such, as the reader is repeatedly told, because she was born on Armistice day and her parents wanted to commemorate the event). The book opens with Thursday's 21st birthday. It's a chirpy event with boisterous sibling rivalry and one sweetly oblivious grandma. However, behind all this, as Lilian Harry points out with a garish want of subtlety, there is a jarring atmosphere of tension and fear in the household as the dark clouds of the immanent war loom.
A couple of chapters later, Thursday announces that she wants to volunteer as a mobile nurse-she is stifled by the life she is expected to lead, and sees the war as a "chance to get away and do something interesting". Unsurprisingly, Thursday's traditional parents clash with her on this decision, but she soon leaves home with their blessing and sets off for Haslar, a foreboding naval Hospital in Portsmouth. Enemas, rifts, friendship, romance, and bawdy jokes ensue, as Thursday witnesses, first hand, the ugly consequences of war.
Harry's prose is beautifully bold and affecting, when describing loss at Haslar- "She saw the sea, which had been so calm and blue, churned into seething, blood-reddened soup; the beaches strewn with the bodies of the dead and wounded soldiers, in grotesque parody of the sunbathers who had once lain on the golden sands, and the boats which came and went a bitter reminder of the pleasure craft of a different world."
The narrative often returns to Thursday's home, in Worcester. Here, Thursday's sister, Jenny, and cousin, Denise, are embarking on a different kind of personal development: adolescence and the dances, make up and boys that go with it. Through these characters, Harry seems to be saying that in spite of the hardships that the younger generation faced during wartime Britain, they were determined to enjoy life.
This thread of optimism is woven through the novel as again and again, Harry's characters reference Churchill's "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech to bolster each other for fresh challenges. In the end, A Girl Called Thursday is about endurance and humanity- "however long it took, the struggle would one day be over"- is a belief that would be relevant to any of us.
With thanks to theguardian.com for the image.
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