The Return of the Railway Children

Lou Kuenzler's The Return of the Railway Children is a wartime story for 11 year olds about a girl sent away from the Blitz to the house by the railway where her mother grew up.

What happens

Edie lives in a tiny attic flat in London with her mother, Fliss. Most nights the siren goes and they dash to Piccadilly Tube station to sleep on the platform among hundreds of strangers.

Fliss isn't like other mothers. She dabs on Chanel perfume during an air raid, forgets to make the tea and used to fly planes. She has never been married, which the girls at school (and their mothers) never let Edie forget.

Then a bomb falls on the Café de Paris, the glamorous club where they sheltered only last week. Fliss decides that's it. She's going to fly planes for the war effort, and Edie is going to Yorkshire. To Aunt Roberta, the sister Fliss fell out with years ago and Edie has never met.

Aunt Roberta lives at Three Chimneys, the house beside the railway. Edie has grown up on the stories. How Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis once stopped a train from crashing by waving red flannel petticoats.

On the train north she meets Gus, who is rude and prickly and clearly hiding something. And his little sister Greta, who never goes anywhere without a knitted elephant called Mr Churchill. By the time they reach the station, Gus has jumped off a moving train. So much for a quiet arrival!

You're right inside Edie's head the whole way, and she's easy to love. She's proud of her mother one minute and furious with her the next, and trying very hard to be grown-up about all of it. Greta steals every scene she's in (Mr Churchill does not like water).

If your reader knows the original Railway Children, they'll spot the names straight away. But the old stories are all explained, so they don't need to.

This one doesn't hide from the war. People are killed in the Café de Paris bombing. It happens off the page, but Edie sees the ruins the next morning, and a single silver shoe lying in the gutter. The gossip about Edie being "born out of wedlock" is cruel too. A reader who worries a lot about bombs and danger might find the opening chapter heavy going. For one who loves a story with real history in it, it's a gripping start.

What to read next

For another houseful of London children loose in the countryside, Five Children and It is waiting in the library. Five brothers and sisters leave London for a house by a gravel-pit and dig up a sand-fairy who grants one wish a day.