When the War Came Home

Lesley Parr's When the War Came Home is a story for 9 year olds about a girl who moves to a Welsh valley village in the 1920s and finds the First World War still living in the people around her.

What happens

Natty's Friday night fish and chips with Mam is a tradition, no matter how tight money gets. This Friday Mam has news. She's been sacked from the factory for standing up for a workmate, they're behind on the rent, and they're moving in with relatives Natty barely remembers.

Natty is FURIOUS. Her mam is always fighting somebody else's fight (workers' rights, fairness, votes for women), and it's always Natty who ends up paying for it. She even feels guilty about the new coat Mam worked extra hours to buy.

So off they go to Uncle Dewi and Aunty Mary's smallholding, with its pigs, its goat and a cousin called Nerys who never stops talking. Nerys has made Natty a shelf and a drawer with little flowery labels. She also takes all the covers in the bed they have to share!

Then there are the two soldiers. Nerys's big brother Huw joined up at fourteen by lying about his age and was at Passchendaele. He's funny one minute and slamming a drawer so hard it smashes the next. And on a bench by the bowling green Natty meets Johnny, a young soldier from the hospital in the village who can't remember his name, his home or anything before the war.

Natty tells it herself, and she's very honest about how cross and lost she feels. You can hear the Welsh in the way everyone talks, all "mun" and "cariad" and Welsh cakes warm off the bakestone. The small moments land beautifully. Johnny calls bara brith "speckled bread", just like Natty and her mam do, and neither of them knows why.

It's gentle but it doesn't pretend. The war is over but the soldiers are still hurting, and the book is honest about memory loss, anger and grief (Natty's dad died when she was small). Nothing in it is graphic. A child who likes a quiet, thoughtful story with a mystery at its heart will get a lot from it, and it's a great way into talking about what happened after the fighting stopped.

What to read next

If they'd like to hear a serviceman tell his own war next, try The Tortoise and the Soldier, where a young reporter in the 1950s sits down with an old sailor who was at Gallipoli. It goes further into the fighting itself, so it suits a reader who's ready for that.