Letters to Kaia

A grandfather describes his boyhood experiences of World War II Britain - with its bombs and rationing, evacuation and separation, "doodle-bugs" and rockets - to a grand-daughter currently of the same age (ten years), as he was at the end of the war in 1945, the midpoint of the decade spanned by this book.



The story begins with the author on vacation by the Danish seaside with his mother and infant brother in September 1939 as War was being declared by Britain and France on Nazi Germany. They escape by flying back to England just before the German invasion of Denmark. The family endures the London Blitz until he, his mother and brother are evacuated to a village in northern England to escape more bombing (which, it turns out, they fail to do). Throughout, young Michael has many adventures, which "Grandpa" Michael relates to his granddaughter Kaia in England.



Brought together as a continuous narrative, we see that Michael regarded his environment as "normal" - that children brought up in a war zone accept the state of war as normal!



Immediate post-war Britain in its grey, austere disillusion is accepted by the growing child who is more intrigued by the experiences of his Danish cousins during the German Occupation with secret agents and the Resistance. Why is Denmark awash in dairy products and ample meats when people in Britain - supposedly a victor of the war - struggle on with niggardly food allowances?



This account is unique, not so much in it's description of a child's memories of the violence of war in England (and his acceptance of it), but with the counter-point of his cousins' experiences in a Denmark subject not to bombs but to the presence of an inimical, occupying force.