With Ellen’s narration we hear the developments of her thoughts and feelings towards Pamela, her caution at first and then her dread of being separated from her new daughter. Pamela is not Ellen’s child and this is the centerpiece of the story – the conflict faced by Ellen and her husband in taking in a child that is not their own, their growing affection, and their, particularly Ellen’s, fears of the disruption of their new family life. The novel, so the description says, is about the fierce love we feel for our children, and the ability of that love to endure, and this description is partially accurate. In a sense the novel never leaves these two characters as they greatly influence every thought and action the other takes. The narrator is Ellen, just eighteen in 1940, and the girl is Pamela – a sleeping toddler unaccompanied on an evacuation bus to the safety of Upton, a small village in the south of England. Four, maybe five years old.” This is how the 400 page, decade-spanning story begins. “She was fast asleep on the back seat of the bus.

A story of courage and kindness, hardship and friendship, We Must be Brave explores the fierce love we feel for our children and the astonishing power of that love to endure.We Must Be Brave opens on an evacuation bus after an air raid on Southampton. But with the end of the fighting comes the realization that Pamela was never theirs to keep. As the war rages on, love grows where it was least expected, surprising them all. Ellen has always believed she does not want children, but when she takes Pamela into her home the child cracks open the past Ellen thought she had escaped and the future she and her husband Selwyn had dreamed for themselves.

Little Pamela, it seems, is entirely alone. In Upton village, amid the chaos, newly-married Ellen Parr finds a girl sleeping, unclaimed at the back of an empty bus. As German bombs fall on Southampton, the city's residents flee to the surrounding villages. The last few passengers were shuffling away from me down the aisle to the doors. She was fast asleep on the back seat of the bus. Spanning the sweep of the twentieth century, We Must Be Brave is a luminous and profoundly moving novel about the people we rescue and the ways in which they rescue us back. A woman a war a child that changed everything.

We must be brave by frances liardet