Dear Mrs. Bird

  Dear Mrs. Bird by A. J. Pearce

     Emmeline Lake is a young, enthusiastic woman with high aspirations.  World War II is tearing London apart and she wants to help. She wants to be a war correspondent in the worst way, but for now she is a volunteer telephone operator with the Auxiliary Fire Service.  She fails to see this as an important thing to do and so when an advertisement in the outdated and circulation slipping newspaper The Woman’s Friend asks for help she is sure this is the important thing she has been waiting for. Finally! Her opening chance as a war correspondent!

     Alas, the job is as assistant to a very outdated advice columnist.  It is now Emmy’s job to screen the letters sent to Henrietta Bird before Mrs. Bird sees them.  Mrs. Bird will have no Unpleasantness.  She will entertain no letters dealing with relations; premarital, extramarital, physical or sexual.  Nothing illegal, political, religious, the war or ‘cookery.’  Well, it was not easy to find letters that did not deal with these issues and as Emmy reads through them she is struck with how sincere the women are who write in asking for advice and help.  Mix one highly ambitious, naïve, and well intentioned young woman with a war and her own personal issues and you get a really big mess.

     Emmy’s desire was to do something important during the war.  She had a heart and realized that just keeping the women who wrote as a last resort to a newspaper column upright was very important. The author, in the end, said these women were alone, everyone gone to war.  They were lonely, they had to make big decisions that would impact them and their families forever, and they needed to ask someone else’s opinion. Were they thinking clearly, should they look at a problem another way?  Emmy knew they deserved an answer, however simple or serious and in order to do that she had to change some minds at The Woman’s Friend.

     While I was reading this book I was at first confused with Emmy’s naivete, her simple ‘oh, gosh’ enthusiasm.  But then I remembered the time I was reading about, a time before internet, in your face media, and the unshockability of our time. The author reflects that time so well it was a relief to remember there was a simpler more respectful time.  A time, when even like now, if we stop and pay attention, small things can be big things.