Juliet Greenwood

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The Last Train from Paris (2023) by Juliet Greenwood

Women of Courage, WWII

Juliet Greenwood writes immersive historical fiction, often set in Wales or Cornwall around World War II and always featuring women protagonists, who rise to the challenge in difficult times. Her books are a tribute to those women, often unseen, who keep the world turning, even in the most terrible of times.

I have been following Juliet’s progress and reading her books since she wrote Eden’s Garden and I have also read and reviewed We That are Left and The Ferryman’s Daughter.

The Last Train from Paris is set in the period just before and during World War II, moving from Paris, to London to Cornwall and was inspired in part by stories that Juliet’s mother told her about this period.

It’s a story I’ve been longing to write, ever since I was a little girl and my Mum first told me about studying French near Paris on the day war broke out in 1939. I couldn’t imagine then what it must have been liketo have been a 17-year-old English girl, on her own, catching the train to Calais through a country preparing for war and, like Nora, finding herself on a ferry in the middle of the Channel, being stalked by a German submarine. It’s a story that’s haunted me, especially since we found the letters Mum exchanged with my Dad in London, and the scribbled note she sent him when she finally arrived in Dover.

Past Circumstances, Present Lives

WWII Historical Fiction Cornwall Paris 1939

1964: Iris is visiting her mother in St Mabon’s Cove, Cornwall, an escape from her life in London. She has been having nightmares of feeling trapped. Her mother has given her a box. She has also been looking at the objects in it that relate to her past. It is awakening something that has become more insistent. She knows she was adopted and that these items have something to do with her original family.

Over the course of the weekend, she will ask her mother questions and begin to learn about the past. And encounter a strange reporter is snooping around the village asking questions, a caller her mother wishes to ignore.

Studying in Paris, 1939

The historical narrative centres around two young women characters in 1939; Nora lives in London, where she has worked as a dish washer in a kitchen since she was sixteen. Sabine, a freelance journalist works in a boulangerie (bakery) in Paris, living with her husband Emil, also a journalist, who is focused on writing the novel that is going to change their lives.

The two women meet when Sabine gives a talk in London, after spending a month gaining work experience at the London Evening Standard newspaper. They maintain contact, writing each letters regularly.

Nora, frustrated with the lack of opportunity in her job, comes up with the idea of going to Paris to do a chef training course at Madame Godeaux’s Cuisine Française, seeing no chance of promotion in her current employment.

The Risk of Relying on the Family Business

Juliet Greenwood historical fiction Paris 19
Photo Pixabay @ Pexels.com

Sabine and Emil’s lives are a little precarious due to their reliance on Emil’s brother Albert to subsidise their rent and pending war has contributed to the family boot business suffering. When bad news arrives, Emil, as the second son, is summoned to return to Colmar, to take over from his brother.

When Nora arrives in Paris, she is disappointed to learn that Sabine has already left for Colmar, but she settles into her course and meets other girls, amid a growing wariness of the safety of the city. When one of the girls Heidi tells her the real reason she is in Paris, Nora begins to understand the danger that is not far away.

The novel follows the twin time periods, the present day 1964 where Iris hearing from her mother stories of the past that will lead towards her understanding her identity and circumstances that lead to where she is now and the crossing of paths of two women in the past whose connection resulted in lives being forever changed.

As the story gathers pace, secrets are revealed, dangers confronted and choices made in desperation have long term effects.

There are so many twists and turns in the story, it’s one that you won’t want to put down once started, bt to share any more would be to spoil the joy of discovering and the detective work we begin to do as readers, trying to puzzle out the missing pieces of the jigsaw of these three women’s lives.

A riveting and immersive read, that reminds us just how precarious life is, how stability can be shattered from one day to the next, yet offers hope in its demonstration of the acts of kindness some will make to help others, to make each other safe.

N.B. Thanks you to the author Juliet Greenwood, for providing me a copy of the book to read and review.

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The Ferryman’s Daughter by Juliet Greenwood

Cornwall The Ferryman's Daughter Juliet Greenwood Historical FictionHester is the ferryman’s daughter, it is Autumn 1908 and she lives in a Cornish seaside village with her family, whose lives are soon to be forever changed when her mother dies.

Working Class Women

A working class family, her mother warns her against getting close to those living in the big houses, who employ but rarely befriend those deemed beneath them in status.

They are not like us. They will never be like us. However much they may try not to be, they see us as a convenience, the people who clean their houses and draw their baths and make their life comfortable. It doesn’t really enter their heads that we are as real as they are, with dreams and ambitions and a desire to also walk in the sun. And that can make them cruel, even if they don’t mean to be. You remember that and don’t ever be distracted from the path you wish to take.

Hester takes over the household domestic duties and then her father’s job becoming a ferrywoman, when he is invalided. Despite her ability to cope, her father is taken in by the wily Jimmy, who continually ignores Hester’s refusals and worms his way into the family and their business.

The Ferryman's Daughter Juliet Greenwood red fishing boat

Photo by Korhan Erdol on Pexels.com

After performing a rescue at sea, Hester experiences for one night what it is like to be waited on, to sink into a hot bath and rest, sleep, with nothing else to do.

Her eyes closed, savouring the stillness. ‘This is what I want,’ she said aloud. She had no hankering to be waited on like a queen, as she had been this evening. She just didn’t want to spend her life as a drudge, the one who got up first, who went to bed last. The invisible hand who did the cleaning and the cooking and the mending, along with the juggling of a meagre budget, the conjuring up of meals out of the barest of essentials.

She is a young woman working against the odds that would normally pull her towards accepting a fate confining her to care for younger siblings and a wayward father. She manages to keep alive her ambition to become something more than what society, her father and Jimmy expect from her, to develop independence without neglecting those who rely on her, finding those who see her for who she really is, even when she loses sight of that herself.

Dad saw reliance on a daughter as humiliating, a lessening of his manhood. Reliance on a son-in-law, particularly one who would, in turn, be reliant on his instruction and his expertise, would restore the natural order of things. Her feelings on the matter were irrelevant.

The Ferryman's Daughter Seaside cafe blue chairs flower pots Cornwall

Photo by Juany Jimenez Torres on Pexels.com

Women During the War

Eventually circumstances including the outbreak of war provide her an opportunity to pursue her first love, to cook wholesome homemade food from the abundance of the gardens of Afalon, the big house where her grandmother had been head cook.  She will be tested and confront challenges she thought she’d left behind, but doing so leads her towards a desire inherited from her mother she is determined to pursue.

A refreshing protagonist, living in an era where few women escaped the narrow role society decided for them, until war gave them a chance to show what were capable of. Hester paves the way in setting a new example for those who experience setbacks, showing how they can be overcome and the importance of working with and being supported by like-minded women.

Historical Fiction With Empowered Female Characters

Another captivating novel from Juliet Greenwood, set in her familiar locale of Cornwall, with her trademark, capable, independent woman protagonist exploring an alternative way of life than ‘the pursuit of a husband’ in an era where rejection of a man’s attentions was perceived as a mark against the character of a woman, who ought not to think so highly of herself as to be capable of surviving without him. A refreshing representation of the rise of the empowered woman.

N.B. Thank you to the author Juliet Greenwood for providing me with a copy of your new book.

Further Reading/Reviews

Review of Eden’s Garden by Juliet Greenwood

Review of We That Are Left by Juliet Greenwood

Buy a Copy of The Ferryman’s Daughter via Book Depository

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We That Are Left by Juliet Greenwood

There are few greater delights than a book that draws you in from the very first pages and immediately makes you care about what happens next, that demands your attention in every free moment you can conjure until the end.

We That Are Left (2)Juliet Greenwood, while painting a world that is far from one that we might imagine living ourselves, one that takes place in an enormous stately home on a hill overlooking a village in Cornwall – manages to imbue in the reader a kind of aspiring fantasy that those who prefer an episode of Downton Abbey to Twilight will be more than happy to immerse themselves within.

Two years ago I read her novel Eden’s Garden also set in Cornwall and Wales and adored it. That book was a dual narrative of two women, one in contemporary time, the other in the Victorian era, whose lives we follow and as the novel progresses reveals what connects them.

Now Juliet Greenwood has written a timely novel, chronicling the lives of a group of young women, focused on Elin Helstone, a young wife living in Hiram House, a country estate that has been her family home since birth.  Now run by her increasingly distant husband Hugo, he has become consumed by dark thoughts he is unwilling to share connected to events of the Boer War and is now likely to be called up in yet another war. Elin tries to anticipate her husbands needs until the onset of war provides the circumstance  that will propel her towards asserting an independence she will find difficult to relinquish.

Elin’s unmarried cousin Alice lives with them, though Hugo pursues every opportunity to introduce her to eligible company in the hope that she too might exit his orbit. Then there is Mouse, Lady Margaret Northholme, whom the two young women meet in the opening pages and become firm friends, their lives will become forever entwined as war descends upon the country and everything as they have previously known it changes forever.

Juliet Greenwood & Phoebe
Glynliffon Hall, Wales
Seeking Inspiration

The opening pages possess an air of excitement and potential, young people meet at their big houses, conforming to social convention and can’t quite believe the rumours of pending war.

‘It will most likely blow over. War is such a medieval occupation. I can’t imagine any modern state embarking on such barbarity.’

War Draft

However, war does arrive and strips the village bare of men, plunging those who stay behind into an alternative way of living, they must live with the fear of not knowing what will happen, of the risk of attack and the dread of a telegram bearing tragic news.

That fear of the unknown will become less significant in comparison with the experience awaiting Elin and her gardener Jack as they depart on their own dangerous mission.

‘Nervous?’

‘Terrified,’ I replied.

‘So you should be. There’s no point in being brave from now on. Forget what anyone ever told you about heroes. Once we reach the other side, it’s fear that will keep you alive.’

Juliet Greenwood creates believable characters, putting them in credible but challenging situations where they fulfill our suspicions of their true natures, while her trademark elements of mystery and intrigue run on continuously throughout the narrative.

She does the same with country locations, we inhabit Hiram Hall and the Welsh farmhouse as if we had known them for years, the author invokes the reader’s imagination bringing the outdoor landscape and its associated elements into the page like fog creeping in from the bay. As Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift reminded us “The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own.’

Port Issac Cornwall

We that are left begins in 1914, a mere five years before Michel Déon’s The Foundling Boy (reviewed here) in 1919 and yet the contrast couldn’t be greater.

Here we become immersed in the war years (Déons novel set in the interwar years) where the absence of so many men advanced opportunities for women like no suffragette initiative yet had, though they certainly paved the way for women like Elin, Lady Margaret, Kitty, Alice and others to be able to take the initiative and get involved in the war effort. They learn to drive, volunteer in hospitals, grow food and distribute it to those with little or nothing. Women of the upper classes who were used to being waited on found themselves with few staff and having to manage like common people. Servants experienced the shift in equality between the classes.

Having complained about the lack of female role models with redeeming features in Michel Déon’s coming of age novel, I find them in abundance here and can’t help but observe the contrast in the female characters portrayed here versus those we met across the channel.

The actions of these women were no doubt inspired from Juliet Greenwood’s research into women and the war effort and she mentions the Virago Book of Women and the Great War edited by Joyce Marlow in the bibliography.

!!!!Car

Gertrude Stein With Auntie and war supplies, 1917

I was reminded of the incredible and courageous efforts of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas as portrayed in Diana Souhami’s excellent biography Gertrude and Alice; Gertrude having sold her Matisse Women with a Hat she and Alice initially decamped for the French Riviera abandoning Paris, but after some time became bored and returned deciding they too wanted to help with the war effort.

After meeting with an organisation that distributed supplies to hospitals, they were informed it would be most useful if they could provide a truck and do the same. So Gertrude took driving lessons, wrote to a cousin in New York asking for a van to be sent, had it converted and named Auntie and off they went road tripping around the country, becoming known at the garages throughout France, distributing the hospital supplies, writing letters to soldiers whom they referred to as their military godsons and collecting recipes along the way. But that’s another story!

We That Are Left is an enthralling read that sets a compulsive pace from that first intriguing landing and doesn’t let up until the final pages. It  is a moving contribution to contemporary WWI fiction and an enlightening exposé on how perceptions and the role of women experienced a complete and irreversible paradigm shift during those years, from which we have benefited more than we realise.

Highly recommended.

Note: Thank you to the author Juliet Greenwood for providing the photos of Glynllifon Hall above, and to her publisher Honno Press for providing me with a copy of the book to read.