An elegant memoir of young adulthood in war-torn Britain.

After an interior design career and the publication of several architectural histories, 88-year-old Wyllie decided in 2020 to document her childhood and coming-of-age during World War II, folding in an account of today’s ongoing pandemic. Her keen eye for detail enriches the memoir—a product, in part, of her training as a secretary and interior designer. The books opens in Kirk Ella House, an 18th-century Georgian mansion in the Yorkshire town of Hull with a “full complement of staff,” where the author lived a life “ordered and gentle in the typical mode of an upper-class English family.” The 6-year old’s life changes on September 3, 1939, when the Nazis invade Poland. She details wartime routines: siren suits, tank sightings, evacuations, knitting balaclavas for soldiers, rations. Still, Wyllie’s class privilege spared her the fate of less fortunate British citizens, and her education continued uninterrupted at Queen Ethelburga’s School and St. Andrews, punctuated by acting, jitterbugging, and occasional studying. A more mature and adventurous chapter begins with Wyllie meeting Peter Wyllie, a young Greenland-exploring geologist of London lower-middle-class origin. The untraditional match took her to a more modest lifestyle and unfamiliar shores as she followed Pete to Pennsylvania State University. The everyday elements of a posh British young woman’s experience—including golden girdles and trousseaus—are traded for aspects of American living, including watching football and pronouncing “tomatoes” with a long “a.” Although the book largely focuses on Wyllie’s young adulthood, it also effectively points to parallels and contrasts between the emergency conditions of 1940 and 2020, highlighting recruitment of volunteers, separation of families, and distribution of protective equipment (whether it’s gas masks or N95s). Wyllie’s vivid accounts of her and Pete’s road trips also offer an outdoorsy palliative for today’s stresses: Her enthusiasm over Florida beaches, Badlands camping, and Yosemite sequoias will remind landlocked Americans that, in the absence of overseas travel, home can be equally delightful.

Sentimental reminiscences of coping during challenging times.