Linda Ruth Brooks

The day the war ended Linda Ruth Brooks

The day the war ended is the day that I began. It was the day people danced in the streets of Sydney. Nanna Ennis tells me over and over that I interrupted the Prime Minister's speech on the radio about Japan giving up and the war had ended. She said no one heard me cry because everyone in the whole hospital was making a dreadful racket celebrating.



Nine year old Lucy Meredith Carter has lost stories. In order to work things out she writes things in her Book of Known Facts, hoping to unravel the secrets of war and family. Post World War II in a small country town is a confusing place for Lucy. She dreams of her dead mother, Sylvia, and worries about where the world begins and ends. She visits her aunt, Fliss, who suffered a stroke at the end of the war. George Carter, a single father, a diffident man who steadfastly refuses to delegate Lucy's care, resisting help and advice from his mother-in-law Ethel, the Ennis family matriarch. George adores his curious daughter. Ethel, a stoic widow doesn't agree with her son-in-law. Some things are best left in the past. Trapped in a partly paralysed body, Fliss struggles with everyday life in a convalescent home, haunted by memories of lost love and the secret locked in her mind. When she utters a word after years of being silent, Lucy tries to find the meaning of the strange word. Harry, the digger living in the shack at the Ennis boarding house remembers the trauma of war and weaves stories for Lucy. Old Pat, a shell-shocked veteran of WWI wanders, lost and living off the land.