Back Home

Back Home is the second children's historical novel by British author Michelle Magorian, following Goodnight Mister Tom, and was first published in 1984. Set in the summer of 1945, just after the end of the Second World War, it follows twelve-year-old Virginia "Rusty" Dickinson, who was sent to a family in Connecticut at the age of seven to escape the war and returns to England five years later. Before leaving, she barely remembers her mother and has never met her four-year-old brother Charlie. Arriving at Plymouth harbor, she has grown into a confident, cheerful, capable, outdoors-loving girl with an American accent, while her mother Peggy has long since become a skilled mechanic in the Women's Voluntary Service. The ruins left by the war, the shabby clothes, and the constant scarcity of postwar British life all feel foreign to her, and Charlie is wary of this "outsider" sister. A distance that is hard to bridge always lies between mother and daughter: Peggy treats her as a child, dislikes hearing about her American foster family, and is suspicious of Beth, the girl she befriended by the River Devon, and of the free, progressive, creativity-encouraging school Beth later attends. After the war the family moves back to Guildford to live with her grandmother, who finds fault with everything about Rusty—her accent, her clothes, her manners. When school starts she is sent to Benwood House, a strict girls' boarding school with endless rules and a cold atmosphere, where she falls behind in every class and finds relief only in drawing, gymnastics, and Greek dance. Through a young girl's eyes the novel portrays the scarcity and reconstruction of postwar British society, and one child's difficult journey to find a sense of belonging again between two cultures and two families. The book runs to about 480 pages, has twice been adapted into a television series of the same name, and also exists as a stage musical.