Beyond distance, beyond time, beyond life itself.Ī woman. Spanning World War II and the sweep of the twentieth century, We Must Be Brave explores the fierce love that we feel for our children and the power of that love to endure. And so we grow.'A powerful story that proves how love itself requires courage.' -Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing And so we come to understand what endurance is. Loss teaches us about one of the most enduring kinds of love – the love we have for the people we will not see again. She remains present in our memories and our love. But loss is not a gap or hole, not a crude absence.Īs Ellen and I discovered, a small girl may be gone, but she is never gone. The small things left behind – in my case it might be a pink baby blanket, in Ellen’s case a pencil stub found twenty years later, chewed by milk teeth – are freighted with an almost wondrous power. I have not known the pain of this kind of parting and I hope I never will.īut what Ellen and I share – I know this – is the kind of awed longing, the pin-sharp memory for detail, the intense sense of preciousness and yearning, that goes with loving a child who has departed. Her pain is different: the child she looks after and grows to love, Pamela, is taken away from her at a young age to live far away. Ellen, unlike me, is childless, so she never experienced my pain. It didn’t take me long, after I first began to create the character of Ellen Parr, to realize that while I was writing about an English village during the Second World War, at its heart, I was writing about loss. I placed her with my grandparents because I know they will look after her until we all meet again. She died just before she was born, a baby who had my hands and feet and her father’s nose. For there is another birthday that I commemorate by visiting a country graveyard in the South of England, the final resting place of my maternal grandparents, on which my first daughter’s ashes are scattered. But I don’t simply laugh and smile on my daughter’s birthday. I am perfectly sure that all parents love their children inordinately. I am blessed by a child who came to me late in life, and I love this daughter of mine, who is now ten years old, inordinately. ‘Loss teaches us about one of the most enduring kinds of love.’

We must be brave