Just a Larger Family: Letters of Marie Williamson from the Canadian Home Front, 1940–1944
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by edited by Mary F. Williamson and Tom Sharp
Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, 2011
402 pp., illus., $50 hardcover
Twentieth-century aerial warfare brought devastation to the home fronts of Europe, and the wider populace’s status as non-combatants no longer mattered. Bombs and their horrific aftermath were indiscriminate, and by World War II the fear for one’s family’s safety reached a critical mass.
Thousands of British children were sent to safer environs — some as close as the English countryside, others as far away as Canada. Just a Larger Family is a tale of two mothers. Margaret Sharp, an English woman, sent her children to live with her Canadian cousin, Marie Williamson, who was practically a stranger to Sharp.
Also a mother of two, Williamson was sensitive to Sharp’s sense of loss and to her concern for her children. She tried to assuage the pain of separation by writing frequent letters that described the children’s activities in vivid detail. Williamson’s collected letters to Sharp tell the story of one family in World War II Toronto, but they also provide insight to a wider wartime phenomenon.
— Tanja Hütter (Read bio)
Tanja Hütter is Online Manager for Canada's History Society and a pragmatic idealist.