Comparisons between the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and World War II create a backdrop for recollections of the author’s childhood, schooling, marriage, and a three-year sojourn in America. The book is a prequel to Wyllie’s 2012 memoir, Loving Andrew.
With the need to find an engrossing project to fill the isolation forced on us by the 2020 global pandemic, From There to Here recalls the author’s childhood growing up in England during World War II. Wyllie compares the many restrictions imposed on our lives today with the hardships endured by the British during the war. Set against this backdrop, the book chronicles the author’s idyllic childhood interrupted by the onset of a world war and all its horrors; wartime in preparatory school; peace declared during senior boarding school; followed by university, marriage to an Arctic explorer, and a three-year sojourn in America. The book ends with the anticipated birth of the author’s first child, making this story a prequel to her previously published Loving Andrew: a Fifty-Two-Year Story of Down Syndrome.
Excerpt
On September 3, 1939, a booming voice over a crackling radio brought news into our home and all of Great Britain that, following Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland, France and Britain had declared war on Germany. The new war would become the biggest and deadliest war in history involving over 30 countries, and lasting six years with an unprecedented loss of life, both in the fighting itself and in the indescribable horror of the Nazi concentration camps, annihilating millions of Jews and fulfilling Hitler’s aim to create a master race of pure Aryans.
During our current 21st century Coronavirus pandemic, we listen in horror to daily reports of numbers, in hundreds and thousands, dying from a vicious virus. Statistics are documented by city, county, nation, and globally, sometimes giving the impression that we are competing with other countries to record the largest number of dead. We are reminded of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic and, 30 some years later, the second World War reports counting the military, naval, and civilian fatalities.
Along with the rest of Britain my peaceful childhood would never be the same. Hull became one of the most severely damaged British cities with 95 percent of houses destroyed or needing repair. As a port city. . . it was especially vulnerable. Moreover, its location was on the route home for the German Luftwaffe, providing a convenient opportunity to unload leftover bombs as the planes followed the river Hull to the Humber estuary and back to their own bases. Between 1940 and 1945, the city recorded more than 1,000 hours under alert with 1,200 people killed by the bombing.
Although we lived outside Hull, in the peaceful village of Kirk Ella, we were still affected by the air raids. Homeowners built air raid shelters in their gardens or walked to the nearest communal shelter. We converted a wine cellar under the kitchen into a shelter and had an emergency egress built from the cellar to the outside with the exit stairs shielded by sandbags in case our house was bombed and collapsed on top of us. The entrance to the cellar was from one of the storage rooms off the kitchen. There was a large trap door in the floor with a heavy ring to pull it up. A steep ladder led into the cellar where cubby holes that normally stored wine were converted into sleeping alcoves. In spite of spending many nights in the cellar and trying to sleep on a lumpy mattress in one of the alcoves, I always forgot that I couldn’t sit up without bumping my head on the ledge above.
Professional Reviews
From There to Here
FROM THERE TO HERE: WAR, PEACE, PANDEMIC
By Romy Wyllie
IR RATING: 4.0
Romy Wyllie’s FROM THERE TO HERE offers a vivid, loving glimpse into a life both alien and familiar: growing up wealthy in England during a world-shaking war and traveling through an American landscape that is at once the same and utterly changed.
IR Approved
Memoir
• Posted by IR Staff|
• January 4, 2021
Synopsis:
FROM THERE TO HERE: War, Peace, Pandemic— which serves as a prequel to the author’s earlier volume— is a mid-20th century memoir of an upper-middle-class woman from her youth in England during World War II through her early adult years in America.
Full Description:
Romy Wyllie was born into the upper-middle-class family of a Scottish-born surgeon living in northern England. She is sent, young, to boarding schools during and after World War II and attends the University of St. Andrews on a windy eastern tip of the Scottish coast. At university, the athletic, good-natured, bright-hearted Wyllie’s instinct for camaraderie sometimes constrains her academic accomplishments. The second half of her tale takes us from her marriage to geologist/petrologist Peter Wyllie, their early years in Pennsylvania, and their extended travel across the United States before the birth of their first child.
Wyllie has a knack for clear prose and for blending well-recalled personal details with a sense of place and history. These talents enrich her storytelling. The history of the school buildings, the annual Kate Kennedy Club parade with its pipe band and a costumed procession of “golfers, clerics, scholars, monarchs, and courtiers,” the dances she attended, and meticulous descriptions of her experiences enliven her story. Against this backdrop of vivid detail, there is the steady, gentle glow of her love and admiration for her father, her husband, and the places she has been and seen.
Memoirs have the fascinating potential of bringing us into lives that resonate with yet are deeply different from our own. Wyllie’s story is no exception. The way her life and family are menaced though not undone by World War II reverberates with the roulette-wheel experience of American life under COVID-19. And yet, her story is rich in the unfamiliar. An adoring nanny, being shipped off to boarding school at a young age, being chided by elderly landladies for bringing men to visit will be alien experiences to many readers. Similarly, and even more haunting, a long happy travelogue through a 1950s America with similar surfaces, but very different depths.
Romy Wyllie’s FROM THERE TO HERE: War, Peace, Pandemic offers a vivid, loving glimpse into a life both alien and familiar: growing up wealthy in England during a world-shaking war and traveling through an American landscape that is at once the same and utterly changed.
~Ellen Graham for IndieReader
A Peek into the Past
This evocative memoir is a peek into a past that the author always manages to make relevant to the present. Her lively and engaging style transports the reader on a journey through childhood in wartime, growing up and falling in love in post-war Britain, and a coming of age sojourn in the US. Vividly recalled events, along with many fascinating historical links, make this a very enjoyable read. It is also a timely book with many parallels to life today.
*Jan Fox, Journalist, Index On Censorship magazine.
Insightful Wisdom Inspired by the Pandemic
5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful wisdom inspired by the pandemic and shared with a generous heart
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2020
For years, I have been so grateful for Romy Wyllie's first memoir, Loving Andrew, as a number of people with Down syndrome have graced my life, most notably, my goddaughter. And I've enjoyed reading her second memoir, From There to Here, and learning more fully about the life Romy led in the years leading up to the birth of Andrew. The Land of Green Ginger, WWII (a rocket hitting her garden), Queen Mary's School and Queen Ethelburga's School, university, Pete (how she darned his socks - so sweet!), marriage, exploring America after five days at sea, and so much more. While reading From Here to There, I found great comfort in Romy's words in the midst of the events of 2020 - her memoir about war, peace, and pandemic have certainly helped me put things into perspective and it has reminded me to be patient, learn from change, and make the best out of life. HIghly recommended.
Julie Valerie
Inside the Methadone Clinic. Addiction to heroin, methadone, and other opiates. Destruction. The primal addiction" of the child, power and control over your own life, the institutions and the characters, the love between a mother and son. This book i
