A sweeping, tenderhearted love story, Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash tells the story of two families living through World War II on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and the shy, irresistible young woman who will call them both her own.
As German bombs fall over London in 1940, working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make an impossible choice: they decide to send their eleven-year-old daughter, Beatrix, to America. There, she’ll live with another family for the duration of the war, where they hope she’ll stay safe.
Scared and angry, feeling lonely and displaced, Bea arrives in Boston to meet the Gregorys. Mr. and Mrs. G, and their sons William and Gerald, fold Bea seamlessly into their world. She becomes part of this lively family, learning their ways and their stories, adjusting to their affluent lifestyle. Bea grows close to both boys, one older and one younger, and fills in the gap between them. Before long, before she even realizes it, life with the Gregorys feels more natural to her than the quiet, spare life with her own parents back in England.
As Bea comes into herself and relaxes into her new life―summers on the coast in Maine, new friends clamoring to hear about life across the sea―the girl she had been begins to fade away, until, abruptly, she is called home to London when the war ends.
Desperate as she is not to leave this life behind, Bea dutifully retraces her trip across the Atlantic back to her new, old world. As she returns to post-war London, the memory of her American family stays with her, never fully letting her go, and always pulling on her heart as she tries to move on and pursue love and a life of her own.
AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURA SPENCE-ASH
What led you to write Beyond That, the Sea?
Over 20 years ago, I read an article in The New York Times about a group of British adults returning to the States to see where they had spent time during World War II when they were young. I was fascinated by this — I was aware that children in London were evacuated to the country, but I hadn’t known that children were sent so far afield and often traveled alone. My children were young when I learned about this, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the way this would feel to a child, and how this decision might impact the rest of their life. I was also interested in how this would feel to the adults and to the other children in the families, both those sending their child away and those bringing a strange child into their home. I then did some research, including reading a memoir by an evacuee who, coincidentally, had been sent to the same small town in Massachusetts where I went to high school. Suddenly the place came into focus for me.
Beyond That, the Sea is firmly rooted in history and place, but it’s also a tender coming-of-age story. What themes did you set out to explore in the book?
I was primarily interested in exploring identity, family, and loss. For much of the novel, Beatrix is struggling to figure out who she is and where she belongs. Beatrix’s struggle is unique, of course: Spending five formative years in another country, with another family, would naturally lead to displacement and confusion. Almost all of the characters wrestle with identity, though. I think this is universal — we are all constantly assessing who we are and who we want to be, both within our families and in the world at large. And loss is ever present in this novel, too, although Beatrix bears the heaviest weight: She is without her parents when she comes to the States, and then she leaves the Gregorys behind when she returns to England after the war. One theme that I didn’t necessarily set out to write about but which is threaded throughout the novel is love. It is there in all its many forms: romantic, familial, filial, and platonic. I think it’s hard to write about family — or perhaps write about these two families — and not write about love.
I think this will be a good read.
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