Something in the Air

It is the 1920s and Peggy’s family, adjusting to the lack of money that has followed the death of her father at Passchendaele, get on with the task of living.

The ache of Peggy’s newly filled tooth nags away ‘forever’ – as do her older sister and school, and she hankers for the freedom and openness that she can glimpse in the lives of her aunt and her friends, a future to aspire to. Meanwhile she has begun to hear strange sounds – is she going mad, are the dead trying to communicate with her?

Peggy battles against repressions and senses new freedoms: in simple, mechanical terms she wants a machine that would play ‘any music you wanted, for as long as you wanted’ and something to connect cloth so that ‘when you put them together they just joined up’. But more than that, she wants an end to ignorance and the things that limit what she’s ‘allowed to know’, a new world where ‘anyone could learn anything … No one could stop them learning because they were poor or because they were girls.’

As Peggy learns later, her strange messages have not been ‘from the other side … but from the future’, a future that is where we are, easily accepting the freedoms that she yearns and fights for. This is a fine, intelligent book, immersing its layers of questions in the apparently ordinary and everyday, sensitive to people’s lives, providing a thoughtful linking of times past and times present, mixing wit and anger, and quietly advocating revolution.