I Have been looking for the title of that book for the last 35 years.
I had the girl in the green jacket and the white armband incised into my memory somewhere between 8 and 10[ 3rd and 5th grade], when I devoured this book and took Marjorie and her nonverbal companion acquired in the crux of the tale into the center of my chest.
My kid sister was still deep on the autism spectrum at the time and the family was all in when it came to continuing the ABA therapy techniques she was inundated with daily at her special school when she got home. She was close to being upleveled into Montessori/Waldorf-esque educational programming on her way back to normal school and then eventually performing arts edu.
It’s so wild to look back on how ALL of that was jam-packed into the same chunk of years, how all hands on deck it was. But that fight got her out of the fog that had been eating away at her like the Nothing from never-ending story, so it was worth it.
All of our household kid issues stemmed from bites from the same beast. Responses to the venom. But what I am realizing now is that I was self-help, even then, at with, nine, ten. I can now see it was 3rd grade. Because I see Heather, my best friend. and I see our 3rd grade school, not 4th and 5th grade school.
I really have looked for this book forever:
My being a writer weaves directly back to Margaret J. Anderson’s book Searching for Shona, as tightly as it does to Frances Hodgson Burnett, of A Little Princess fame.
But it is only because of how this fire was rekindled this past weekend that I am this explicitly quietly shaken to my core.
There are cheat codes for the life that was already upon me and that waited for me all over this book, just as much as Burnett’s book gave me a cosmically comical understanding of the beast at the root of my mother at ages five, six and seven to be basically impervious to the brunt of her “work.”
I look back and know that it’s this book that even gave me the mental space and actual capacity to function as I was called on to in regards to my sister.
No adult around me gave me the tools for navigating that. I used to chalk it up to just them being narcs. Now I also add in that they were kids themselves, arrogant, popular ones thrown into dealing with all of this that their narcissism just dined on daily, as all popular girl and guy in HS shit fell the fuck away, and hard.
BUT…Anderson did.
And it is actually very possible that when the time came to go no- contact with my own family (for reasons wholly different than what happens in this book) I had psychological blueprints for having to maneuver as such thanks in part to this tale, to let the unspoken depths of all of that roll off of my back like water.
Because that was surely gotten across in the beginning of the book. Marjorie’s family were pompous, rich, cold jerks. I don’t even recall them being involved IN shipping her off. So that Shona became …what she did…even to an eight year old’s burgeoning reading comprehension… you fucking “got” it.
The way it happened with the protagonist of the book was not run of the mill, but she had very good reasons to think she’d fare better getting the fuck outta dodge than going and holing up with an even worse wing of them all.
The math MAthed like a motherfuck.
If you don’t want to become them, you get the fuck away from them.
But… how did this come about? How did this fire get rekindled?
A conversation with a client. A heart to heart had with a woman whose lineage escaped the holocaust, telling me about stumbling stone ceremonies. A WILD story that gave me chills every step of the way, that I implored her to write down…but in our tete a tete she spoke of immediate family members escaping via the Kindertransport and ending up in the English countryside and Canada.
It was like I was set on fire-
Because that was the nucleus of this book that has haunted me my entire adult life that I’d given up on looking for. It’s always those clarifying questions too. Kindertransport is not what is sounds like. It’s not just the wee ones.
“I think you were able to participate in it all the way to sixteen or seventeen,” she said.
The arc of the book and my inability to recall the name flooded out of me. The book was never positioned as a holocaust book. It was a war book. & they were kids. It didn’t matter to the child reading the book if they were Jewish or not. But I do recall that Anderson made them blond and that Marjorie’s hair darkening as she got older was positioned as a quiet tell.
I can look back and see the nuances that book’s heart helped me develop.
I can see a direct through line from it to The Wall by John Hersey. I can see how it primed me for Gulag, without even trying. She changed my life.
And now I once again know the title of the book she did it through.
What a writerhead Day!
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