The Sky Is Falling

Kit Pearson

4 ideas

1. Evacuated Siblings Split by Their Host

   In 1940 ten-year-old Norah Stoakes and her five-year-old brother Gavin are shipped from their English village to Toronto and taken in by the wealthy Mrs. Ogilvie and her daughter Mary. Mrs. Ogilvie, who is still grieving a dead son, lavishes attention on Gavin and treats Norah coldly, so the two children who arrived as one household become a favoured child and an outsider. Norah endures her exile through homesickness, bullying at school, and responsibility for a brother who is being drawn away from her.

2. Safety Experienced as Desertion

   A person removed from danger can feel guilt rather than relief, because leaving reads to them as abandoning the people and duty left behind. Norah had been watching the English skies for German planes, and in Canada she feels she has run away from her country's fight.

3. Caregiving as Displaced Grief

   A caregiver's uneven affection can be read as unresolved mourning rather than as a judgment of the children themselves. Mrs. Ogilvie's devotion to Gavin works as a way to replace her lost son, and her coldness to Norah follows from Norah not fitting that role. Seen this way, a child's rejection comes from the adult's history and not from anything the child did, although the child experiences it as a verdict on her own worth.

4. Age Determines How Uprooted Children Adapt

   Younger children rebuild attachment around whoever cares for them now, while older children hold on to their previous identity and home. Gavin quickly bonds with his hosts and lets England and his mother fade, while Norah resists assimilation and feels bound to remember for both of them. The gap turns the older sibling into a reluctant guardian of family continuity, and she comes to resent both the host who is taking her brother and the brother who is allowing it.

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