The Teacher Evacuees

by Rose Warner

It’s late summer 1939, and Canadian-born teacher Victoria McKay is about to start her first permanent teaching job in London. Then she and all the other teachers are called to a meeting at the school. With the threat of war looming, they learn that — subject to parents’ agreement — all London schoolchildren will be evacuated to the UK countryside for safety. And all the teachers are to go with them.

Victoria is not thrilled at this announcement. After being jilted by her Canadian fiancé, she had come to England to avoid pitying looks from friends and family. After a temporary post at a girls’ school in Yorkshire, she’s been looking forward to building a new life in London, “the heart of everything.” But that’s no longer in the cards.

She had assumed talk of war would blow over, but now it’s on her doorstep. Along with two other teachers — stern middle-aged Beatrice and unworldly young Nell —Victoria is to accompany a group of children being evacuated to Hazelbury, a small Norfolk village near the coast north east of London.

When they arrive, all the children have been billeted with local families, but no arrangements have been made for the teachers; they end up sleeping in the village hall until rooms can be found for them. Two days after arriving, they learn that war has been declared. But all they can do is carry on, organizing school lessons for their pupils, helping them cope with fears and homesickness, all while dealing with their own emotions and various issues of village life.

The teachers meet Louis Granger, an attractive naval officer visiting his great-aunts who own the formerly-grand manor house in the village where the three teachers are staying. Victoria is drawn to Louis, and the attraction seems mutual; romance is on the horizon.

Then the plot thickens: Louis convinces Victoria to help him gather information about some of the villagers to help the British war effort. She complies, but when she later sees him meeting a suspicious stranger in the woods, she wonders if her trust was misplaced: is he actually working for the other side?

Victoria learns that the village itself is in peril, and from there it’s a dramatic race against time. She has to decide who to trust with the information and how to prevent tragedy from striking.

Excitement builds as the story unfolds, with all the tension of a suspenseful thriller wound around a trouble-filled romance. It’s also very much a wartime saga, accurately portraying details based on the author’s meticulous research into the period. Though the village and characters in the novel are fictional, the book depicts numerous events that actually happened, such as the Luftwaffe bombing the town of Cromer in July 1940. Many of the details of the teacher evacuees’ daily lives are drawn from real letters and audio interviews that the author reviewed at the Imperial War Museum in London.  

Numerous books and studies, both fiction and non-fiction, have focused on the lives of child evacuees in WWII, but the teachers who accompanied them are often overlooked. This novel, and the series that it launches, move into this gap with well-paced imagination and flair. A satisfying book, and highly recommended.

Rose Warner is a pen name for author Jen Gilroy — a new writing identity to distinguish her World War II women’s fiction from the “sweet contemporary romances” she writes as Jen. This is the first of her Rose Warner books; two more in her Teacher Evacuee series are already in the works.

Jen grew up in Winnipeg, spent summers in small-town Ontario, and lived in London UK for a number of years: all these settings are reflected in her writing. Her first published novel was A Cottage at Firefly Lake, a romance published in 2017. She’s now the author of ten romance novels — the five most recent ones published by Harlequin Heartwarming — set in rural and small town settings in the US. A sixth, A Surprise for the Single Dad, will be published in 2026.

During her years living in England, Jen earned a doctorate focusing on British cultural studies and social history from University College London, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. Drawing on this background, and writing as Jen, in 1922 she published a historical women’s fiction novel, The Sweetheart Locket, currently only available in audio. Now writing for Canelo, a UK-based publisher owned by Penguin Random House, she has continued delving into World War II social history to write the Teacher Evacuee series. She’s recently completed the second in this series, Christmas for the Teacher Evacuees, to be published in 2026. A third in the series is scheduled for 2027.

Jen lives in a small town south of Ottawa with her husband and floppy-eared dog; they have one daughter who is away at university.

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