Sometimes I try to imagine what my life would have been if….
How strange to think of these ‘might have beens’ and what small incidents shape one’s destinies!

Listening Valley begins with the growing years of two sisters, Lou and Tonia, the children of indifferent parents who were most annoyed that at least one of them wasn’t a boy! 😳 The girls had a very close relationship with each other, which was just as well because their parents didn’t have much to do with either of them. They had a Nanny who had been with them all their lives and they loved her but their mother, to save money, sent her away when the girls were in their teens. The girls were left to their own devices at this stage and were able, with a bit of cunning from Lou, to explore their neighbourhood of Edinburgh and expand their meagre social lives.
Lou shocked her parents by eloping with a young man she met during this time and with the couple going off to India to live, Tonia was left at home with her parents. Lou had always taken the lead and overshadowed Tonia but ultimately her going away was a blessing in disguise for Tonia. A fearful child, she always had weak hands which made her clumsy and caused her much embarrassment. Her parents never bothered to investigate the cause of her weakness and basically thought Tonia was a bit useless as well as very dull.
Through a set of circumstances, Tonia began to flourish, and her life changed completely.
Listening Valley feels like two separate books as the story leaves the girls’ early lives behind and tracks the course of Tonia’s life as she moved to London and lived through the Second World War. Lou is barely mentioned except for one instance where she is confronted by the claim that in many ways she harmed her younger sister by making her dependent upon her. The war brought Tonia many changes and challenges as well as a great loss.

Fortunately Tonia had a refuge from the trials and troubles of life. It was a place inside herself – a listening place – and when life pressed upon her too hardly she could hide from her troubles and enjoy peace and quietness there.

Tonia experienced the horrors of the London Blitz and was kept busy during her time there. It was here that she was sent word that she had inherited her Great-Aunt Antonia’s home in Scotland and she decided to go back there without telling her family. The war was still in progress and in the village where she her aunt’s home was situated, she formed friendships with the servicemen and woman in the Airforce. At night she would listen to the bombers as they left for bombing raids over Germany and wonder which of her friends would not return.

The sound faded away in the distance as the plane flew over the hills…it would have reached the coast by this time, it would thundering along above the dark rolling sea, speeding east to the appointed place with its load of death…taking death to thousands of people in some German city. Ghastly thought! But that was war. We had to do it. We had to crush our enemies in every way we could. She reminded herself of London and Liverpool and Coventry, she thought if Warsaw and Rotterdam and Belgrade. The tables had been turned now, not in a spirit of revenge but merely as a war-time necessity.

In her new home she found diaries that her Great-Aunt Antonia kept where she read of another war and found many similarities between their lives. Her Aunt’s fiancée was drowned at sea and her life had to be refashioned, much as Tonia’s life now had to be remade. Her Aunt wrote:

Some people might think our lives dull and uneventful bit it does not seem so to us. We talked of this and agreed that it is not travel and adventure that make a full life. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.

Two of Tonya’s old school mates come back into her life and there is an improbable encounter with a woman who was supposedly a spy. This wasn’t very convincing, but it added uncertainty and tension regarding a possible romantic interest…🥀
I enjoyed this book despite some of its small flaws, and I thought Stevenson’s development of Tonia’s character was quite skillful. One of the strengths of Stevenson’s books is the settings, and as with her other books set during WWII, they are vividly portrayed – she was there and lived through the uncertainty but although there was a good amount of realism, Stevenson’s writing was always underscored with hope.

https://www.internal.org/William_Blake/To_Spring