A Place to Hang the Moon

Edmund is the 11-year-old middle Pearce child and a main protagonist. Like William is an archetypal eldest sibling, Edmund is an archetypal middle child. On the surface he loves sweets and mischief and hates taking directions or advice. Under the surface, he is insecure about the trouble he brings to his siblings and deeply desires their love and forgiveness.

Edmund protects his feelings by pretending like he does not care. When Mr. Engersoll presents his “preposterous plan” to get the children new guardianship, Edmund is the only one to point out the absurdity of his idea. Edmund deeply desires loving and understanding guardianship, but being blunt is his method of hedging his expectations so that he does not get hurt if it does not work out.

This approach sometimes gets Edmund into trouble. When William suggests Edmund sit facing forward in the train because he gets motion sickness, Edmund refuses based on principle. Even when he started getting sick, “[a]t no point did he consider changing seats” (36): Admitting that William was right would be worse than the humiliation of being sick.

Edmund’s resulting sickness hardens Miss Carr against him; for much of the novel, the two are at odds. She does not understand the source of Edmund’s confrontational and stubborn nature, and so she blames Edmund for the siblings’ changing billet. Edmund’s bluntness gets the siblings in trouble at the Forresters’ house when he rightfully accuses the twins of framing him for defacing the school, which infuriates their mother, who believes the twins can do no wrong. Edmund gets the siblings thrown out of their second billet as well, when he calls Mrs. Griffith a bad mother for encouraging Penny to tear up their books for the petty, and Mrs. Griffith slaps him.

This bluster obscures Edmund’s deep desire for his siblings love and understanding. When Edmund asks William for affirmation that William does not believe Edmund could graffiti the school, William’s responding pause “[is] just long enough to cut a hole in Edmund’s heart” (120). Mrs. Müller is the first person to immediately and wholeheartedly understand Edmund, telling him that someone “must have the darkest of souls to hate someone as dear as [him]” (262). This care and affection for his nature is what endears Mrs. Müller to Edmund as their eventual guardian.

Anna, the final main protagonist, is nine years old and the youngest Pearce child. Like her brothers, she fills her archetypal role as the baby of the family. She has no memories of their parents and relies heavily on William for emotional support. She will “with some regularity, turn to William and say tell me something about them” (10) when she needs comfort, thus emphasizing The Importance of Stories in Difficult Times. William makes sacrifices to protect her, carrying her bag at the expense of “blisters on his palms” (47), telling her stories when he is emotionally exhausted, comforting her when she cries, letting her sit on his lap when she needs comfort, and hiding difficult truths from her, like what he and Edmund had to do when chasing rats for Mrs. Griffith. As such, when Anna constructs her storybook family, “the mum Anna pictures [is] not unlike William” (72). Though Anna is only three years younger than William, she sees him as a parental figure.

Anna is prone to tears and bouts of emotion due to her compassionate nature. When she hears about the casualties in London due to the ongoing Battle of Britain, she “[weeps] silent tears” for them (107), which earns her ridicule from the Forrester twins. Later, when their teacher Mrs. Warren must leave the village because of her husband’s death in the war, Edmund mistakenly assumes that Anna is crying because she will miss Mrs. Warren. She answers, “I’m not crying for me, Edmund. I’m crying for her” (140). Though deeply emotional, it is always motivated by compassion for others.

This compassion makes Anna well-suited for caring for others, especially those who are in emotional distress. When Mrs. Müller receives news of her husband’s death, Anna wraps “her arms about the librarian as tightly as she [knows] how. […] Anna might not [know] what to say, but she [knows] what to do” (267). Though Anna is young and therefore cannot always express her feelings coherently, she intuitively knows how to comfort and sympathize with people.

For Anna, Mrs. Müller fills the parental role that William has occupied for so long. In relieving William of his burdens, Mrs. Müller simultaneously fills Anna’s needs for attention and care, which makes her the perfect mother in Anna’s eyes.

Mrs. Müller is a key side character and the children’s eventual guardian. She has chestnut hair, and when the children meet her, she is wearing “a nubby cardigan over a delicately-flowered dress” (72). While the children filter through their first two billets, her library provides a safe space for them to escape to when needed. Mrs. Müller’s greatest strength is her empathy. She seems to always know what the children need and when they need it. She provides them with companionship and conversation in a form that makes sense to them as they connect over books and stories.

William secretly regrets bringing an encyclopedia as his only book, but will not give Edmund the satisfaction of admitting he was right. Mrs. Müller admires him but offers him a fiction book as well, saying, “I hope you keep it up, but I suppose when one is set adrift in an unknown land, a bit of diversion might not be such a bad thing?” (75). This compassion continues as the siblings’ situation gets worse. She offers them food and a warm fire when she realizes they are underfed and cold at Mrs. Griffith’s and combs the nits out of Anna’s hair so that William does not have to take on the task all by himself.

Mrs. Müller is targeted by Mrs. Norton and the WVS as an “unsuitable billet” because of her marriage to a German man who returned to Nazi Germany. Mrs. Müller tells the children the village thinks she’s guilty “by association” because “[p]eople are frightened” (189). She counts herself lucky, as people with German and Austrian nationality living in Britain were interned in detention camps across Britain beginning in 1939 (Kershaw, Roger. “Collar the lot! Britain’s policy of internment during the Second World War.” The National Archives. 2 July 2015). Despite her marriage, she bears no allegiance to Germany or their actions in the war and is eager to prove so to her fellow townspeople. She hosts a vegetable growing tutorial in support of the war effort and supplies goods for the evacuees’ victory garden, and she is hurt whenever she is rebuffed by the others in town.

She tends to be submissive and self-doubtful to a fault. She confesses to Edmund that she keeps her “head down quite a bit more than necessary” and does not stand up for herself (263). She admires Edmund’s ability to “keep lifting [his head] up again” even when people judge him and wrongfully accuse him (263). Edmund encourages her to be more confident, giving her the support that she does not get from the other adults. The children inspire Mrs. Müller, who finally asserts herself and takes custody of the children when she realizes how they have suffered with Mrs. Griffith. Just as Mrs. Müller helps the children, they help her grow more confident of herself and her place in society.

Miss Carr, a “hawkish woman” (26), is a complex secondary character. For much of the story, she plays a minor antagonistic role, but her behavior comes not from malice but from stress. Miss Carr misdirects the pressure and responsibility she feels as directress of evacuation operations and takes her stress out on the children. She labors to make an extremely difficult situation—which grows more difficult as tensions between village and evacuees rise—work for all parties involved. This leads to a dislike of anyone, like the Pearce children, who seem to make that mission more difficult.

When she is attempting to organize children by age to get them on the evacuation train, the Pearces’ special permission to stay together disrupts her idea of order. Later, Edmund gets motion sickness and soils his clothes. Rather than being compassionate for his discomfort like Mrs. Warren is, Miss Carr immediately thinks about the problems this creates for her. She reminds Edmund, “You would do well to remember that a billet for three is a challenge, even for evacuees not in such states of disrepair” (39). She does not dislike the children themselves, but she is overly focused on the difficulty of ensuring the wellness of dozens of children in a tense wartime environment.

The children do not understand this. Following Alfie’s lead, Edmund calls her “Carr-buncle” due to her severe nature. However, their perception of Miss Carr begins to change, and vice versa, when Edmund approaches her with the idea of an evacuee victory garden. Edmund’s idea speaks to her fundamental desire, which is to do something “good for the war effort in general, and [their] relationship with the village more specifically” (285). Previously, she and the Pearce children had conflicting goals: theirs was to stay together and find a new family while hers was to keep order among her charges. Now, their goal becomes the same.

Miss Carr confesses to Mrs. Müller that the garden “rather changed [her] opinion of [ Mrs. Müller’s] three wards” (295). Once the garden shows both parties that they have similar goals, they reconcile and begin to work together. This eases the animosity between them and allows them to overcome their past clashes.

Mr. and Mrs. Forrester are the Pearce children’s first billet. Mrs. Forrester is a slight woman who always wears bright pink lipstick, and Mr. Forrester is a large man with red cheeks. Mr. Forrester tends to take a back seat to Mrs. Forrester, following her lead in all things. He agrees to foster the three children under Mrs. Forrester’s request, and then agrees to toss them out at her urging too. Later, when he sees the children alone, he apologizes to them for this.

Mrs. Forrester is kind to the children but has a lack of empathy and compassion. While Anna cries over the lost lives in London and France due to the bombing and invasion, Mrs. Forrester laments the lack of nylon stockings and French perfumes. Mr. Forrester uses his position as the town butcher to get them extra meat rations, and Mrs. Forrester proudly brags about this to the children on their first night. She finds the Pearces’ love of reading strange and amusing, and she is willfully ignorant of Jack and Simon’s bullying of the Pearce children, even though there is ample evidence against them. Ultimately, she thinks that her own children “hung the moon,” and so she does not have room in her heart or life for the Pearces. The siblings stay with the Forresters for the first nine chapters, from summer through fall, but they are ultimately kicked out when the Forrester twins vandalize the school and frame Edmund for it.