Between The Wars (Complete Set) - Between The Wars, #5

Mary Evans was born in 1920 in Melbourne, Australia. Her father had come home from World War 1 suffering from shell shock and the loss of his leg. When she was only seven, her father finally died. She, her mother and younger brother, David who had an intellectual disability, were cast out onto the streets. By sheer chance Mary spots a pickpocket at the Queen Victoria Market and gives chase. The pickpocket is arrested.
The owner of the stolen wallet is so grateful that he offers Mary's mother a job as a live-in maid. The Evans family take up residence in the Hansens' house in Hawthorn, a well to-do suburb of Melbourne. Mary finds it palatial in comparison to sleeping in the back alleys of North Melbourne. The Hansens insist that she begin school at a nearby private girls' school. Mary excels at school and her world becomes much more expansive.
New people enter that world. The Great Depression hits just as Mary wins a scholarship. The Hansens are very community minded and determined to help those struggling. This along with the exposure to many places, ideas and people help Mary to weld together a framework of philosophy and ethics beyond her years. Mary in Part 2 is going through the strange adolescent period that every person goes through at secondary school.
Sometimes very confident, sometimes very unsure and of course there are boys. It is the time of the Great Depression and the Hansens are doing what they can to support the less well off in the community. Mary, her brother David and her mother also pitch in. In Part 3 Mary Evans is about to graduate from secondary school and enter into university which was not a very common thing for young women during the late 1930's in Melbourne, Australia.
She is still living with the Hansens where her mother works as a live-in maid and companion in the affluent suburb of Hawthorn. Australia is just coming out of the Great Depression but war looms on the horizon in Europe. Mary has grown up a lot and matured beyond her years. She is slowly building relationships, in particular, one has become very strong and that is with her boyfriend Michael who is also on the way to university.
Michael Harrington began writing poetry when he first met Mary Evans, a teenage girl he met in the 1930's at a joint school dance In Melbourne, Australia. Very quiet and unassuming, he used his poetry to profess his love of her and to reflect on his young life that was about to have a massive upheaval as the Second World War approached. His poems form the addendum to the book.