The Address — Class 11 English

Marga Minco's poignant story, set in post-war Holland, explores the human predicament left by the Second World War. The narrator returns after the war to the address her mother had given her — Number 46, Marconi Street — where Mrs Dorling, an old acquaintance, had taken away the family's valuables during the war "to save" them, removing silver, plates, vases and crockery suitcase by suitcase. On her first visit, Mrs Dorling refuses to recognise the narrator and shuts the door, though she is wearing the narrator's mother's green cardigan. On a second visit, Mrs Dorling's teenaged daughter lets the narrator in, and she finds herself in a room crowded with her family's familiar possessions — the woollen tablecloth with its burn mark, the silver cutlery, the gold-rimmed teapot, the box of spoons — but arranged in a tasteless, oppressive way amid a muggy smell. The objects, severed from the life and people they once belonged to, have lost their meaning and value for her. Realising this, the narrator decides she does not want them back; in their strange surroundings they are emptied of the warmth of memory. She resolves to forget the address, choosing to move on from a past that the war has destroyed. The story powerfully conveys grief, loss, dispossession and the way war shatters ordinary lives, while showing the human will to leave the painful past behind.