title: Keep the Home Fires Burning
author:  Anne Baker 
description: Anne Baker trained as a nurse in England, but after her marriage lived in Libya and Nigeria before returning to her native Birkenhead, where she worked as a Health Visitor. She now lives with her husband on Merseyside.
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  ![Images](../Images/00002.jpeg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For my mom and two dads
  
  
  
  
  
  &
  
  
  
  
  
  Katherine Porterfield
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
  
  
  
  
  
  You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
  
  
  
  
  
  yet here I am.
  
  
  
  
  
  —Margaret Atwood, from “Morning in the Burned House”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Prologue
  
  
  
  
  
  We named the houses they put us in. We stayed in some for months at a time;
  other places, it was a few days or a few hours. There was the Bomb-Making
  House, then the Electric House. After that came the Escape House, a squat
  concrete building where we’d sometimes hear gunfire outside our windows and
  sometimes a mother singing nearby to her child, her voice low and sweet. After
  we escaped the Escape House, we were moved, somewhat frantically, to the Tacky
  House, into a bedroom with a flowery bedspread and a wooden dresser that held
  hair sprays and gels laid out in perfect rows, a place where, it was clear
  from the sound of the angry, put-upon woman jab