‘When the War Came To Our Place’ is a fiction about a family living in a village on Tyneside during the Second World War. Bill and Maggie Atkinson, their two daughters Jane and Sally and son Daniel are the main characters in the book. Real events are woven into the fiction as we follow the Atkinson family and their friends from the dark days of 1941 right through to Victory in Europe Day. After being bombed out of their home on the north east coast, Sally and her husband Pete move back to live with her parents in the village of Sunniside.

As war rages across Europe, Sally and Pete Simpson’s world is upended when their home is destroyed in a bombing raid. Forced to return to Sally’s childhood village on Tyneside, they move in with her parents, Bill and Maggie, and her younger brother Daniel. While Sally tries to make the best of their new reality, Pete resents the restrictions of village life—and the authority of his no-nonsense father-in-law.
Restless and unwilling to work an honest job, Pete turns to black-market dealings and robbery, putting himself on the wrong side of both the law and his family. When Bill refuses to tolerate his reckless behaviour, Pete walks out on Sally and starts a new life with another woman, leaving his wife to pick up the pieces.
But Pete’s selfish choices catch up with him when he stumbles upon a dark family secret—one with the power to shatter not just Sally’s family, but another in the locality as well. Seeing an opportunity to enrich himself, he threatens to reveal the truth, only to be thwarted days before Victory in Europe is won.
All of the characters are fictitious but the places mentioned in the book are real. The story is interwoven with real-time events as they happened during the period from 1941 to Victory in Europe Day in 1945