The War That Saved My Life

Not all lies are morally wrong. It’s okay to lie to protect yourself, such as when Ada tells people that an accident with a brewer’s cart is to blame for her foot injury. Mam raised Ada to believe that her twisted foot is disgusting, and she doesn’t want people new to her to know that it’s a deformity. She thinks being born with a twisted foot means there is something wrong with her, but if her foot is only recently injured then people will be more accepting of her. Ada lies about her foot to protect herself from the disgust and scorn she’s sure she deserves.

A lie told “to keep yourself safe” doesn’t make a person a liar, as Susan says. A liar is someone who lies “to make themselves look special or important” (112). When Susan doesn’t believe Ada’s story about Margaret’s horse jumping their wall, it’s because Susan thinks Ada has exaggerated and created details in the story. Ada suspects Jamie of the same thing when he claims to know pilots from the nearby airfield.

It’s also okay to lie in order to protect others, such as when Susan lies to get her point across to Jamie’s teacher that his left-handedness is not a mark of the devil. Susan did go to Oxford and did graduate, but she studied maths, not Divinity. She tells the fib to protect Jamie, though, and to convince his teacher that even a Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford can be left-handed, therefore it must be fine that Jamie is left-handed as well.

The novel reveals that it’s a general rule to tell the truth, but under some circumstances, it’s okay to break rules. Telling the truth isn’t as black and white as Ada would like it to be, and Susan captures how complicated lying can be when she tells Ada, “I don’t want to tell you a lie, and I don’t know the truth” (130). Ada recognizes this is perhaps one of the “most honest” (130) things anyone has ever told her, signifying that she’s beginning to understand the complex nature of human interaction.

Mam establishes Ada’s identity for her as a simpleton, an identity Ada is unaware of until she escapes and speaks with Stephen White for the first time. Ada has waved to Stephen plenty of times from her window, never realizing that she may appear crazy to those at street level who are already under the impression that she’s not right in the head. Once he meets her, Stephen recognizes that it’s not Ada who is crazy, but rather Mam’s treatment of Ada that is crazy. His social acceptance of Ada is immediate, as demonstrated by his carrying her to the train station on his back.

Ada is surprised that she’s not treated as an outcast outside Mam’s apartment. She’s come to believe that she deserves to be shunned by society just as she’s shunned by Mam. If her own mother doesn’t accept her, it’s understandable that she’d expect the same from strangers. Similarly, Susan’s father shuns her, and she hides from social interaction with the village: “All those proper housewives! I don’t fit in. I never have” (169). A uniform from the WVS isn’t enough to make Susan feel accepted by the other women in the village because “it’s not the outside that counts, not with that group” (169). While Ada struggles to overcome feelings that her physical deformity makes her an outcast, Susan struggles with an internal feeling of separation from those around her, understanding that nothing she does to change her appearance can ever change who she is as a person..

Ada doesn’t recognize the filthy image of herself in the train station, and Mam doesn’t recognize the strong image of Ada riding Butter. Ada’s natural inclination is to not recognize the bad version in herself, whereas Mam’s inclination is to not recognize the good in Ada. Ada recognizes that she’s not simple, her foot is a long way from her head, but even with crutches, she’s the same person. It takes a year of self-realization and positive affirmation for Ada to not only look past the ugliness she sees in herself, but to also recognize strength and courage in herself.