67 pages • 2 hours read
Kate AlbusA Place to Hang the Moon
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
In December, the WVS holds a clothing swap so the growing evacuee and village children can get clothes that fit. Miss Carr also announces that the evacuees will put on a Nativity Play for the town as a goodwill gesture. Edmund is cast as the star, Anna as an angel, and William as a shepherd, even though Frances wanted them to play Mary and Joseph.
The siblings continue to spend their afternoons in the library next to the fire, which is preferable to their straw pallets and threadbare blankets in Mrs. Griffith’s frigid house. Soon after the clothing swap, Anna discovers she caught nits from her new coat. She starts crying, ashamed, although William assures her it is not her fault and he will take care of her.
When they tell Mrs. Müller, she is adamant about taking that responsibility off William’s shoulders. She visits the pharmacist for supplies and combs out Anna’s nits. Edmund asks Mrs. Müller if she has children or a husband. She says she does have a husband but sounds sad. She tells them that her husband is German and came to England after the Great War. When the new war broke out, he went home under the auspices of checking on his family. He never returned, and she fears he enlisted with the Nazi Party. Because of this association with Germany, the townsfolk distrust her.
When they return to Mrs. Griffith’s house, she is furious to learn that Anna had nits. She begrudgingly allows the children to boil their things on the stove. The children work into the night boiling, wringing out, and drying their things. They decide to sleep near the coal stove in the kitchen rather than in their frigid room on damp pallets.
Chapter 15 Summary
Through late December, the children prepare for their upcoming play during the day and return to their freezing room at night. One Saturday, they wake up to the first snowfall of the year. Mrs. Griffith agrees to let them play in the snow as long as they watch her three daughters while she takes the baby shopping.
The six children go to the town square to play with the rest of the children in the snow. The boys start a snowball war, creating munitions and battlements as if they are in the war. Jack and Simon sneak up behind Edmund and attempt to drown him in the snow. William punches one of the twins to save Edmund, and boys from both the evacuee group and town congratulate him. Mrs. Griffith is mad about how wet they all are when they return and orders the three siblings to dry all of their things.
The next morning is Christmas Eve. The children wake up and begin to tear up newspapers for the petty. Anna recognizes some of the pages Penny has torn up as book pages, not newspaper pages. The siblings see a pile of torn up books from both home and the library, and are aghast that Mrs. Griffith has taken the books from their room for this purpose.
Edmund gets into a screaming match with Mrs. Griffith. He is angry that she allowed such a thing to happen and that she appears unremorseful, while she is angry that they have the “nerve” to speak back to her in her house. She slaps Edmund. The siblings hurriedly leave the house, ignoring Mrs. Griffith’s calls behind them.
Chapter 16 Summary
Needing someplace warm, the siblings go to the church where they are to put on the Nativity Play that afternoon. There, they come up with a plan for their futures. They would like to find Mrs. Müller, but they do not know where she lives and are not hopeful that she can help them, given that she has been deemed “unsuitable.”
When Miss Carr arrives for the play, William asks her if they can get a new foster home. Miss Carr is furious and blames Edmund; she says that another home is out of the question and they need to go back to Mrs. Griffith’s after the play and apologize to her.
The children try their best in the Nativity Play, though Edmund—sick, with a growing welt on his face—briefly drops the Star of Bethlehem on Joseph. After the play, the hungry children eagerly eat cookies at the reception. They are approached by Mrs. Müller, who congratulates them on their performance but grows concerned when she sees Edmund’s welt.
Anna tells the librarian everything that happened at Mrs. Griffith’s house, despite William’s hesitation. Mrs. Müller feels guilty that she let the voices of the townspeople and her own self-doubt convince her that the children would be better off enduring Mrs. Griffith’s neglect and abuse than staying with her.
She approaches Miss Carr, resolved to become the children’s new foster mother. Miss Carr protests at first, but Mrs. Müller is firm about the neglect that has been leveled at the children previously and that she is the best one to remedy that. Cowed, Miss Carr relents. The children begin to walk with Mrs. Müller back to her home.
Chapter 17 Summary
The children arrive at Mrs. Müller’s house, a small but cozy cottage. She feeds them warm, buttered bread and hot chocolate and gives them spare nightclothes. She tucks them into her bed with hot water bottles while she takes the spare room. She reads them a bedtime story, which fills the children with an unfamiliar feeling of comfort and hope.
Chapter 18 Summary
On Christmas Day, the children wake up late, unused to being warm and cozy. They thank Mrs. Müller profusely, but she thanks them in turn, glad not to be alone for another Christmas. While they eat, they discuss Mrs. Müller’s chickens, goat, and garden. She asks about their parents; William reveals that their parents have passed and says they are cared for by their grandmother.
After they eat, Mrs. Müller reveals that they each have Christmas presents: A small gift each, a new copy of their destroyed books from home, peppermints, and hand-knitted socks. Together, they listen to the King’s Christmas broadcast. The children write yet another postcard to Miss Collins updating her about their new address.
Over the next week, the children fall into the routine of daily life with Mrs. Müller.
Chapters 14-18 Analysis
These chapters focus on The Meaning of Family as the Pearce children finally arrive at Mrs. Müller’s home. While William, Edmund, and Anna’s relationship stays strong through the novel, it is occasionally put to the test by their circumstances. In these chapters, they increasingly learn about relying on themselves and how their love for each other can carry them through difficult situations. They also realize what they do not want in a mother and begin to see some attributes in Mrs. Müller that they do want.
William, Edmund, and Anna are the only constant forces in each other’s lives. While they ultimately always stand by one another, environmental stressors sometimes lead to tension in their relationship. Edmund was hurt after they got kicked out of their first billet because William and Anna hesitated before taking his side in their conflict with the Forresters. In contrast, when Mrs. Griffith slaps Edmund, “William and Anna both [spring] to their brother as if shot by cannons” (209). There is no hesitation in their support for him. William gathers the other two and “[n]one of them [spare] Mrs. Griffith so much as a backward glance” (210). William hesitated before believing Edmund during his conflict with the Forresters because Edmund has a history of mischief. Now, however, William has learned that the most reliable thing they have is each other. He does not hesitate to put his siblings’ wellbeing first, even if that means heading out into a snowy Christmas Eve alone with no guidance or guardianship. In previous chapters, William expressed his stress and his desire for an adult to ease the burden of caring for his siblings. The moment they need his support, however, William immediately steps up to protect them, which proves that he loves and values his family no matter how difficult things may be.
This final conflict with Mrs. Griffith shows the children what they do not want in a mother. Though some of Mrs. Griffith’s behavior is caused by the stress of needing to care for her family, her cruelest and most neglectful behavior is caused by a lack of empathy. She expresses no desire to understand people different from her. Mrs. Forrester did not understand the children’s love of reading either, but where she humored it and found it funny, Mrs. Griffith seems scornful. She tears up the books for the petty, saying “you’ve already read them, haven’t you?” (208), showing no care for the Pearces’ belongings or interests. Her focus on what is practical leads to cruelty, and she lacks an understanding about what brings joy and solace to different types of people.
When Mrs. Griffith points out that the children are technically finished with their books, Edmund responds, “That’s not the point, is it?” (208). By this, he means that they rely on The Importance of Stories in Difficult Times; the books give them comfort and security. In addition to her physical abuse of Edmund, the Pearce children finally realize that they cannot reconcile themselves with someone who fails to comprehend such a major aspect of their lives.
This contrasts with their first experience of Mrs. Müller’s house. With joy, they observe how the house is filled with books, “on the floor, stacked on side tables, lined up between bookends on the mantle” (243). Being surrounded by these items that symbolize comfort for the children makes the space feel “comfortable” rather than “untidy” (243). Though Mrs. Müller is by no means wealthy, she holds the same interests and ideals as the children do. This leads her to intuitively understand what each of the children need: When she leads them into her house and begins preparing them a warm drink, “Anna nearly [weeps]” from gratefulness (228). Usually, William is the one to offer Anna his hand to lead her somewhere, but Mrs. Müller takes on this role when she shows them to bed. She tucks warm water bottles in at their feet, piles them with blankets, and brings a book to them, giving them the exact sort of care and comfort they have longed for since they began their search for a family.
Just as the children are getting used to what family means, Mrs. Müller is as well. When the children are shocked at her offer of a bedtime story, she mistakes their reactions for dissatisfaction and self-consciously says, “Not having children of my own, I’m sure to make a mess of things” (235). Just as the children are not used to having a caring guardian, Mrs. Müller has been rejected by her surrounding community and is unused to people accepting her care, let alone appreciating it to the degree the children do. The absence of her husband and the rejection of her community have left Mrs. Müller feeling lonely, and she is just as eager to make a good impression on the children as they are to endear themselves to her.
Mrs. Müller’s gestures of love and affection are small—warm drinks, a seat near a fire, a caring word, and a guiding hand—but to the three siblings, who have had sparse parental affection through their lives, small gestures speak much louder than large ones. The final chapters allow all four of them to settle into their new family dynamic as they navigate the prejudices of their community.
