The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

I nodded. We were still keeping it bandaged, but the bandage tended to get
damp and my foot was nearly always freezing. “I don’t mind,” I said. “When
it gets numb I can’t feel it.”
Susan looked at me, puzzled.
I said, “When it gets numb it doesn’t hurt.”
She winced. “You could get frostbite,” she said. “That wouldn’t be good
for you. We need a better plan.” In typical Susan fashion she set about making
one. First she took one of her own thick wool stockings, which were bigger
than mine and easier to slide over my inflexible ankle. Then she messed
around with an old pair of slippers and a needle and thread, and pretty soon I
had a sort of house shoe, with a leather bottom and knit top. It didn’t keep my
foot completely dry, but it helped a lot. “Hmmm,” Susan said, studying the
shoe. “We’ll keep working.”
She had her sewing machine going all the time now, three or four hours a
day. She made bed jackets for soldiers from cloth the WVS gave her. She
made a coat for Jamie out of an old woolen coat she said had been Becky’s.
She went through a pile of old clothes and ripped them apart at the seams,
then washed and pressed the cloth pieces and cut and sewed them into
different things entirely. “The government calls it Make Do and Mend,”
Susan said. “I call it how I was raised. My mother was an excellent manager.”
“Does your mother hate you?” I asked.
Her face clouded. “No. She’s dead, remember?”
“Did she hate you when she was alive?”
“I hope not,” Susan said.
“But you said your father doesn’t like you.”
“No. He thinks my going to university was a bad idea.”
“Did your mother think that?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “She always did whatever my father wanted.”
She stopped pinning pieces of cloth together. “It wasn’t a good thing,” she
said. “It made her unhappy, but she did it anyway.”
“But you didn’t do what your father wanted,” I said.
“It’s complicated,” Susan said. “At first he was pleased when I won a place
at Oxford. Only later he said he didn’t like the way it changed me. He thought
all women should get married and I didn’t do that, and—it’s complicated.
Only I’m not sorry I made the choices I did. If I had it to do over I’d make
them again.”