ONCE UPON A WAR is a child's eye view of World War II. Beryl MacDonald was born in London and when war broke out in 1939 she was sent away to the country, to live with strangers. Homesick, she went back to her family in London in the middle of the Blitz. Growing into a teenager, Beryl managed to weave a thread of normalcy through the abnormal fabric of bombings and shortages. After the war, still a teenager, she became a "G.I. Bride" and traveled across an ocean and a continent to join her husband in Oregon.