Harborne is the first substantial home of the Wheeler family in the narrative, a Birmingham setting where marriage, commerce, family life, and memory are concentrated above and around a butcher’s shop. Its importance lies not in a single dramatic incident but in the dense everyday world it provides: a busy trading high street, a working household, and the secure local environment from which later wartime upheaval carries the family away.

Family Home and Butcher’s Trade

Harborne is presented through the Wheeler family’s long association with butchery. The Wheelers have been butchers for decades, operating shops in and around Birmingham city centre, and Sidney Wheeler returns from the war physically unharmed to resume the family business. His earlier apprenticeship had taught him the cuts, preparation, and storage of meat, while his work as a delivery boy had taken him by bicycle to a local theatre with an order for steak for the touring dancer Anna Pavlova. That youthful errand, which brought him a meeting with Pavlova and a two-shilling tip, belongs to the family’s pre-Harborne history, but it helps establish the trade and inherited working identity that Harborne continues.

After Sidney Wheeler proposes and Marie Wheeler accepts, they marry on Monday, July 10, 1922, at St Peter’s Church, Harborne. Their guests then travel fifteen miles by charabanc to The Tontine on the River Severn at Stourport for the wedding breakfast, turning the move from church to hotel into an adventurous communal celebration. The marriage therefore makes Harborne more than a business location: it becomes the point at which Sidney Wheeler’s survival of the war opens into domestic life and a shared future.

The couple set up home in accommodation above the butcher’s shop on Harborne High Street. The location is both residence and workplace, with the family living directly over a vibrant and busy trading area. Their routine demands very early starts for journeys to buy meat at the market in the Bull Ring, and the shop’s success is especially important because Sidney Wheeler’s father, who works and lives with the couple, has expensive tastes. The household’s prosperity is consequently tied to the rhythms of the market and the continuing viability of the shop.

A Childhood Place

Harborne is also the setting into which Pamela Wheeler Fellows is born and cherished. She is born on August 18, 1924, at a local nursing home and grows up as the family’s only child. Her mother treats her rather like a large doll, dressing her in an elaborate coordinated wardrobe that includes a white fur coat and matching hat. As the only child, Pamela Wheeler Fellows is doted on, indulged, and accustomed to having her own way. The detail of her clothes conveys the family’s prosperity more vividly than a general statement about comfort could do, while the arrangement above the shop places childhood privilege inside a demanding working household.

The Harborne home is therefore marked by a doubleness. It is a place of affection and indulgence, but it is also a place of long days, early market journeys, and close interdependence between family and business. Domestic life cannot be separated from the shop below; the family’s security is produced by work, and the child’s sheltered world exists within the same commercial system that sustains it.

Locality, Observation, and Community

The narrative later recalls Harborne in relation to the wider geography around the family’s hotel life and Birmingham. A lane opposite the hotel leads towards the hills, with properties including a large house understood to be operating as a nursing home, extensive vegetable grounds, fields, and the wooded Clent Hills beyond. This landscape shows how the local world combines rural edges, commercial activity, and institutions serving the surrounding population. Produce grown on the grounds is sold to the public, linking the nearby countryside to local exchange and wartime food concerns.

The spatial logic associated with Harborne also includes unusually close observation. From the elevated bar area where Pamela Wheeler Fellows works, she can see over the top sash window of the police station opposite. When the Sergeant puts on his helmet, the hotel staff take it as advance warning that he is crossing the road to enforce the licensing hours. They call time, cover the beer pulls with towels, pull down the shutters, and hurry remaining customers to finish drinking. The arrangement turns a police station into a visual signal and converts an ordinary architectural sightline into a practical means of survival for the licensed trade.

This proximity also gives the local setting a disciplinary edge. The police station represents the strict licensing laws that could remove a livelihood permanently if alcohol were sold outside permitted hours, while the hotel’s view across the road provides a small, precarious advantage. Harborne and its surrounding localities are thus not merely backdrops: their buildings, lanes, windows, and fields organize what the family can see, conceal, protect, and risk.

Animals and Material Continuity

The domestic world linked to Harborne includes Bonzo, the little brown terrier given to Pamela Wheeler Fellows, apparently to soften the prospect of moving to a new location. Bonzo becomes her best friend, sleeping on her bed and remaining inseparable from her. When he nearly dies of distemper, Sidney Wheeler administers brandy and advocaat, and the dog eventually recovers and thrives. The incident turns an animal into a central element of family continuity: Bonzo is not a decorative possession but a companion whose presence makes a threatened move emotionally bearable.

Bonzo’s intelligence and unruliness also animate the household’s relation to its surroundings. When Marie Wheeler tells him to get a chookie so that she can take an afternoon nap, he interprets the instruction literally and deposits a large white chicken on the lawn outside her bedroom window, followed by three more. Sidney Wheeler must pay for the four chickens and apologize to their owner, Mr Coles. Bonzo later begs much of a poor man’s modest lunch in the hotel bar, despite having access to plentiful food in the kitchens, and responds eagerly to the car horn whenever a ride or shopping trip is possible. These episodes make the family’s local world vivid through exchanges among people, animals, food, property, and transport.

The later war exposes how sharply this earlier abundance has changed. Household food scraps are collected to fatten the nation’s pigs, scrap metal is gathered for aeroplanes and bombs, and objects such as pots, bicycles, buckets, prams, railings, and fences are redirected into the war effort. Even the pony and trap acquired by Jim Parkes because petrol is unavailable belongs to this altered material economy. The family’s new pram is eventually commandeered to carry food, while rationing removes ham and other familiar treats. Against these conditions, Harborne’s butcher’s shop represents an earlier form of access to food and commercial security, though the narrative never treats that security as permanent.

Departure and Narrative Significance

Harborne’s decisive narrative function is to define what is later lost. The family eventually leaves The Woodman Hotel and moves into a top-floor mansion flat about half a mile from Birmingham city centre, entering a more dangerous urban environment as bombing intensifies. Their new home is elegant and newly furnished, but the route is lined with bombed-out buildings, and the first air raid nearly becomes Pamela Wheeler Fellows’s last. When residents cannot reach the shelter, Sidney Wheeler orders them onto the ground floor with their hands over their ears; the position saves their lives, while shrapnel holes at waist and head height show what would have happened to anyone standing.

The move away from the countryside is therefore not a simple change of address. It is a passage from the known local world of Harborne and the family trade into wartime danger, displacement, shortages, and dependence on friends. After the bombing, Jim and Renee Parkes take the family into the cramped accommodation above their café in Quinton for several weeks. Harborne remains significant as the remembered point of origin: the place of Sidney Wheeler and Marie Wheeler’s marriage, the shop above which Pamela Wheeler Fellows begins life, and the domestic landscape whose ordinary pleasures acquire their full meaning only after war has made them vulnerable.