Carrie’s war by Nina
Bawden (Puffin, 2005; first published by Victor Gollancz, 1973)
ISBN 0-140-36456-0
15
chapters; 192 pages
Subjects:
World War Two, England, Wales, evacuees, junior fiction (Year 5-8)
There are several
different covers. The book I read had this cover, but in orange, not purple.
Synopsis
Now published in the
Puffin Modem Classic series, this book is set in war
time, when 11-year-old Carrie Willow and her younger brother Nick are sent to
live in a mining village in Wales. But the “war” in the title is Carrie’s own
internal war as well. The closest the actual war comes to this remote village
is when an American soldier arrives to visit Auntie Lou, or when Mr Evans’ son
Frederick comes home on leave.
It is a lovely story,
beautifully told, with a vivid setting and unforgettable characters. The main
narrative is bookended by the story of the grown-up Carrie, coming back 30
years later to the oddly named Druid’s Bottom with her own children. She
recalls the people who lived there: Albert Sandwich, Dilys Gotobed, Hephzibah
Green and Mister Johnny, but then describes something as “the worst thing she
ever did” and won’t go any further.
One reason this story
seems so firmly anchored in the past is that Carrie doesn’t know what happened
to Druid’s Bottom and its inhabitants for 30 years, and it’s hard to imagine
that being the case today, in a world of Google, texts, instant communication
and information overload.
Reviews:
The annual
“Great Reading Adventure” tries to get people in the English city of Bristol reading
and talking about the same book. For the 2005 Great Reading Adventure,
they also chose Carrie’s war to get
younger readers involved. The activity pack has some excellent info from pg 14
on about British evacuees and how the evacuation process was organised:
- The British Committee of Evacuation was set up on 26 May 1938
- Evacuation areas (places likely to be bombed) included London, Portsmouth, Southampton, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow
- Those evacuated were children aged 5-15, mothers with children under 5, pregnant women and disabled people. Most children were sent away in school groups with their teachers
- Britain and her Allies declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. By Christmas 1939, half the children who had gone away returned home as the expected air raids hadn’t happened. However, in June 1940, the Germans occupied France. Evacuation began once more and many children did not see their homes again until the end of the war in 1945
- Parents were given lists of what to pack: a gas mask, identity card, ration book, woolly jumper, warm coat, handkerchief, socks and shoes. The evacuees had labels tied around their necks with their names and addresses on. They left the cities on trains and buses
- Over three million children were evacuated during the war in Britain.
About the author
Nina Bawden
was herself evacuated to Wales in the war. ‘Carrie’s story is not mine, but her
feelings about being away from home for the first time are ones I remember…the
sense of not being watched, brooded over by concerned adults, was heady.’ She says (in The Great Reading Adventure notes):
‘I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate
their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them
I try to put this right.’
She was
seriously injured in the Potters Car rail crash in 2002, in which her husband
died.
Nina Bawden
wrote more than 40 novels. She died in 2012, aged 87.
This article in the Guardian, written after her
death, talks about how Carrie’s war “has had an
incendiary impact on our imagination not because it is explosive in any
military sense – the guns and bombs of the second world war are not much in
evidence in Druid's Bottom” but because “the novel speaks with painful truth
about the ripple effects of war.”
Other books you might like
Nina Bawden
writes about her childhood in her autobiography In My Own Time (1995) and her book Keeping Henry is also about evacuees who are sent to
Wales.
Other books on this blog that cover different aspects of the evacuee experience are Archie’s war, Lord of the nutcracker men, When the siren wailed and Ronnie’s war.
Have you read it?
Have you
read this book? Let me know what you think!
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