Charlotte sometimes by Penelope Farmer

Charlotte sometimes by Penelope Farmer (Red Fox, 1999; first published Chatto and Windus, 1969)

3 parts; 198 pages with a few full-page black and white illustrations

Subjects: World War One, England, Armistice, VE Day, school, sisters, friends, time travel, junior fiction (Year 5-8)

Synopsis

This was one of my favourite books as a child, although I realise now that I read it as a time travel fantasy, with very little understanding of the historical background.

The New York Review has a succinct summary of the plot:

It’s natural to feel a little out of place when you’re the new girl, but when Charlotte Makepeace wakes up after her first night at boarding school, she’s baffled: everyone thinks she’s a girl called Clare Mobley, and even more shockingly, it seems she has traveled forty years back in time to 1918. In the months to follow, Charlotte wakes alternately in her own time and in Clare’s. And instead of having only one new set of rules to learn, she also has to contend with the unprecedented strangeness of being an entirely new person in an era she knows nothing about. Her teachers think she’s slow, the other girls find her odd, and, as she spends more and more time in 1918, Charlotte starts to wonder if she remembers how to be Charlotte at all. If she doesn’t figure out some way to get back to the world she knows before the end of the term, she might never have another chance.

On her blog, Penelope Farmer writes an interesting summary herself, describing the book as being “set in the kind of English boarding school my twin sister and I attended/were incarcerated in – take your pick – for part of the fifties.” No wonder the school scenes ring so true. The girls have very English names: Susannah, Vanessa, Janet, Elizabeth, Sarah, and there is a mystery about Sarah’s unexpected kindness to Charlotte, explained at the end.

(This is the school which Penelope and her sister went to, and which she used as the setting for the book, including the cedar tree and the glassed-over verandah that Charlotte climbs out onto.)

She adds that “the whole book turned – though I didn’t see that when I wrote it – on identity; how do people identify you as you?” and says this is “a particularly relevant question for twins in general, and still more so for two not identical but similar looking twins like my sister and me, quite different in character and ability – even opposites in many respects, she right-handed, me left - but always taken together not singly. This was another connection I did not make at the time I was writing.” (More on her twin sister below.)

The first clues about the war setting come with breakfast (“porridge… as solid as bread, much solider in lumps, and slippery too”) when Bunty tells Charlotte-as-Clare, “Miss Bite says it’s doing your bit, to eat things you don’t like… I don’t see how it hurts Germans myself, eating nasty porridge.” 

In September 1918, the war is drawing to a close. We as readers know it is nearly over, but the girls at school don’t, and it still affects their everyday lives. There are air raid alarms in the middle of the night, and an army training camp nearby with soldiers dressed in khaki, who “strolled casually about or marched stiffly up and down.”  Injured soldiers arrive home on the hospital trains. A girl with a German surname is ostracised by the others, and the teachers, girls and nearby villagers have fiancés, fathers or sons away fighting in France; some of them won’t ever come back.  

Part Three only takes up about 25 pages but it brings the story to a perfect, poignant ending. 

You can find lots of lots of different covers, some of which are better than others.  

About the author

A number of excellent fiction writers are called Penelope. This writer is not Penelope Mortimer or Penelope Fitzgerald or (another of my favourites) Penelope Lively.

Penelope Farmer was born in 1939. At first glance, there isn’t a lot of information about her online, but the New York Review says that she published her first book of short stories for children, The China People, in 1960 and writes novels for adults and children, including several books about Charlotte and her sister Emma.  (We also had Emma in winter when I was a child, which I enjoyed - but not as much as Charlotte sometimes.)

There is some biographical material about her here (including more fascinating twin info about the circumstances of her birth).

However, an absorbing article in the Guardian reveals a lot about her family life. Written in 2007, it describes the events of 16 years before when her twin sister lay dying in hospital in Oxford, and the connection that developed between her and the daughters of the woman who was dying in the next bed. It is a sad, moving and yet lovely story, all hinging on a chance meeting in the street.

Later, living in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, she wrote about starting a blog called grannyp (“Old writers may not die, but they do have to move on. Thank God for the internet”) but it doesn’t seem to go beyond 2010.

Info about the illustrator

The cover illustration on my copy is by Emma Chichester-Clark who is best known for her Blue kangaroo books (and incidentally she also went to boarding school)

Other books you might like

Valentine Joe is a time travel book about World War One.

The red suitcase by Jill Harris is another, but about World War Two.

Things I didn’t know

I didn’t know anything at all about Penelope Farmer. It has been a delight to find out all this info about her, and this remains one of my favourite books.

And how many children’s books have inspired songs? This one inspired a song by The Cure, called Charlotte Sometimes and full of quotations.  This Smashwords blog article points to two other blog postings that talk about the copyright implications, the impact it had on her sales, how Penelope Farmer actually got to meet the Cure at one of their concerts, how she signed a copy of the Puffin edition for Robert Smith (who told her that his older brother read him the story at bedtime when he was about 12, and “it never got out of my head”) and how she enjoyed her own “brief moment of pop glory” when they played the song as an encore at the end of the concert.

You can read them here and here (scroll down to the entry for June 12).

Have you read it?

Have you read this book? If so, I hope you loved it as much as I do. Let me know what you think!

Ronnie's war by Bernard Ashley

Ronnie’s war by Bernard Ashley (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2010)

ISBN 978-1-84780-162-3

190 pages; 4 sections (Blitzkrieg, Top bunk boy, The American captain, Man of the house)

Subjects: World War Two, London, England, evacuees, Blitz, Americans, VE Day, junior fiction (Year 5-8)

Synopsis

When war is declared in 1939, Ronnie is a boy of eleven. By VE Day, he is a young man who has left school and is working as a spot welder, although his mother wants him to get an engineering apprenticeship. In-between times, the story takes us through his experiences in four separate sections. He is caught in the Blitz, and then evacuated to a village in Lancashire where he has to cope with a chilly welcome in his new home and a hostile reception and bullying teacher at school. His father is called up for the Royal Artillery and goes missing in action, probably in the Far East. Ronnie and his mother move out of London to another village in Essex where she gets a job working on an American Air Force base.  

The scene where Ronnie goes to look for his mother is a dramatic description of the aftermath of an air raid (there is a similar scene in The machine gunners by Robert Westall, when Chas and his dad make their way across town to try and find out if his grandparents are still alive.) His relationship with his mother – its ups and downs, through his teenage years, but their underlying love for and loyalty to each other – provides a link between the four sections, as does their ongoing worry and uncertainty about what might have happened to his father.

There are many small details that help to build up a convincing picture of life in Britain during the war. I always enjoy these unexpected details – facts like what happened with the wartime football league (it was all “guest players and soldiers on leave”, and teams weren’t allowed to play more than 50km from home), or that the Anderson (air raid) shelters that people dug in their back yards had blackout curtains instead of a door. Playground games, lessons, slang and meals all have the ring of authenticity. It also features one of the few fictional descriptions of VE Day celebrations that I’ve read (there's another one in Charlotte sometimes by Penelope Farmer).

Reviews:

This review in the Guardian calls it "a slim, to-the-point volume that proves you don't need to fell an acre to conjure a convincing fictional world... Four vignettes, then, which quickly yet subtly build a full picture of what ordinary life was like for a child who spent their entire adolescence under the cloud of war."

The Historical Novel Society has another review which describes the book (with a few reservations) as "an interesting portrait of a young man in his formative years, which happen to occur against the backdrop of war". 

Author’s website

Bernard Ashley lives in London and worked for many years as a teacher and principal. His first children’s novel was published in 1974 and he has published dozens since then. One of the most well-known is Little soldier shortlisted for the Carnegie medal.

He has some lovely answers to questions here. I especially like his answer to a question I invariably get asked at every school visit: Where do you get your ideas from?

"All around me. One of the advantages of living a hectic life in one of the world's busiest cities is that there's no shortage of drama and excitement around me. Sometimes comedy, sometimes - sadly - tragedy. I never use the people I know, but certain themes recur in relationships. In the creation of characters I use bits of various people. Hitting on the right name for a character is a great help, like the right costume is to an actor."

And I liked what he said about doing research:

"My liking of travel is often satisfied by doing research for one of my stories.
I have to get it right! If I say this London bus takes you there you can depend on it being right. And if you can trust me in the practical things I hope you can trust me emotionally, too."