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!

An unexpected hero by L.P. Hansen

An unexpected hero by L.P. Hansen (CreateBooks, 2014)

ISBN 978-0-9941102-7-5

12 chapters; 145 pages

Subjects: World War One, New Zealand, conscientious objectors, pacifism, Archibald Baxter, schools, bullying, farms, junior fiction (Year 5-8)

Synopsis

Matt Turner, 12 years old, faces a move from the big city to the country for family reasons. Instead of living with his parents, he has to stay on the farm with his grandparents and attend the same small country school where his father once went.

First chapters can be tricky when then there is a lot of information to get across, but Linda Hansen’s opening chapter does a fine job of introducing Matt, his grandparents and the farm, explaining why he is there, showing us how difficult it can be for kids on that first day at a new school and hinting at some of the major themes to follow (local war history and Matt’s struggles with public speaking).  

At Matt’s new school, the annual Year 8 farewell speeches are a big community event, and he has arrived in time to be a part of it. Matt’s family has never made a big deal about war, so he doesn’t know who to choose for his “war hero”. Even worse, he hates speaking in public (a fact that his grandparents don’t know about him) and is terrified that he will stutter, blush and totally mess up.

The book follows Matt’s journey both in thinking about the nature of heroism and in taking steps towards a victory of his own. I liked the way that the author shows us Matt struggling with both of these issues, and getting help from other people, but ultimately finding a way towards his own resolution of them.

Reviews:

Bobs book blog (always an excellent resource) gives the book a very good review and calls it “an excellent short novel …for primary and intermediate children and a timely reminder that it takes courage to refuse to fight”

Free Teachers’ Resource kits are available from the publisher here.

Questions:

Who would you choose as your war time hero?

(I’m currently taking my first ever MOOC (Massive Open Online) course on “Changing faces of heroism”,  and this is one of the first questions we were asked.)

About the author

Linda Hansen is both a storyteller and a writer. In 2012, she won the Jack Lasenby Children’s Writing Award for ‘Socks in the Library,’ a story about homelessness.

Linda developed her writing skills by working in places like Radio New Zealand and then in Parliament where, as the deputy director of one of the Research Units, she researched and wrote for politicians. During her time at Volunteer Service Abroad, she learned about countries where the volunteers worked and wrote handbooks about them.

Other books you might like:

Other books that deal with the topic of pacifism are Evan’s Gallipoli by Kerry Greenwood, Remembrance by Theresa Breslin and My brother’s war by David Hill. 

Things I didn’t know

I did know something about Archibald Baxter and I‘ve read his classic memoir We will not cease, but I didn't know anything about the developments in the country that Matt uses for the basis of his speech. I don’t want to spoil the plot but it is worth searching online for the idea of “changing rifles into notebooks”.

Links

You can find more info about Archibald Baxter on Te ara, NZ history or the site Lest we forget – "remembering peacemakers on Anzac Day".

Have you read it?

Have you read this book? Let me know what you think!

Twenty and ten by Claire Huchet Bishop

Twenty and ten by Claire Huchet Bishop, as told by Janet Joly (Viking Press, 1952)

Also published as The secret cave (Scholastic, 1969)

5 chapters; 76 pages with black and white illustrations by William Pene du Bois

Subjects: World War Two, France, Jews, children, schools, junior fiction (Year 3-6)

This book was a delightful discovery. I'd never heard of it before finding it on a Storylines list of books about the World Wars.

The story is told by a 13 year old girl called Janet, looking back two years to 1944 when she was one of “twenty” fifth grade French school children. Along with their teacher, Sister Gabriel, they agree to hide the “ten” Jewish children in their boarding school up in the hills. At first the two groups of children don’t get on, partly because they have to share rations so everyone is hungrier.

One day Sister Gabriel walks into town for supplies and doesn’t come back; instead, two Nazi soldiers arrive on bicycles. All the children have to use their wits, courage and ingenuity to protect the ten Jewish children, and a hidden underground cave they find during their games becomes a vital hiding place.

The cave is shown on one version of the cover: 

The first chapter might be slightly confusing for any readers who don’t know the Biblical story of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus fleeing King Herod in the Flight into Egypt. The reason it is there seems to be to draw a parallel with the plight of the Jewish children in the war; also it plays a part towards the end, when it looks like the 4-year-old brother is going to spill the beans.

The story is based on real life events in France during the Nazi occupation. It was adapted for a 1986 movie, "Miracle at Moreau." The book also seems to be available online at various sites.

Teachers’ notes:

There are a number of teaching units online, for example here and here.

Questions:

What was at risk for the Jewish children when the Nazis arrived? 

What was at risk for the French children? (In other words, what might happen to them?)

What are the differences between the 20 and 10 children? How are they the same?

Info about the author:

Claire Huchet Bishop (1899 – 1933) grew up in France. In 1924, she opened France's first library for children, L'Heure Joyeuse (The Joyous Hour). She moved to the United States after her marriage. After her first book, a retelling of a Chinese fable  - The five Chinese brothers - she wrote about 30 others, several of which won awards. 

Pancakes-Paris (Viking, 1947) was about food scarcity in France after the war. Two American GIs reward a boy called Charles with a box of pancake mix for giving them directions. Charles wants to make crepes for his family, but he's not sure how to follow the instructions because they are written in English. 



This short biography includes the tantalising information that she was "active during the Second World War in the cause of European Jews," but doesn't give any further details.   

Her obituary in the New York Times also mentions how "the persecution of Jewish friends in France in World War II" prompted her to start writing on different issues. 

Who was Janet Joly?

There is an interesting blog posting here about the words “as told by Janet Joly” on the title page.

“Janet Joly” is presumably meant to be the original narrator - the young girl, Janet, who passes on the story to the author - but in fact she doesn't exist. She seems to be part of the story, a fictional character used to make it seem more real. The funny thing is that you can Google her and she comes up on sites like Goodreads as a real author. 

Info about the illustrator:

William Pene du Bois (1916-1993) was an American writer and illustrator. He lived with his family in France from the age of 8 to 14, and he also died in France (in Nice.)