Stay where you are and then leave by John Boyne

Stay where you are and then leave by John Boyne (Doubleday, 2013)

14 chapters; 247 pages

Subjects: World War One, England, London, hospitals, shell shock, conscientious objectors, junior fiction (Year 5-8)

Synopsis

Alfie Summerfield is five years old, living on an ordinary London street called Damley Road, when the war starts. His father, Georgie, signs up almost straightaway. Four years later, Alfie is nine, the war is still going on and there is no word from his father. His letters have stopped arriving and all Alfie knows is what his mother Margie tells him: that his father is on a secret mission for the Government, and that’s why he can’t write any more.

The community of Damley Road is a close-knit one, and we find out what happens to a number of its other occupants during these four years. One of the most powerful moments is when two men in military uniform knock at the door to (slight spoiler alert here) deliver the news of a soldier’s death. Margie’s emotions skip from shock to horror to outrage as she realises they have the wrong house, and every other woman along the street stands in fear on her doorstep, waiting to see where they go next.  

Money is tight and Alfie decides to help out by skipping school (except on the days when they have history or reading) and working as a shoeshine boy at King’s Cross Station. This is where he finds out where his father actually is, and where he starts to dream up a plan to get him home again.

The Guardian review points out some of the coincidence in the plot, and there are some events that stretch credulity. I found it hard to believe that Alfie could get around the hospital without being detected, or that he could escape so easily when finally spotted. But it is still a story that pulls you along, and John Boyne does an amazing job of telling it from the point of view of a young child – for example, the way that Alfie views anyone aged 21 or over to be unimaginably old. There are some lovely insights into the nature of loyalty and friendship, especially that shown by Georgie’s oldest friend, Joe Patience, who is ostracised by everyone else in the street for being a conscientious objector. And I loved any scene with Mr Asquith in it!

Reviews

The Guardian book review (mentioned above) says "There may be a fairytale feel to this wartime tale of a boy's quest to find his father, yet it's a solid, engaging read." 

The Pretty Books blog also comments on the fact that "it is fascinating to see the world through the eyes of a child." 

Finally, the reviewer in The Book zone for Boys loved the book and says it is "much more than just a story about a victim of shell shock" and which "really brought alive the everyday travails of the people left at home".

About the author

You can read about John Boyne on his website, which has a special page for this book (although this older link is also quite amusing). 

About the illustrator

The chapter titles were hand lettered by Oliver Jeffers! 

Other books you might like

I can’t think of many similar books to this one. The way John Boyne gets into the head of a five-year-old, then a nine-year-old is hard to replicate. If you haven’t read The boy in the striped pyjamas, you should definitely read that.

NZ connections

Only to say that I heard John Boyne speak a year or so ago and was fascinated by his account of how he wrote The boy in the striped pyjamas in about three days, virtually non-stop. You can read about it here in this transcript of a talk with Dublin Public Libraries

Things I didn’t know

I didn’t know much about shoe shine boys, but now I've found out that the Shoeblack Brigade set boys up as shoeblacks in London in 1850. More than a dozen brigades were formed, each with their own uniform, and the boys often lived in hostels. The Shoeblack Brigades had mostly disappeared by the start of World War One. “Shoe shining continued as a London street trade for many years” but had virtually vanished by the 1960s.

You can see more of Frederick Wilfred's evocative photos of London here. 

Have you read it?

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

The silver donkey by Sonya Hartnett

The silver donkey by Sonya Hartnett (Viking, 2004)

ISBN 0 670 04240 4

18 chapters; 192 pages with about 10 full page black and white illustrations

Subjects: World War One, France, deserters, animals, fable, junior fiction (Year 5-8)

This story is set in northern France, near the coast, sometime during the battles fought along the Western Front during World War One. 

Two sisters, Coco and Marcelle, find a soldier hiding in the woods, desperate to get back to his sick brother in England. The trauma of war has left him temporarily blind. Together with their older brother Pascal and a friend, Fabrice, the girls concoct a plan to help him. The two of them are delightful, especially Coco who is entranced by the soldier’s tiny silver donkey (there is a lovely passage where she imagines riding away on it.) Pascal, on the other hand, would prefer to hear gruesome first-hand accounts of the war, “a tale about machine-guns and bayonets.”

Interspersed with the main narrative are four stand-alone stories, told by the soldier, three of them with a donkey theme: Mary and Joseph travelling to Bethlehem, a legend about why storm clouds are grey and the tale of the “donkey man” at Gallipoli (although again the place is not mentioned.)  

The story is beautifully told in almost poetic language. One plot detail that bothered me was that the soldier would still be treated as a deserter when he reached England, so he was not really escaping to safety.  But this is partly because details are often left vague, and the story has an almost dreamlike quality of “fable”. The book is asking questions about the nature of bravery and courage and the sort of qualities that really matter, like the donkey’s qualities of loyalty, humility, gentleness, trustworthiness and steadfastness.

The silver donkey was made into a musical by the Australian team of Dean Bryant and Matthew Frank, and the production toured Australia and  the USA in 2006. You can see a clip from it here on Youtube. 

Reviews: 

Charm under fire: Sonya Hartnett's The Silver Donkey shows that life in wartime offers surprising opportunities. Another review is here: The silver donkey by Sonya Hartnett. 

You can also find teacher's notes for the book here. 

Questions:

• What do you think is the answer to Fabrice’s question (in the chapter called Heroes): “Do you really have a brother… Or is he a ghost made of wishes and fear, someone you invented to disguise your shame in fleeing a war which other men… have stayed behind to fight?"
• Do you think the Lieutenant did the right thing when he lay beside the dying Ernie Whittaker? What else could he have done? How do you think he felt afterwards?
• What does the silver donkey represent?
• Why don’t we ever learn the Lieutenant’s real name?
• Who is a “hero” in this book? What is heroism?

Author’s website:

Sonya Hartnett is an Australian writer. 

Her other war-related children’s books include Children of the King (2012),  a time-overlap adventure about three children sent to the countryside to escape the war in London, and The midnight zoo (2010) (“Under cover of darkness, two brothers cross a war-ravaged countryside carrying a secret bundle. One night they stumble across a deserted town reduced to smouldering ruins. But at the end of a blackened street they find a small green miracle: a zoo filled with animals in need of hope.”)

Other books you might like:

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo also deals with the topic of army deserters and how they were treated.

New Zealand connections:

Desertion was treated as a crime by the army and could be punished by  court-martial and execution.  On pg 47 of Anzac Day: the New Zealand story is a section called “Pardoned at last”. This tells the story of the men who were court-martialled for mutiny or desertion, often because they were suffering from undiagnosed shell shock. Many of these men had fought bravely in other parts of the war but had just reached the limit of what they could endure. Their deaths were seen as terribly shameful for their families and often they were not talked about for years.

In England, there is a memorial  to some of these young men from Britain and the Commonwealth at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

Called the Shot At Dawn Memorial, it contains a statue of a young man ­blindfolded and strapped to a post, surrounded by 306 other posts, each with the name, age and ­regiment of a man who was executed.

In 2000, the Pardon for Soldiers of the Great War Act was passed to pardon the five NZ soldiers who were subsequently shot. You can read more about the Act here and here. The medals and certificate of pardon for one of the soldiers, Victor Spencer, were later gifted to the Bluff Maritime Museum. 

Of the five soldiers listed, two were born in Australia and their story is told further here:

ANZAC tragedies revealed after 80 years: the stories of Private John Sweeney and Frank Needs / John King , both Australians who signed up in NZ, and served bravely in Gallipoli but were charged with desertion in France and shot. (It’s interesting to note that Australian never allowed its own soldiers to be shot, perhaps because the AIF was made up of volunteers  - conscription was voted against twice by the Australian public during World War One - and the public outcry would have been huge. But these two men had signed up for the NZ army.)