Angel of Grasmere

Tom Palmer keeps them coming; the wonderful stories from WWII and after, some of them set in the Lake District. Angel of Grasmere is the latest, beginning in 1940, soon after Dunkirk.

Tarn and her friends roam the fells, partly looking for invading Nazis, but also because it’s what children did. Tarn’s older brother was lost in the retreat from Dunkirk, and her family no longer feels complete.

But Tarn has her friend Peter and their new pal Eric, an evacuee from Manchester. Their story is a good way of learning what life during the war might have been like, and it’s shocking how close the was came, to somewhere that feels quite distant both from Europe and the south of England.

There seems to be an angel in the neighbourhood, someone who carries out acts of kindness in various ways. It makes people feel better, thinking someone is looking out for them.

In a way their lives are quite ordinary, and yet not at all. This is a lowkey kind of war story, making you feel good about seeing the actions of this angel, as well as seeing how grown up these 11-year-olds could be. Because they had to.

And the setting is lovely, between Grasmere village and up towards Easedale Tarn.

A Song for Summer

Let’s get romantic!

I don’t often say this, but it is Valentine’s Day after all.

Wasn’t altogether sure about reviewing [one of] Eva Ibbotson’s adult romantic novels, because what can you say? Do we know at the outset that the couple will end up happily ever after? Well, I’m not telling you.

This is another of Eva’s stories set in Austria, and Britain, before and during WWII, but written in the 1990s. She does it so well, knowing her Austria, and her London among the better educated. Except here we have Ellen who prefers to cook and grow a garden. Her mother and her aunts are horrified. When she could have a proper education!

The reader will be happy when Ellen sets off to work in a school in Austria, where she will work her magic on pupils and adults alike, and she does much cleaning and cooking. There is a man, of course. There are several, but one special one, even if they sometimes have to fight over who gets Ellen.

It’s a lovely period piece, if somewhat rosy. Except, the war does make itself known and it has effects, and I especially resented the death of Xxxx. And Ellen is terribly dutiful and will do what seems best, and isn’t necessarily what she herself wants, or the reader.

I loved it.

Stateless

Elizabeth Wein makes me very happy. I love the way I feel when she moves into the between-the-wars period, even when I can’t avoid thinking about what her characters will have to face in just a couple of years’ time (this book is set in 1937). There is something magical about a period when people have all this hope, after that other war.

Stateless is about one person’s wish to promote peace, trying to make it happen when twelve young pilots from as many European countries are brought together in a flying race, where they will travel and talk and hopefully overcome the memories from the Great War. Except there is a fatal incident on the first leg of the race, with just one witness.

The witness is Stella, the British competitor, who already feels she needs to tread carefully, being both the only female pilot, but also the holder of a Nansen passport, meaning she is stateless.

This makes the race dangerous. Who might be next? And who was behind the first incident? The pilots are young and some are hot-headed. Many are scared because of the political situation in the various countries they visit; different for each in each place. Can they make friends, and can they stay alive while trying to find out what’s happening?

Flying is Elizabeth’s strength, and it’s not only this topic that makes her books stand out, but it’s the way the reader learns what the pilot can see – or not see – from the cockpit, because the wings are in the way, or some other thing. You learn how to be less visible if you are being chased by another plane. And you find out – if you didn’t already know – about the political issues of the day; the civil war in Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, the early days of Hitler’s Germany, about being jewish. Immoral music, even.

And the friendships? Enough to make my hair stand on end. Nothing is quite as you’d expect. This Europe of one for all and all for one is exciting. I still haven’t made my mind up as to whether things were more promising then, or now.

At least now you have Stateless to read. Don’t make any other plans until you’re done.

Resist

It’s the tulip bulbs I’ve never forgotten. Even as a child, learning that Audrey Hepburn had to eat tulip bulbs to survive during the war, it seemed both fantastic – in a bad way – and hard to believe. Just as I couldn’t really get my head round what Audrey was doing in the Netherlands.

If you read Tom Palmer’s new book Resist, you will find out, and it will probably leave you with tears in your eyes. Unlike many novels about the resistance in the war, in whatever country the story might be set, this one is a little more – dare I say it? – ordinary. Because it is based so much on what actually happened to Audrey and her family, rather than what an author has simply made up.

You meet Audrey – called Edda here, for her own safety – in her home village of Velp, near Arnhem, as she is setting out on helping the local resistance. It’s the kind of thing you need to keep secret, because the less anyone else knows, the safer you all are. Edda’s family have had bad things happen to them, and lying low is the way forward.

Covering the last two years of WWII, we learn much about ordinary Dutch people. Except, they are not ordinary; they are brave, albeit often in a quiet, life-saving way. I learned more about Arnhem, which to me was ‘just’ a place name connected with the war, in a bad way. And the tulips.

The same age as Anne Frank, we have to be grateful Audrey survived, if only just. It’s hard to believe that starvation can be so much more of a threat than being hit by bombs, say. And people fleeing their old homes has become much more of a current thing than we could ever have thought, until recently.

This is the latest of many thoughtful books from Tom Palmer about WWII and its effects. Its brevity adds to its seriousness. And the cover art from Tom Clohosy Cole is stunning.

The Reluctant Rebel, A Jacobite Adventure

Like ‘most’ people, I have known ‘all’ about Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald and ‘over the sea to Skye’. Thanks to Barbara Henderson and her new historical novel The Reluctant Rebel, I now actually ‘know’ something. Lots more, in fact.

I raced through the book, to find out what happened and how. Even when you might know the ending, and how the bonnie Prince never became King, it’s exciting.

We see the story unfold through the eyes of Archie MacDonald – who lost his father at Prestonpans in 1745 – beginning just before Culloden in 1746. Which I knew to have been a disaster, but you don’t learn so much from history books. Well, I don’t.

His master’s three sons are fighting, and not everyone returns home. At least as important, if not more, is Archie’s cousin Meg, a maid at Borrodale. She’s brave and intelligent, even if she does seem to have a crush on the Prince.

Their paths cross the Prince’s, several times, and they are called on to help him escape. Just staying alive is difficult. Because of his father and because of the shock of the bloodiness of Culloden, Archie isn’t sure he supports the Prince’s cause any longer. Soon there is a price on his head as well, which can be tempting for someone who is hungry.

This is a terribly exciting historical adventure, set beautifully to fit in with the real story, and feeling all the better for it.

Displaced

It’s hard to know what to think these days. Having read and loved so many children’s books about the Kindertransport and all the other schemes from WWII to get people, children and adults, to safety, I have been proud of what Britain did. With hindsight I realise that not everything was quite like in the books. But still, people arrived here, and many remained and many did well. So apart from the awful reason for them coming, the end result seems to have been OK a lot of the time.

And now we are ashamed of what Britain is not doing. Most of us have the Ukraine in mind, but I don’t mind casting wider and will mention Syria and Afghanistan among many other crisis-laden nations. And that other countries are receiving refugees more generously and with greater ease than seems to be possible here.

One night recently I came to think of ‘my’ first lot of refugees. Not counting the girl from Hungary I was friendly with in my first year at school, because that happened before I was aware, ‘my’ displaced people came from Chile.

Well, they arrived from there, but they were frequently from some other Latin American country, having already fled to Chile from their place of birth. I encountered many of them where I lived, which was a small town. I suspect one reason for their appearance there was that the then head of Amnesty International in Sweden lived nearby. But as is often the case, they moved on, and congregated in the bigger cities, where they could be with others from the same background.

When I moved to Gothenburg, I met Chilean refugees there. And I know many of them are still there, with children and grandchildren born in this other country at the opposite end of the world. Such a lot of them ended up there because one night they clambered over the wall to the Swedish embassy, where the ambassador temporarily achieved hero status for saving so many individuals fleeing for their lives.

So, that night I mentioned, I began wondering if the person whose full name I for some reason still remember, might still be there. He is. That’s the beauty of computerised, publicly available records. Back then he was a political student leader, not from Chile, but from one of the neighbouring countries. I have no idea what he’s done in the nearly fifty years since then, but he’s now ‘old’ and still living in the city that took him in. I wonder what his life has been like. Still marooned at the other end of the world. But I dare say it beats the alternative.

‘Shouldn’t we be ashamed of ourselves?’

Those words came from Alf Dubs; a man with experience of fleeing your country, but luckily for us, being welcomed, or at least allowed, in when he arrived in Britain all those years ago.

I don’t always enjoy Marina Hyde in the Guardian, but Wednesday’s column was one of the good ones. One of the columns that makes one feel ashamed, even when the fault is not one’s own. And her comments about photographs in colour or black and white, and the difference it makes when you look at them, set me thinking about the shoe being on the other foot.

What if ‘nice English people’ were to be stopped at a border somewhere, in desperate need of help, having to queue, and possibly not be allowed in. Because the receiving country is not being friendly. But I don’t believe that our ‘leading politicians’ are capable of seeing themselves, or anyone they care about, in such a situation.

Fiction is good at making you see things that are not necessarily real. Yet. It’s almost exactly nine years since I reviewed After Tomorrow by Gillian Cross. It’s still bone-chillingly current. And it’s five years since I felt I had to publish the review again, because of what was happening.

There are probably other novels about poor British people throwing themselves on the mercies of their European neighbours, but this is my go-to example. I’m just so sorry that it has to be.

And even if we, in this country, don’t ever have to escape to some other place, surely we could welcome [quite] a few from elsewhere? They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have to. It’s especially telling that not even these nice white, and similar to us, refugees are welcomed with open arms, after the discussions in the media about why ‘we’ like them so much better than the Syrians, say, or anyone else fleeing from a more distant country.

There were bests in 2021 too

I worried. But then I nearly always worry. What did I read? Was it any good?

As always, I read. And yes, it was good, even in 2021. I read fewer books than usual, and with a larger proportion being old, adult or a translation, I have left those out. It’s handy that I make my own rules here.

I’ll put you out of your misery right now. The book standing head and shoulders above all the other really great books is Hilary McKay’s The Swallows’ Flight. Set in WWII, it’s a story I can’t forget (and these days I forget a lot).

Hilary’s is not alone in being a WWII story, as 50% of my 2021 winners are. I don’t know if this is proof that many more such books have been published recently, or if it just shows how much I like them.

The other five are Phil Earle’s When the Sky Falls, Morris Gleitzman’s Always, Liz Kessler’s When the World Was Ours, Tom Palmer’s Arctic Star, and Elizabeth Wein’s The Last Hawk. The latter two are dyslexia-friendly books.

Debi Gliori’s A Cat Called Waverley also features a war, but a more modern one. The illustration below makes me cry every time, and it has that thing which makes a picture book truly great.

Waverley is Scottish, as are C J Dunford’s Fake News, Barbara Henderson’s The Chessmen Thief and Roy Peachey’s The Race.

Last but not least, we have an animal story from Gill Lewis, A Street Dog Named Pup, and a ‘historical futuristic fantasy’ in The Outlaws Scarlett & Browne by Jonathan Stroud.

These twelve gave me much pleasure, and they were not in the slightest hard to choose. If the publishing world continues to give me books like these, I will have no reason to give up [reading].

Always

I was all right. It was fine me not having read two of the books in Morris Gleitzman’s Once series. This one – Always – is the last. And it really is the last. Because several of the books have turned up in random order, it doesn’t actually matter at all. But it does help if you have met and know Felix.

He is an old man now. Granted, he was old before as well, in modern Australia. But when Once began he was a child, and that childlike way of being has remained with both Felix, and the current child in the book. The world is full of sweet and lovely people.

But I suspect that when Morris saw what was going on in Europe today, he needed to write one more book about Felix. Because there are also many rather nasty people, and perhaps a book won’t help change that, but it will help the reader to believe in courage and goodness.

Wassim is the latest – last – child and he is as kind and thoughtful as all the others have been, especially not forgetting Zelda. Either of the Zeldas, but mostly Zelda the first, who died. (I’m sorry if you didn’t know that, but it’s very much part of the story.)

We’re back in, not quite Poland, but somewhere a bit like it, and Wassim is having a hard time, with dead parents and Uncle Otto, who can be harsh sometimes but who took him in, and the Iron Weasels who are very bad. In other words, we and Wassim are looking at a Europe that hates foreigners and coloured people and anyone else who is different; Jews, Muslims. You get the picture.

I’m grateful to Morris for wanting to write about this, which I believe both he and I thought was part of the past, the past where Felix was a child and WWII happened.

Wassim knows he needs help, and he learns about Felix, and he looks him up online. Although it could be worth noting that public libraries ‘can be more dangerous than they look.’

Anyway, he finds Felix and Felix agrees to help him. This is where you need to start worrying. But with these two very sweet people working together, you know some good will come of it. Even if you also know, or suspect, that some bad is unavoidable. Remember Zelda.

Now is very much a time when we need a Felix.

Miss Graham’s [Cold] War [Cookbook]

We’ve got used to books where we are all terribly pleased the Allies won WWII. And it’s quite obvious, really – isn’t it? – that the victors take over and they run things, while the losers put up with it. Especially if you are the victorious one. And the British were quite decent and everything worked out for the best.

Well, there’s much that’s wrong with this picture, and I’m glad to report that Celia Rees deals with these tired clichés in her adult book about Miss Graham and her cookbook, back in Germany in 1946. To begin with, I found it refreshing to have a heroine – neither young, nor old – who drinks and has sex, in a way that we’ve got used to female heroines not doing [back then]. In fact, Edith Graham is quite normal, in a way that fits in with both modern thinking, but also doesn’t feel wrong for the 1940s.

And the British… well. They ‘know’ they are right and the Germans ‘had it coming.’ But they are not very nice. Nor are the Americans, and it goes without saying that the Russians are all wrong. We see the victors eating and drinking really well, while the Germans are quietly starving on the sides. Perhaps not those who ‘had it coming’ but more the normal civilians.

Edith is in Lübeck to look after education, but she has also been involved in a couple of sidelines, doing bits of minor (?) spying for the Military, and also for someone else. She does this with the help of her recipe collection, which turns out to be a useful hobby.

She makes friends, but also plenty of enemies. Above all, she learns that all is not simple and that even close friends are doing the wrong thing and not always for the right reason.

In a way I already knew this, but I still feel my eyes have been opened. And the book has probably forever ruined similarly set books where the Allies are the heroes.

There are a couple of unusual twists to the story, at least one of which I could sense from the beginning, while not quite sure how it would work out. I’ll leave you to enjoy the book, and to see what you think will happen.

(I believe the words ‘cold’ and ‘cookbook’ have been dropped from the paperback edition. I would like to think that they have also edited the surplus of ‘Teirgartens’ I was disturbed by. Or not. German is a foreign language, after all.)