Carrie's War
Author: Nina Bawden
Publisher: Virago Modern Books
Print Length: 224 pages
Genre: Fiction / Historical Fiction, Classical Fiction, Children
Area: The United Kingdom (UK)
Topic: Children & Childhood, Refugees & Forced Migration, Internally Displaced Person (IDP), War
One of the most loved and enduring wartime novels, Carrie’s War is a modern classic.
‘Poignant and realistic… Carrie’s War captures the true reality of war for a child, and it doesn’t sentimentalise war.’ SHIRLEY HUGHES, GUARDIAN
‘I did a dreadful thing, the worst thing of my life, when I was twelve and a half years old, and nothing can change it.’
It is wartime and Carrie and her little brother Nick have been evacuated from their London home to the Welsh hills. In an unfamiliar place, among strangers, the children feel alone and find little comfort with the family they are billeted with: Mr Evans, a bullying shopkeeper and Auntie Lou, his kind but timid sister.
When Carrie and Nick visit Albert, another evacuee, they are welcomed into Hepzibah Green’s warm kitchen. Hepzibah is rumoured to be a witch, but her cooking is delicious, her stories are enthralling and the children cannot keep away. With Albert, Hepzibah and Mister Johnny, they begin to settle into their new surroundings. But before long, their loyalties are tested: will they be persuaded to betray their new friends?
Table of Contents
Foreword: “At a time when millions of children all over the world are being torn away from family and home by the threat and violence of war, stories of evacuee children during the Second World War take on a new and powerful resonance and relevance.”
Chapter 1. “Carrie had often dreamed about coming back.”
Chapter 2. “For several minutes neither of them dared to break it. Then Nick said, ‘I want Mummy.'”
Chapter 3. “He wasn’t an Ogre, of course. Just a tall, thin, cross man with a loud voice, pale, staring, pop-eyes, and tufts of spiky hair sticking out from each nostril.”
Chapter 4. “But the door opened inward, like magic, and they fell through it to light, warmth, and safety.”
Chapter 5. “A warm, safe, lighted place. Hepzibah’s kitchen was always like that, and not only that evening.”
Chapter 6. “Mr Evans said, ‘Did you see my sister? House in good order? Get a good tea?'”
Chapter 7. “‘I don’t know,’ Carrie said. ‘I don’t know.'”
Chapter 8. “Carrie said to Hepzibah, ‘Mr Evans hates the Americans.'”
Chapter 9. “She said, ‘Things are seldom as bad as you think they’re going to be. Not when you come to them. So it’s a waste of time, being afraid. You remember that!'”
Chapter 10. “‘I was only trying to put myself in his place,’ Carrie said. ‘I felt sorry for him.'”
Chapter 11. “Mr Evans’s rages were noisy while they lasted but they didn’t last long.”
Chapter 12. “‘I mean, I do want to go, in a way, but in another way I’d rather stay here. I wish there was two of me, really. I feel torn in two.'”
Chapter 13. “‘Honestly, Carrie, I don’t think Auntie Lou will be worried.'”
Chapter 14. “She cried and cried and Nick sat and watched.”
Chapter 15. “Even thirty years later, when she was quite old enough to know it wasn’t her fault, that a house didn’t burn down because a girl threw a skull into a horse pond, she still cried in much the same way when she thought of it.”
Nina Bawden was a popular British novelist and children’s writer. Her mother was a teacher and her father a marine. When World War II broke out she spent the school holidays at a farm in Shropshire along with her mother and her brothers, but lived in Aberdare, Wales, during term time. Bawden attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Her novels include Carrie’s War, Peppermint Pig, and The Witch’s Daughter.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/157819.Nina_Bawden
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