Yvonne‘ALL FALL DOWN‘ by JENNY OLDFIELD
Later that evening, Walter tried to come to terms with the idea of evacuating the boys to safety.
The picture of their two boys, joining hundreds of thousands of other children in the exodus from London frightened them beyond words. Thousands of buses and trains crawling out of the capital to unknown destinations. Strange faces to greet them, strange bedrooms to sleep in. And what if they should never see them again?
She stopped by the window, looking out at an orange sky flecked with golden clouds and at the ominous, silent balloons. “Do you think they’ll actually do it?” Her voice trembled. “Actually drop those bombs on innocent kiddies?”
Clicking on the book’s title will link you with its dedicated Goodreads page
If you don’t really want to read any major spoilers, then you can tease yourself a little more, by reading the first few lines of the story … here
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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by … Jenn at ‘A Daily Rhythm’
Anyone can take part, by just doing the following:
Grab your current read.
Open to a random page.
- Share a couple of “teaser” sentences, from somewhere on that page.
- Be careful not to share “spoiler” sentences.
- Remember to share the title and author too.
- Head on over to ‘A Daily Rhythm’ and leave a link to your post, so that others can share it and you can share other people’s.
It would be great if you then decided to leave a comment for Jenn, as we all like to receive them and are interested in sharing your thoughts.
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Loving that first quote. Not only can I see all of those children, trams and trains, I can also hear the noise and smell the smells.
This meal happened to be a make-believe tea, and they sat around the board, guzzling in their greed, and really, what with their chatter and recriminations, the noise, as Wendy said, was positively deafening.
– Page 106. The Complete Peter Pan by J.m. Barrie.
Hi Tracy,
Some of the evacuees were so young, my own mother-in-law would only have been 10 or 11, that it must have been a heart-wrenching decision for parents to have to make, especially if like them and the family in the book, there were several children, not necessarily all going to the same place!
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I have to admit, that although I have visited Disney World so often and have of course been subject to the ‘Disneyfication’ of the children’s classics, I can’t recall ever reading the ‘official’ version of Peter Pan – particularly not the part where:
“This volume contains the celebrated stage version on which Peter and Wendy is based, as well as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, in which Peter Pan is a seven-day-old infant who consorts with birds and fairies and travels down the Serpentine in a thrush’s nest.”
Thanks for sharing your lines this time and enjoy the book 🙂
Wonderful teasers! One of the Kate Morton books I read addressed the topic of those children who were parceled off to the country during the war. I can’t imagine!
I’m almost to the end of Vertigo 42 by Martha Grimes, so to attempt avoiding spoilers, I’ve looked back in the book for a teaser to share. This is from page 208:
“Miss Tallboys had followed the direction of Melrose’s gaze. ‘Got that pair across the way at Germaine. Quite pricey, but I expect they’re worth it.’
Melrose expected they weren’t but just sipped the tea that had been served them from a pot covered by a rose-colored crocheted tea cozy. She could have served it boiling from Hell’s Kitchen and it would still have gone cold by the second sip. But then Hell had long frozen over in number 13, Crutches Close. Miss Tallboys simply had a knack for a chill.”
Hi Kelly,
My mother-in-law and some of her siblings were evacuated during the war, as they lived in Portsmouth, which at the time was a major naval base on the the south coast of England and as such, was under constant threat of bombing.
In some ways she was quite lucky, as she only ended up about 40 miles away from home, although many other children were spread far and wide.
The perspective familiies who were willing to offer shelter to the trainloads of children, were more or less allowed to select the child they wished to take, a bit like being at school when teams were picked!
Many of the children were treated as virtual slaves by the family who took them in, with parents only being allowed to visit three or four times a year, on public holidays.
For children, some of whom were only 4 or 5 years old, can you imagine the trauma … and kids today think that they have a hard time of things!
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Your teaser lines have me at a real loss as to what is going on … Miss Tallboys sounds like a right harridan and I wonder what she has acquired as a pair that were so costly? Even the name of the street sends shivers down the spine.
I can remember the time when just about everyone made tea in the pot and covered it with a crocheted or knitted tea cozy, to keep in the heat. These days most of us simply throw a tea-bag in a mug and pour on boiling water!
I wonder if times have changed for better or worse 🙂
That must have been such a scary situation for both the parents and the children. This week my teaser comes from Dark Turns by Cate Holahan. Happy reading!
Hi Kathy,
I often think that if anything bad was going to happen, then it would always be best to be together as a family. However, I guess that in the war years, ‘normal’ life was so shattered by the men going off to fight, whilst women found themselves having to do full time jobs, that knowing that your children were at least reasonably safe must have been something of a comfort!
Thanks for taking the time to stop by, I always appreciate your comments 🙂
Sounds great! With only 11 countries in the world free of external wars or internal conflicts, we shouldn’t lose sight of the impact that war has on families. That is the true tragedy of power struggles. Here’s my link: http://wp.me/p4DMf0-115
Hi Lorraine,
Thanks for stopping by Fiction Books this week. I always enjoy meeting new people, so your visits and comments will be much appreciated 🙂
It seems as though war dominates our lives these days, almost to the same extent as World War ll did, all those decades ago, so how much progress have we really made, or are fighting and violence inherent traits amongst humans, which we can never hope to breed out of society?
It appears that the children are always the ones to suffer the most, but are all our humanitarian efforts in vain, if we are to never learn the lessons of our forefathers?
Thanks for taking part in the discussion and ‘Happy Reading’ this week 🙂
Sounds like turbulent and scary times there….enjoy your reading and hope all is well my friend 🙂
Hi Naida,
I don’t have any family of my own, but I can’t even begin to imagine how I would feel if I was told that I should evacuate my children to another part of the country for their own safety, never knowing if I would ever see them again!
Watching the bombs rain down on your area, must have been scary and to think that there are children all over the world today, who still live with this as an everyday occurrence, really doesn’t bear thinking about!
Will we never learn from the mistakes of the past!
All is good in this neck of the woods thanks. Although I have my eyes closed and wishing that Christmas was all over with 🙂