This is a promotion from my new Streets Ahead street team, which has now moved over to MeWe as I’ve deleted my Facebook account. Authors can join using this link:
https://mewe.com/group/5cc86303c7ff680d05925297
At the moment we’re promoting Robbie Cheadle’s book ‘While the Bombs Fell’.
What was it like for children growing up in rural Suffolk during World War 2?
Elsie and her family live in a small double-storey cottage in Bungay, Suffolk. Every night she lies awake listening anxiously for the sound of the German bomber planes. Often they come and the air raid siren sounds signalling that the family must leave their beds and venture out to the air raid shelter in the garden.
Despite the war raging across the English channel, daily life continues with its highlights, such as Christmas and the traditional Boxing Day fox hunt, and its wary moments when Elsie learns the stories of Jack Frost and the ghostly and terrifying Black Shuck that haunts the coastline and countryside of East Anglia.
Includes some authentic World War 2 recipes
I enjoyed reading this book, and here’s my 4 star review posted on Amazon UK on 16th October 2018: https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RZW5J2COEAFXG/
An Entertaining Read
I was immediately interested in reading this book, as I’ve lived in Suffolk for nearly 30 years, and not too far from Bungay. I heard lots of wartime stories from my mother who lived in London during the war, but this book was different in that the main character, a child called Elsie, lives in the countryside. Ms Cheadle has written anecdotes gleaned from family and friends over the years, and has written quite a charming faction book.
Elsie tells of what it was like to live not only through the war itself, but also about food rationing and how her mother made the pennies stretch to feed her family. There are highlights in Elsie’s life of Christmas Day, and the rich fruit pudding complete with a lucky sixpence that she and her siblings looked forward to, and also at other times of the odd rabbit that her farmer father managed to catch and the rabbit stew it became after her mother had skinned and gutted it. There is also the alarming sound of the air raid siren, and how she had to flee to the garden shelter with her family, sometimes in the middle of the night.
As Elsie is a child, the book is written in quite a young style that is suitable for older children as well as adults. She thinks nothing of walking two miles with her siblings to play at a favourite spot, something I think today’s children would not even consider (indeed if they are allowed outside in the first place). She took as normal today’s privations such as icy bedrooms and having to share a bed with her 2 sisters, but she was glad of them for warmth.
With a diet augmented by rabbits and whatever else her father managed to catch, Elsie possibly fared rather better than children in London who were not evacuated. I’m sure she grew up healthier than today’s children, brought up on a diet of fast food and lack of exercise. Hopefully she would have been too young at the time to let the war’s horrors blight her later life.
I would have preferred the style of writing to be more aimed at adults, but I give this book 4 stars for an entertaining read.
