posted on 16 Oct 2017

Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden

Bawden’s 1973 novel has become something of a classic of the children’s literature genre. Published just 28 years after the end of World War Two it deals with the experience of child evacuees – something that would have been resonant with a generation of adults keen for their own children to have some understanding of what that experience was like and maybe what their parents had been through.

Bawden herself was a wartime child evacuee and it was an experience that had a deep impact on her throughout the rest of her life. In Carrie’s War she conjures up not just the physical experience of being ripped from the security of the family home but the emotional impact too. The children in her book, Carrie (Caroline), her younger brother Nick and the splendidly named Albert Sandwich all go through the shock of their relocation to a small town in Wales but also demonstrate an extraordinary capacity to cope – what is now so often called ‘resilience’.

She draws characters brilliantly and you feel you have known them all for ages. She’s especially good with adults I think – the rather icy and unlovable Mr Evans who is haunted by regret; the sister he bullies but who is essentially kind hearted, Auntie Lou; Hepzibah Green, earth-mother and proto-Hippy ; and, Johnny Gotobed who is of indeterminate age but has a significant learning disability.

Around these people and the cast of children Bawden builds her story. The telling of the story is prompted by the adult Carrie’s return to Druid’s Bottom, the location of much of the action, when she is an adult with children of her own. Expecting to make an off-the-cuff nostalgic return to a place she always thought of as significant to her, she finds she is in fact overwhelmed by the memories of those times.

It is, in many ways, a simple story of family animosities, lingering feuds and inevitable change in which the children are the unwitting catalysts. I’m not going to recount the details of the story because that would spoil the book for you but I can tell you that Bawden doesn’t leave any loose ends dangling and everything is resolved at the end – although not everything turns out well for everyone.

I was struck by just how essentially old-fashioned this book now feels. By which I don’t mean that it’s historically dated but it feels like a form of storytelling that is hard to find in young adult or children’s books today. The emphasis she puts on the skill of storytelling and characterisation over the constant drive for action and events seems to speak of a time when stories were allowed to unfold rather than be pushed along at speed. The children belong to a very different, pre-mass media and technology generation and certainly aren’t ‘street-wise’ in any modern sense of the word.

To read this book is to travel backwards in time – both from the perspective of the plot and the way the plot is told. It’s a story of children beginning to lose their innocence and to understand what that loss entails as they move from childhood to adulthood.

It’s a book that will stay with you because the images it creates are so three-dimensional and barely need the illustrations it has that were provided by Faith Jaques – although these are always delicious extras to have.

You’ll easily find a paperback or cheap hardback edition of this that will suit you and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have a great afternoon reading it.

 

Terry Potter

October 2017