British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War
Firing the youthful imagination
Owen Dudley EdwardsEdinburgh University Press, 744pp, £150,
Nicolas Barker on Owen Dudley Edwards' overview of WW2 children's fiction
How much of all this did I grasp, over 60 years ago? Quite a lot, it now seems to me. Our house was big enough to be hospitable. Before the war, German Jewish academics came, stayed and moved on. As war hit London, a charming Bedford College student joined us, to become a friend for life. Poles, Chinese, Romanians, Hungarians and Czechs followed, some in uniform, some not. Father’s ‘Politico-Military’ courses on governing occupied territory (a distant prospect in 1940-1) brought diverse British soldiers. Many visitors left books; I remember the horrific illustrations of The German New Order in Poland. My parents did not try to shield us from these or other overtones of war (Blyton was off limits, for stylistic rather than ideological reasons). I laughed with and at William, took Biggles’s heroics with a pinch of salt, swallowed Needham’s and other Ruritanias (already familiar from The Prisoner of Zenda). These and other new books merged with earlier books, read earlier, George Macdonald, Julia Horatia Ewing, and, above all, E. Nesbitt. Who can forget the end of The Railway Children, gentlest and best of childish lessons?
He goes in and the door is shut. I think we will not open the door or follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted here. I think it will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and Gipsy roses and St John’s Wort, we may just take one last look, over our shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted just now.
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Margaret Stoll
April 21st, 2008 11:35amI'm glad you mentioned Violet Needham. She doesn't seem to be remembered much nowadays although Blyton, Johns, Crompton et al are well recalled and their works presented to a modern audience (Martin Jarvis reading the William stories on Radio 4 - what a joy!)
No, Violet Needham brought a new word and a new concept to my vocabulary - 'fortitude'. The young hero of 'The Black Riders' and 'The Stormy Petrel' was a precursor of Alex Rider, the boy agent. 'To look a tyrant in the eye and say him nay' as Needham's hero Richard Fauconbois did, became an ideal of mine. And perhaps, an icon for those times.