Manylion a Disgrifiad y Llyfr | Book Details & Description
- ISBN: 9781845240622
- Author: Ken Foskett
- Publication May 2007
- Format: Paperback, 182x124 mm, 254 pages
The history of evacuees in northern Pembrokeshire during the Second World War. Ken Foskett's early days were spent in Norwood, near London, and it was from here that he and his sister were evacuated to a hillside farm in Pembrokeshire at the start of the Second World War.
Gwales Review
Like so many children during the Second World War, Ken Foskett and his older sister Rene were evacuated to the countryside for their own safety. Unlike so many others, their experience was very positive. They did not want to go but imagined it would be for only a few weeks. They were actually away for a full two years, seeing their parents only once during that time. It was long enough for them to become a part of the kind and caring Welsh family and community that had taken them in and to fall in love with Wales: ‘it was to become a place we hated at times and a place we eventually loved but we had not yet come to understand it. Eventually, it became to us the most beautiful place in the world.’
Foskett’s account of those two years in Wales is enthralling, giving a real sense of the joys and hardships of hill-farming before mechanisation and bringing to life the family and community that embraced him and his sister with such genuine warmth. The joy is in the detail: when he describes the weekly ritual of bread-making, you can almost smell the bread as it comes out of the oven; you can really see the gangly vicar and the overly-curvaceous Mrs Ladd squeezed together in the front of that Austin 7; you can feel the chafing of wet wool against young skin after the three-mile walk to school in the rain. And the anecdotes are a memorable delight, conveying Foskett’s love of his adoptive family with humour and respect. This is a heart-warming tribute to a family, a community, a country – and to the courage of all the children who were forced to live with strangers, albeit for their own safety.
As a compassionate and unsentimental record of a child’s experience of being evacuated during the Second World War and an affectionate and sharply observed account of life on a hill farm in Wales, this book deserves to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with both Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom and Horatio Clare’s Running for the Hills.
Suzy Ceulan Hughes