Lively WW2-set story for 8-11-year-olds!
What was it like to be an evacuee?
Explores cultural differences within and between nations
Gently explores effects of dementia
How can we help children to learn the lessons of history and to appreciate the importance of encountering difference?
Eleanor Watkins’ brave and powerful story immerses its young readers in the daunting world of a London evacuee as she is thrown into the foreign environment of a Welsh farming family, newly arrived American GIs and escaped German POWs. As events are narrated by an ageing great-grandmother to her contemporary great-granddaughter, we discover how the racism, conflict and fear of the other from the WW2 period can inform the way we live today. Furthermore, the touching relationship between the great-grandmother, who is in the early stages of dementia, and her great-granddaughter helps younger readers understand the condition and how cross-generational relationships can be strengthened in spite of it.
Eleanor Watkins says, ‘I also hope to inspire younger readers to look into their family histories and perhaps even write about them. Most importantly I aim to tell a good story!’
A Time of Green is set in the 1940s. The world is at war, and June’s secure life is about to change for ever as she leaves the bombed devastation of London and enters the strange new world of the Welsh countryside. Decades later June, now almost ninety, and her Californian great-granddaughter, Juniper, have a close bond despite the almost eighty years difference in their ages. When devastating news hits the family, Juniper and June discover a shared need to recall and record June’s early years, spent during a time of war as an evacuee on a Welsh border farm. June had hated the farm during the first long, hard winter, with its isolation, mud, cold and hard work. Later, when spring and the ‘green time’ arrived, her views changed, and she fell in love with the countryside. As the conflict progressed, prisoners-of-war came to the farm and there was trouble ahead. Tensions were heightened with the arrival of American soldiers, and for June and her host family, life would never be the same again, affecting the future as well as the present and stretching down the years to Juniper’s time and place.
A Time of Green by Eleanor Watkins (ISBN: 9781912726134) is published by Instant Apostle and is available on 17th October 2019 from Christian bookshops, bookstores and online retailers. Children’s fiction, 176pp, £7.99.