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    Carrie's War
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    Carrie's War
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    Carrie's War
    Ebook149 pages2 hours

    Carrie's War

    By Nina Bawden and Emma Reeves

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    When the Second World War air raids threaten their safety in the city, Carrie and her brother Nick are evacuated to a small Welsh village. But the countryside has dangers and adventures of its own - and a group of characters who will change Carrie's life forever. There's mean Mr Evans, who won't let the children eat meat; but there’s also kind Auntie Lou. There's brilliant young Albert Sandwich, another evacuee, and Mr Johnny, who speaks a language all of his own. Then there's Hepzibah Green, the witch at Druid’s Grove who makes perfect mince pies, and the ancient skull with its terrifying curse...For adults and young people aged eight and over.

    Emma Reeves has created a stunning stage adaptation of Nina Bawden’s much loved classic account of life as an evacuee in the 1940s, which opened at the Lillian Bayliss Theatre in November 2006. This edition includes teachers' notes and activities for classes based on the play.

    ‘I doubt... anything will beat this traditional page-to-stage adaptation for ceaselessly involving telling of a cracking story’ - Evening Standard

    ‘Irresistible’ - Sunday Telegraph, Critic's Choice

    ‘Richly entertaining. Funny & deeply rewarding’ - Daily Telegraph, Critic’s Choice

    ‘Consistently excellent’ - The Times, Critic’s Choice

    ‘Dramatic, imaginative and polished’ - Evening Standard, Critic’s Choice

    ‘Excellent. Truly refreshing story-telling’ - Daily Mail

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOBERON BOOKS Ltd
    Release dateJun 26, 2012
    ISBN9781849436113
    Unavailable
    Carrie's War
    Author

    Nina Bawden

    Nina Bawden was one of Britain's most distinguished and best-loved novelists for both adults and young people. Several of her novels for children - Carrie's War, a Phoenix Award winner in 1993; The Peppermint Pig, which won the Guardian Fiction Award; The Runaway Summer; and Keeping Henry - have become contemporary classics. She wrote over forty novels, slightly more than half of which are for adults, an autobiography and a memoir describing her experiences during and following the Potters Bar rail crash in May 2002, which killed her husband, Austen Kark, and from which she emerged seriously injured - but fighting. She was shortlisted for the 1987 Man Booker Prize for Circles of Deceit and several of her books, like Family Money (1991), have been adapted for film or television. Many of her works have been translated into numerous languages. Born in London in 1925, Nina studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University in the same year as Margaret Thatcher. Following Potter's Bar, she was movingly portrayed as a character in the David Hare play, The Permanent Way, about the privatization of the British railways. She received the prestigious S T Dupont Golden Pen Award for a lifetime's contribution to literature in 2004, and in 2010 The Birds on the Trees was shortlisted for the Lost Booker of 1970. Bawden passed away on Wednesday 22 August 2012, at her home in North London with her family around her.

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    Reviews for Carrie's War

    3.5/5

    143 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A childhood favourite! The BBC did a great adaptation of this in 1974 and more recently there has been a version with the excellent Alun Armstrong playing Mr Evans and Pauline Quirke as Hepzibah, which was such a good adaptation! I think the ‘blurb’ says as much as needs to be said about this because I don’t want to give away the storyline, but I think that although written in the 1970s it doesn’t feel dated at all (maybe that’s a silly thing to say seeing as the book is set during WW2, but I know what I mean!) and it’s such a great story that if you haven’t read it and you like children’s/YA novels then give it a go – it’s a quick read and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!
    • 4/5
      Interesting story of a young girl's experiences as an evacuee from London to Wales furing WWII. Virtually nothing about school or peers - she was busy watching how the adults treated each other. Not a dark, sad, or harrowing tale at all - in fact, we know it ends ok because it's told in flashback as Carrie brings her children to see this place in which she spent such a formative year.
    • 4/5
      Carrie's War by Nina Bawden is the story of Carrie and her little brother Nick during World War II. The children were sent to live in the country, away from the bombings in London, for their own safety. I'd bet you $55 million dollars you could not show me a children's story with characters more real and more human. The children are placed with an absurdly cheap shopkeeper and his mousy sister for the war's duration, and they are very unhappy there, suffering from the shopkeeper's frugality and the sister's inability to stand up to her brother. Nevertheless, Carrie and Nick gradually form a relationship with the two, and come to see the underlying reasons for the miserly ways of the shopkeeper and the fearfulness of the sister, as they grow to know the household of an estranged sibling of the two. Very complex characters, and that's the great strength of this story. A 1001 CBYMRBYGU.
    • 4/5
      This book was a trip down memory lane for me - it was one of my favourites growing up.

      If Carrie's War does nothing else, it teaches you a few lessons and it makes you happy and thankful for your lot. And if you have siblings, it makes you appreciate them more.

      Carrie and Nick are children, and the story is told from Carrie's perspective. It was never going to be amazing and insightful in an adult way, but reading it as an adult has helped me better understand it.

      A great read and a modern classic.
    • 3/5
      Reading this book was rather distracting, since some other English Lit student had helpfully annotated it before me. Comments like "she takes refuge in household tasks" and "here gender roles are reasserted" are rather irritating when you're trying to read a book as a child. Carrie's War is set during the World War, and contains little details that place it well in that time -- the gas masks, the trains, the rationing -- in a way that's pretty matter-of-fact. Not "ooh look at me I'm historical fiction", but "this is a story that happens to be set in the World War". I liked the way it was framed by the adult Carrie and her children -- there's realism in the sense of continuity.

      It's also very obviously a more modern children's story, since there isn't some big moral front and centre. There's some subtlety in the characters -- you feel a little sorry for Mr Evans, even if he doesn't come across as a very nice man.

      And even though it's quite matter-of-fact and realistic, there is magic in it -- in Hepzibah, and in the strange names, and in the Grove and the fragment of skull. Enough that children can find something slightly otherworldly in it, if they want to. I always found magic everywhere like that when I was Carrie and Nick's age.
    • 4/5
      I read this book as a class I really enjoyed it,I really like history.The film was exallent. It is about a girl called Carrie and her grother Nick. They are evacuated from London to the country side and they go live with a shopkeeper and his sister. They have many adventure's.......
    • 5/5
      It's such a good book it has got so much drama in it and you could imagine how it would feel like if you were an evacuee

    • 5/5
      This children's book was published in the 1970s and adapted by the BBC into a serial at around the same time, one I remember with affection watching as a 7/8 year old. At base, it is the story of a sister and brother evacuated to the south Wales valleys during the Blitz, and how they relate to the family they stay with. The characters are well rounded and distinct, with some particularly colourful ones in Mr Johnny and the dying Mrs Gotobed, dressing in her ball gowns, a slightly macabre image that I distinctly remember from the TV series. There is also a skull that supposedly carries a curse, though this is not primarily a fantasy or mystery novel. Good to renew my acquaintance with this story.
    • 5/5
      Guilt is a terrible thing. And when it's brought about by such a tenuous belief as sympathetic magic, the sense of culpability can overwhelm---even when there may be no actual cause-and-effect involved between an act and what happens subsequently. Such is the case with Carrie when, as an adult, she revisits the South Wales mining community where she was evacuated during the Second World War and where she has to confront fears engendered thirty years before.As with many child evacuees Carrie and her younger brother Nick are separated from her widowed mother, sent to the Valleys while their mother relocates to Scotland for the war's duration. They stay with the odious Mr Evans and his anxious sister Aunty Lou in a bleak mining village (based on Blaengarw, north of Bridgend, which is where the author was herself evacuated to). Nothing they do seems to ingratiate themselves with the self-righteous bullying Mr Evans, who rules his little domain with spite and parsimony.Luckily there are altogether more friendly people to leaven their existence: Albert Sandwich, another evacuee who lodges with Norfolk-born Hepzibah Green and the child-like Mister Johnny, whom Nick instantly befriends. These all live outside the village at an old farmhouse called Druid's Bottom, just within sight of the railway line; it's the home of the now widowed Mrs Gotobed, estranged sister of Mr Evans.And so the scene is set for the inevitable misunderstandings, conflicts and possible tragedy, as seen through the eyes of the twelve-year-old, and as remembered by her adult self.Carrie's War is every bit as brilliant as its reputation suggests. It is a poignant reminder of how childhood can be blighted by the inconsiderate and incomprehensible actions of adults, and even more so in an age where children were suffered to be seen but not heard. When delights come her way -- a welcoming kitchen, a cuddle, an unexpected picnic -- she grabs and relishes them while she can, but the contrast between these and the treading-on-eggshells consequent on Mr Evans' constant negativity is sharp and terrible. Druid's Bottom, and the earby Druid's Grove, also hold contrary emotions for her -- sometimes comfort, other times fear -- for along with the motherly Hepzibah and innocent Mister Johnny is a woman very much like Miss Havisham, one with secrets of her own, plus an ancient relic which may or may not be cursed.Carrie's instinct is to look for the best in human nature, to try and give people the benefit of the doubt (an instinct her brother refuses to yield to in the face of Mr Evans' hypocrisy), which all renders the unfolding drama so heartbreaking. When Carrie does commit an act of desperation, the subsequent disaster -- which she believes is her fault -- brings her to a nadir in her young life. Which makes the final denouement even more powerful, one that I have to confess resulted in the shedding a tear or two.The war that is Carrie's is only partly related her experience of those terrible years when the outside world went mad; mostly it describes the conflict that she encounters in that valley. It's a fitting coincidence that the Blaengarw that Nina Bawden herself knew was where the words of the famous Welsh hymn Calon Lân were composed by Daniel James, for Calon Lân translates as 'a pure heart'. Love is the idée fixe that runs through this novel: love given, love taken away, love lost and love regained.
    • 3/5
      I read this in bits and chunks when I was at school (when you go to school in Wales, it's a book that's very difficult to escape) but didn't really have much of a coherent memory of it in my head. It's been a loose end in my reading history, one I've meant to go back and tie for a while.Now I have and... well, I wish I'd paid a bit more attention at the time. I was surprised how clear my memories were of big chunks of the book, particularly the early parts, but often I was remembering the effect of them at the time, rather than feeling it anew.Little things like Nick's strop about getting a Bible for his birthday rather than one of the knives Mr Evans knew he wanted felt much closer then than they do as an adult; now, it's behaviour I recognise in children but it isn't something I recognise in me.The plot also feels a lot less substantial. It's interesting how much longer books seem as a child – I guess because your reading is so much slower – but I'm always surprised to go back and find books I remember spending weeks on were only a couple of hundred pages long.I think Carrie's War suffers from that foreshortening; the name itself suggests a story covering years, but it's hard to sink into the world and lives of the characters when you can rattle through them in a few hours. That's not necessarily a problem of the book, just evidence I'm not the target audience.Some books you can catch up with years after you first (or should have) read them. Others will remain in the past. Given the story it tells, maybe it's fitting that Carrie's War is the latter.