I've just galloped through this in two days, completely engrossed. Lore Segal - now an elegant and beautiful 91-year-old - is one of the last surviving kindertransport children. At 10, she stepped off the boat quite alone, at least that's how she remembers it - although years later she comes across newsreel footage that shows her in a line of other refugees on the gangplank. Lore was child 152.
So this book - originally published in 1964 - is described as a fictionalised memoir, although her child's eye view has a ring of absolute authenticity. Lore's father was determined that she should save the rest of the family and tasked her - at 10!- with petitioning for visas to get her parents and extended family out of Austria. At least, that was the child's perception. Imagine the father's desperation. And the burden of responsibility placed on the child. But against all the odds - for the vast majority of kindertransport children never saw their parents again - Lore was reunited with hers on her 11th birthday in March, 1939. They're safe, but still forced to live apart: Lore taken in as a refugee child in other people's houses; her educated, cultivated parents reduced to working elsewhere as domestic servants.
By chance I'd just finished a pair of YA wartime novels - Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire - that were highly-acclaimed a few years ago. Now, in fairness, when I was a YA the genre hadn't been invented. (You'd read a couple of Agatha Christies - your mum told you'd love Daphne du Maurier - and that was it, you were on your own in the big library!) I found the unsophisticated language of these YA novels a bit plodding. (I'm sure the bar could be a set a bit higher ... but how old are YAs? I thought maybe 13-ish?)
The SOE spy plot, on the other hand, seemed unnecessarily tricksy and melodramatic. In dramatic times, there's surely no need to over-egg the (rationed) pudding? It's 50-odd years since I sat beside my mum on a Sunday afternoon watching Carve Her Name with Pride and grasped that these were events that had happened to real, courageous people ... far more memorable than any immature adventure novel.
7 comments:
I remember being able to use the adult library from the age of 14 and used to rely on the covers of the books until I discovered authors I liked...
That poor child - what an enormous responsibility, but how wonderful her parents escaped!
I know, I kept thinking what if they hadn't got out - would she have blamed herself?
Indeed. I too went from The Famous Five to Les Miserables and The Scarlet Pimpernel - not much in between.
I have to disagree with you about Codename Verity, which I thought very good.
The YA concept is strange, isn't it? When I was a child, you progressed to the adult library at fourteen and goodbye childhood reading (in theory). What I actually did was read a lot of books which can be enjoyed by adults and young people e.g. Gerald Durrell, John Buchan. I'd also read most of Dornford Yates' novels by the time I was thirteen but that's another story.
Oh, I loved The Scarlet Pimpernel, Pam - that was another recommendation from my mum. I remember feeling almost sick with excitement and having a huge crush on him. Does anybody read them now?
I know that Codename Verity was well-reviewed, Callmemadam. I've never read Dornford Yates - would you recommend?
Drat, Blogger ate my comment.
Dornford Yates was one of those clubland 'snobbery with violence' authors. The Berry books are light and funny, the Chandos series adventures set in some Ruritanian-style Europe. They are quite amoral, really.
There's quite a lot about him on my blog here.
Enjoyed your review, I would like to read this. I read quite a lot of novels set during WW2 and it does seem that children in earlier decades had more responsibility placed on them than today.
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