NINA BAWDEN:
CARRIE'S WAR:
INTRODUCTION:
Nina Bawden was born in London where she still lives,but she is equally at home in Norfolk, where her mother was born, and in Wales, where she went to school during wartime evacuation from London. A year after she left somerville college, oxford, with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, she wrote her first novel. Since then she has written twenty-one adult novels and seventeen novels for children, most of which have been widely translated and adapted for film or television. The places she has lived in, and loved, London, Wales, Norfolk, Shropshire and Greece, provide the real life setting for her novels. The peppermint takes place in swaffham where her mother grew up: keeping Henry is set in a farmhouse in Shropshire and Carrie's War in the mining valleys of Wales.
Once you have finished reading Carrie's War you may be interested in reading the afterword by Julia Eccleshare on page 171.
CHAPTER 1:
Carrie had often dreamed about coming back. In her dreams she was twelve years old again short scratched legs in red socks and scuffed, brown sandals, walking along the narrow, dirt path at the side of the railway line to where it plunged down ,off the high ridge through the Druid's Grove.The yew trees in the Grove were dark green and so old that they had grown twisted and lumpy like arthritic fingers. And in Carrie's dream the fingers reached out for her plucking at her hair and her skirt as she ran. She was always from the house,uphill towards the railway line.
But when she did come back, with her own children, the railway line had been closed. The sleepers had been taken up and the flat, stony top of the ridge was so overgrown with blackberries and wild rose and hazelnut bushes that it was like pushing through a forgotten forest in a fairy tale. The tangled wood round sleeping beauty's castle. Pulling off the sticky brambles that clung to their jeans, Carries's children said, 'No one's been here for hundred, of years......'
Not hundreds, thousands.....'
A hundred, thousands years. A million, billion, trillion.
Only about thirty, Carrie said. She spoke as is this was no time at all. I was here with uncle Nick thirty years ago. During the war- when England was at war with Germany. The government sent the children out of the cities so they should't be bombed, We weren't told where we going . Just told to turn up at our schools with a packed lunch and a change of clothes, then we went whole train loads of children sent away like that....
Without their mummies? the little ones said. Without their dads?
Oh, quite alone, Carrie said. I was eleven when we first came here. And uncle Nick was going on ten.
Uncle Nick was old. He had been old for years and grown so fat in the stomach that he puffed when he stooped. The thought of him being ten years old made the children want to giggle but they bit the giggles back. Their mother was looking so strange eyes half closed and dreaming. They looked at her pale, dreaming face and said nothing.
Carrie said Nick and i used to walk from the town along the side of the railway. It was quite safe,not like an electrified line and there weren't many trains, anyway. Only two or three a day and they came dead slow round the bend in the case there were sheep on the track. When there were, the engine driver would stop the train and get out of his cab and shoo them off, and sometimes he'd wait so that everyone could get down from the carriages and stretch their legs and pick blackberries before they set off again . Nick and i never saw that but people said it often happened. They were specially god blackberries here, easy to reach and not dusty, like at the side of a road. When they were ripe. Nick and i used to pick some to eat on the way. Not many, we were always in to much of a hurry to see Johnny Go to bed and Hepzibah green.
Go to bed
Yes just like that Carrie said. Go to Bed.'
She smiled. A remembering smile, half happy, happy sad. Waiting for her to go on the children looked at each other. Carrie was good at stories but sometimes she stopped in the middle and had to be prodded. People don't have names like that,' the oldest boy said to encourage her. Not real life, ordinary people.
Oh Johnny go to bed and Hepzibah were real, all right, Carrie said. But' they weren't ordinary. Any more than Albert was. Albert Sandwich. Our friend who lived with them.'
Lived where? There were no houses in sight: the wooded mountain rose on one side of the old railway track and fell steeply away on the other. No sound of people,either: no cars, no aeroplanes, not even a tractor. Only a pigeon or two in the line trees and sheep, baa-ing below in the valley.
