Lena saw their strained, sullen faces, and suddenly it was more than she could bear. Was it not enough that she should have lost Alex? She fought, but loneliness and self-pity engulfed her ... Laurel would have liked to have flung her arms around Lena ... but horror kept her silent. She rused to the door and flung it open. Her voice rose to a scream, 'Nannie, do come, Mum's ill or something.' Then the two children raced out into the garden, pushing each other about and howling with laughter.
The four Wiltshire children live a comfortable middle-class English life. But as WWII overtakes the country, the family, like so many others, slowly disintegrates. Told from the perspective of the children, Saplings is “immensely readable . . . a dark inversion of the author’s best-known book, the children’s classic Ballet Shoes” (Sunday Telegraph).Laurel, at eleven, was conscious of being happy. She was almost afraid of it. “I’ll never be as happy again. When I’m quite old, as old as thirty, I’ll come back to this bit of Easterbourne. I’ll come on the same day in June and remember me now.”
An insightful account of one English family's gradual disintegration during WWII.