Saplings

AFTERWORD BY JEREMY HOLMES
384pp
ISBN 781903155059

'I didn't know she wrote novels for grown-ups,' people remark about Noel Streatfeild – making those of us who have been secretly enjoying them in our mothers' editions, or in battered copies with the green Boots label, feel very lucky. Indeed, Noel had not thought of writing for children until her publisher persuaded to re-work the first of her adult novels as Ballet Shoes; this had sold ten million copies by the time of her death.

Saplings (1945) is also about children: a family with four of them, to whom we are first introduced in the summer of 1939. Streatfeild takes a happy, successful, middle-class pre-war English family (and the Wiltshires, like their name, are very English – there is no hint of the Celtic fringe or the cosmopolitan exoticism which lurks in the background of Ballet Shoes), 'beautiful, orderly, full of children' (the 'saplings'), with holidays at the seaside, a comfortable house in Regent's Park, a glamorous mother and a successful industrialist for a father, nannies and nurses, prep schools and public schools – and then tracks 'in miserable detail the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of such families,' writes the psychiatrist Dr Jeremy Holmes in his Afterword. Streatfeild's 'supreme gift was her ability to see the world from a child's perspective. What makes Saplings special is her use of that skill to explore a very adult problem – the psychological impact of war and trauma on family life...' 

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Endpaper

A 1938 fabric by Marion Dorn was chosen for Saplings. It is called 'Aircraft' and shows pairs of stylised pigeons in flight on a background of natural linen. It contains the imagery of aircraft being readied for war yet of birds freely in flight.

Picture Caption

WVS Clothing Exchange by Evelyn Gibbs, 1943 © Imperial War Museum