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Saplings

by Noel Streatfeild
Persephone book no:

15 16 17


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The Far Cry
A Well Full of Leaves
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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 all their secure Englishness in the summer of 1939. 'Her purpose is to take a happy, successful, middle-class pre-war family - and then track 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. Her 'supreme gift was her ability to see the world from a child's perspective' and 'she shows that children can remain serene in the midst of terrible events as long as they are handled with love and openness.' She understood that 'the psychological consequences of separating children from their parents was glossed over in the rush to ensure their physical survival... It is fascinating to watch Streatfeild casually and intuitively anticipate many of the findings of developmental psychology over the past fifty years.'

Also available as a Persephone Classic and a Persephone e-book.

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


Read What Readers Say

Jacqueline Wilson (writer)

It's hard to choose my favourite Persephone book as I love so many, but the one I've reread the most times is 'Saplings' - it's a quietly convincing and very moving family story set during the last world war.

Sarah Waters, 'The Guardian'

A study of the disintegration of a middle-class family during the turmoil of the Second World War, and quite shocking.

Gill Hornby (writer)

'Saplings' is a quite brilliant portrait of one family's life. It follows the Wiltshires from 1939 - so comfortable, so close, so happy - through to 1945 and the almost inevitable chaos. But these characters are more than just a metaphor for the English middle class in the Second World War; the four children, in particular, are so convincing as to almost break your heart.

Categories: Childhood Family Mothers Sex Widows Woman and Home WWII

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