Blitz: One Family’s War
Another beautifully illustrated picture book by Martin Impey (he illustrated Hilary Robinson’s Where the Poppies Now Grow), who is here also as the author. Referencing his own father’s stories, and skilfully blending exciting incident with accurate fact, this story forms the first volume of a new series about a London family’s experiences during WWII.
A brother and sister, and ‘baby Molly’, experience the first months of the war as a sudden transformation from safety and security to unfamiliarity and uncertainty. Their father leaves to fight, food is rationed, black-out curtains put up, and their favourite parks filled with anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons. When the London Blitz commences in September 1940, the strange becomes terrifying, with the family forced to flee for shelter to the Underground, never knowing whether their homes, streets or neighbours will still be there when they emerge. One terrible night the family is split up, and a tragic event leads their mother to make the difficult decision to allow the older children to be evacuated. The next volume will deal with the children’s experiences in the countryside.
Each page comprises one large or several watercolour illustrations and brief lines of narrative in type-written font. Interspersed with this are radio-broadcast news, signs, placards and, most movingly, their father’s letters home, all signed, ‘Daddy XXXX (one each)’. Every painting is vivid, filled with marvellous period detail and visually stunning, especially the double-page spreads of bombers filling the skies above London or a wrecked street after a raid, bus embedded in the tarmac. During the evacuation train-ride the author paints wonderful contrasts between the war-torn city and a still peaceful countryside of badgers and woods.
Aimed at 8–12-year-olds, but a book to excite any child’s interest in history and instil a sense of wonder at the strangeness yet familiarity of the past. Recommended.
