Evacuees and Crabapple Trees
For lovers of Sheila Newberry’s historical sagas, her collected memoirs – Evacuees and Crabapple Trees – are a delight. The celebrated author of more than 20 bestselling novels wrote her first book before she was ten. She’s been enthralling fans ever since, with her warm storytelling inspired by family life. She died in 2020 at the age of 88, a mother to nine children, grandmother to 22 and great-grandmother to seven.
Newberry was born in Suffolk, where her mother was visiting from Surrey, and it was to that rural county she returned as a seven-year-old with her family to escape the ravages of World War II. Her memoirs begin in 1939 with Newberry as a bewildered evacuee, bright at school although terrible at maths and teased by her countryside classmates for being a Cockney (she wasn’t).
In five distinct periods of her life, up until the early 1980s, Newberry takes us on a fascinating, personal journey in which she begins a career as a trainee proofreader not far from London’s Fleet Street, and meets John, the love of her life, at a dance in Streatham and marries him. They spend 40 years together on a smallholding in Kent, where they raise a clutch of children. The family photos paint a lovely, idyllic picture of the author’s life.
