Product Description

Albert, Carrie and young Nick are war-time evacuees whose lives get so tangled up with the people they've come to live among that the war and their real families seem to belong to another world. Carrie and Nick are billeted in Wales with old Mr Evans, who is so mean and cold, and his timid mouse of a sister, Lou, who suddenly starts having secrets. Their friend Albert is luckier, living in Druid's Bottom with warm-hearted Hepzibah Green and the strange Mister Johnny, who can talk to animals but not to human beings. Carrie and Nick visit him there whenever they can for Hepzibah makes life exciting and enticing with her stories and delicious cooking. Gradually they begin to feel more at ease in their war-time home, but then, in trying to heal the rift between Mr Evans and his estranged sister, and save Druid's Bottom, Carrie does a terrible thing which is to haunt her for years to come. Carrie revisits Wales as an adult and tells the story to her own children.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36558 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
The stingy fundamentalist shopkeeper Mr. Evans and his timid sister Aunt Lou provide a secure if spartan existence for youngsters Carrie and Nick during their time as evacuees from wartorn London. And for warmth and good food, there was always their treasured visits to the kitchen at Druid's Bottom, where the witch-wise servant woman Hepzibah cared for Mr. Evans' senile sister Dilys Gotobed, for mute and retarded Mr. Johnny and for fellow evacuee Albert Sandwich. Years later as she recalls these scenes for her children, Carrie is still haunted by the fear that her spiteful defiance of an old superstition may have caused the conflagration at Druid's Bottom that she glimpsed from a train window on the day of her departure. And she remembers the time when everyone believed that by confiding in Mr. Evans, for whom she alone felt pity, she had helped rob Hepzibah of her rightful inheritance. The murky atmosphere of the eccentric country household and the nitpicking routines dictated by Mr. Evans' compulsive thrift are adroitly contrasted, but the real reward is Carrie's insight into the loneliness of an unsympathetic old man. The realities of chilblains and fried bread in a Welsh mining town and the mysteries of that remembered "dark green, silent place" in the valley overgrown by yew trees are fused into a story of hushed suspense and emotional complexity. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Nina Bawden is one of today's best writers for both adults and children. she has often used her own childhood experiences in her books - Carrie's War is set in the mining valley in Wales where she lived as an evacuee in wartime. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford and finished her first novel the year after she took her degree. She won the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction for The Peppermint Pig.