Saplings

Product Description

Noel Streatfeild is best known as a writer for children but had not thought of writing for them until persuaded to re-work her first novel as Ballet Shoes; this had sold ten million copies by the time of her death. Saplings (1945) her tenth book for adults 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
- & then track in miserable detail the disintegration & 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 childs perspective & she shows that children can remain serene in the midst of terrible events as long as they are handled with love & 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 & intuitively anticipate many of the findings of developmental psychology over the past fifty years. A study of the disintegration of a middle-class family during the turmoil of the Second World War & quite shocking wrote Sarah Waters in the Guardian. Saplings was a ten-part serial on BBC Radio 4 in 2004.