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 - 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.' 'A study of the
disintegration of a middle-class family during the turmoil of the
Second World War, and quite shocking' wrote Sarah Waters in the
Guardian. Saplings was a ten-part serial on BBC Radio 4 in 2004.
General
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