Flatlands

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Freda is initially aghast at the bleak landscapes of The Wash (in Lincolnshire) but through her friendship with Philip she comes to see its unique beauty and through Hubbard's descriptions, we do too.

Does an excellent job of conjuring the consolations that can be found from withdrawing into nature, where the changing of the seasons and the routines of the wildlife offer their own companionship… Hubbard’s Lincolnshire Fens are imagined in all their bleakness and beauty. Freda, a twelve-year-old evacuee from East London, finds herself in the Lincolnshire countryside living with a strange, cold and abusive couple. No, after Bethnal Green with its crabbed back-to-backs, its soot-blackened tenements, bustling markets and noisy pubs, I could never have dreamt that such a place existed. In 1939, as the war is unfolding, children are being evacuated from the cities to areas which the enemy is less likely to target. It’s a novel of reminiscence that drifts back and forth between time zones and the two main protagonists, Freda and Philip .

Other sections set during the war introduce us to Philip Rhayader, a 22-year-old conscientious objector who has left Oxford with his vocation to join the church in tatters, following a nervous breakdown and the discovery of strong feelings for a male friend. A tender portrait of wartime youth [with] an elegiac, gentle quality, evoking the Wash as "a place between somewhere and nowhere, one of the last wildernesses in England". Photograph: Joe Rey/Alamy View image in fullscreen ‘An evocative landscape, lonely and bleak’ … the Fens in Flatlands.

She is billeted with a family, only interested in the money the government is paying for her to stay with them. Too many names of prominent artists and intellectual figures of the time and too many details from BBC Home Service war reports also added to the tedium. In beautiful, almost lyrical, prose the author has created some unforgettable characters, not least the landscape itself, all of whom influenced the course of Freda’s life.Philip “knew he had an innate sense of the holy but that it had nothing to do with theology or creeds, that it was to be found, if anywhere, in the first primroses or the flight of the whooper swans etched against the pale morning sky”. My one criticism of the novel is that there are frequent, Sudden time jumps which make the story fragmented and difficult to settle down to read.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. The read to me was reminiscent of All The Light We Cannot See or Atonement as well as books by Claire Keegan.Philip worried about her a lot, and they were both united by their loneliness and their lost sense of belonging. She arrives in the Fens,the harsh bleak flatlands of great natural beauty and wilderness, bitterly cold, windy, and desolate, and taken in by the impoverished Willocks into their dilapidated broken down home. As the world is consumed by war, they form a friendship that will change the course of both their lives. Both the characters in this book--the young girl separated by war from her family and the young man who tries to hold to his pacifist believes--are thoroughly believable and their external and internal struggles make a fine parallel set of stories that come together.