The Yellow Duster Sisters: A Wartime Childhood

(Paperback)

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Description

1939. Nine year old Susie and her sister Gyll live in Watford, and all week look forward to their Saturday shopping expedition to Woolworths with their nanny, to buy something nice for Mummy. But as war breaks out in Europe, the girls are evacuated to Africa. Feeling abandoned and alone, the sisters find their new life miserable and get no sympathy from their guardians, who force them to wear patched-up clothes and be in bed by six o'clock. As time passes and letters from home stop arriving, the sisters dream of escape and of returning to idyllic England. Yet when they finally do arrive home, all the changes that await them make for a very different life than the one they had longed for... Intensely funny and charming, Susan Kennaway writes about growing up during the Second World War with rare honesty and insight.

Reviews

A moving memoir of two sisters evacuated during the Second World War * Daily Mail *
Beautifully moving, offering an insight into the trauma of evacuation and the impact it had on family life * Lifestyle *
Wonderfully evocative * Womans Own *
I have never felt closer to a pair of such young sisters. What a childhood, so full of different adventures ... This is a MUST READ ... you really won't want to put it down * Lesley Garrett, CBE *
Susan Kennaway's charming memoir explores growing up during the Second World War and how wars tear families apart ... a delightful and compelling read * The Lady *
Truthful and touching ... vividly evokes the wartime experience of a young girl evacuated to a strange country, far from home * Adam Sisman *

Author Bio

Susan Kennaway was born in Watford in 1930. At the onset of the Second World War, she and her sister were evacuated to Africa. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College and later at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. She married the writer James Kennaway, and they had four children before his death in a car accident, aged forty. Susan then opened and ran a successful restaurant in the Cotswolds until she married Stanley Vereker on her fiftieth birthday. They moved to the Tarn in France where Susan created a highly acclaimed garden and now restores porcelain. Susan Kennaway is the author of The Kennaway Papers. The Yellow Duster Sisters is her second book.