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Continuing where I left off yesterday with my description and review of London’s Imperial War Museum’s new exhibition, Once Upon a Wartime, the fourth section of the exhibition is dedicated to Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword, the story, based on true events, of a small band of Polish children who travel from Warsaw to Switzerland in search of their family, having been separated from them earlier in the Second World War.

Click to view larger image

Above is a section of the cabinet including some of Serraillier’s original notes and then for comparison, an excerpt from the final manuscript for The Silver Sword.

This is the silver sword – actually an envelope opener sent to Serraillier by his brother, but which provided such inspiration for the novel.

Illustrated route taken by children in The Silver Sword

A beautiful space in the exhibition is an illustrated map of the route taken by the children on their way to Poland. I felt this helped give a sense of scale to their journey and made me think about what astonishing things people can achieve, and about what conditions bring out hidden strengths and perseverance in us.

The map included several video screens with questions posed to us the visitors, asking about the choices we might have made at various junctures along the way. Whilst the idea for this was great, it didn’t quite come off, in my opinion. The questions posed were too simple and the answers lacked contextualization. Perhaps the questions and answers were written to engage younger children, but they could have included a little more information so that adults could also enjoy this section.

The fifth and final book presented in the exhibition is Little Soldier by Bernard Ashley. This book was new to me and tells the story of a boy soldier from east Africa who is “rescued” (my quotes, not Ashley’s) and taken to the UK. He finds it hard to settle and continues to find conflict everywhere in his life, now with gangs on the streets of London.

Storyboard for Little Soldier

Whilst I thought it was an excellent choice to include this book, a book not about either of the world wars, a book set in contemporary rather than historical Britain, a book about what real fighting and face to face conflict can mean to a chil

Once Upon a Wartime, an exhibition which opened earlier this month at London’s Imperial War Museum, takes five children’s novels about war and conflict and uses them as a starting point to explore what war can mean for children.

Imperial War Museum entrance

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo, Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden, The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier, The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall and Little Soldier by Bernard Ashley provide the inspiration and setting to explore themes of loyalty, separation, excitement, survival and identity. Whilst these are books typically read by children older than my normal focus here on Playing by the book, I was nevertheless extremely keen to visit this new exhibition, to discover what inspired the authors to write their books and find out about the historical context of each story through objects, photographs and films.

I was also very interested to see how the museum chose to bring these books to life – exhibitions about children’s literature are not that common – and I thought you too would be interested to see how these books have been translated into a family exhibition.

In my review which follows I’ve included plenty of photos (to give those of you unable to visit the exhibition the best possible flavour if it) and

The Making of Me is Robert Westall's posthumous autobiography. Westall was the author of 50 acclaimed children's books, including such 20th century classics as The Machine-Gunners (Review) , The Kingdom by the Sea, The Scarecrows and Blitzcat Review. He was awarded the Carnegie Medal twice and also received the Guardian Award and the Smarties Prize. Westall grew up on Tyneside, which is the setting of many of his books, and when the Second World War broke out he was 10. He enjoyed it, finding the war exciting, even though Tyneside was heavily bombed and the young Bob had to live through the terror of the air raids. His upbringing and family life during the 1930s and 1940s is vividly brought to life in his autobiographical writings: the influences of his surroundings, the character and expectations of his parents and grandparents, the brutality of school life and what it meant in his peer group to be both short-sighted and fat - are all influences that were to resurface later in his writings, some of them, like Futuretrack 5, are savage indictments of social class. The Making of Me is a fascinating account of the early life of an important and influential children's writer of the 20th century, and provides a unique insight into his writing.

Robert Westall's The Haunting of Chas McGill and other stories is a collection of eight supernatural short stories. The title story is set before both The Machine Gunners (Review) and Fathom Five (Review). In it Chas has been temporarily evacuated to a local boarding school which is reputed to be haunted. In fact Chas meets the ghost of a WW1 Tommy, who hid at the school and then later hanged himself there. However, Chas interferes in history - somehow and history changes...

The other stories in the collection are "Almost a Ghost story" - about an Abbey which may or may not be haunted by the ghost of a nun.

"The Vacancy" - which is a futuristic SF story that's got quite a gruesome ending.

"The Night Out" - which is a quite sad story about a bunch of bikers.

"The Creatures in the House" - about a creature that feeds on the memories of single women. It's also a story about cats.

"Sea Coal" - which is a time-travel story - also featuring a cat.

"The Dracula Tour" - in which a woman taken on a trip to Bucharest who falls in love with Count Dracula.

and "A Walk on the Wild Side" - about a cat named Rama that can transform itself into a woman.

This is an intriguing collection. I particularly enjoyed "The Night Out", "The Creatures in the House" and "Sea Coal".

I've got an eclectic mix of poems for you this week. First is "Ariel's Song" from The Tempest:

Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.
Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark.
Bow-wow.
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them-Ding-dong, bell

I picked this because the second stanza is quoted twice in Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners (which I read and reviewed on Tuesday).

Next is A A Milne's

The King's Breakfast

The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"
The Queen asked the Dairymaid,
The Dairymaid
Said, "Certainly,
I'll go and tell the cow
Now
Before she goes to bed."

The Dairymaid
She curtsied,
And went and told the Alderney:
"Don't forget the butter for
The Royal slice of bread."

The Alderney said sleepily:
"You'd better tell
His Majesty
That many people nowadays
Like marmalade
Instead."

The Dairymaid
Said "Fancy!"
And went to
Her Majesty.
She curtsied to the Queen, and
She turned a little red:
"Excuse me,
Your Majesty,
For taking of
The liberty,
But marmalade is tasty, if
It's very
Thickly
Spread."

The Queen said
"Oh!"
And went to his Majesty:
"Talking of the butter for
The royal slice of bread,
Many people
Think that
Marmalade
Is nicer.
Would you like to try a little
Marmalade
Instead?"

The King said,
"Bother!"
And then he said,
"Oh, deary me!"
The King sobbed, "Oh, deary me!"
And went back to bed.
"Nobody,"
He whimpered,
"Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!"

The Queen said,
"There, there!"
And went to
The Dairymaid.
The Dairymaid
Said, "There, there!"
And went to the shed.
The cow said,
"There, there!
I didn't really
Mean it;
Here's milk for his porringer
And butter for his bread."

The queen took the butter
And brought it to
His Majesty.
The King said
"Butter, eh?"
And bounced out of bed.
"Nobody," he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
"Nobody," he said,
As he slid down
The banisters,
"Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man -
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!"

I offer this because it was A A Milne's birthday yesterday.

Finally, today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, so I thought I would link to an earlier Poetry Friday offering for the full text of Poe's poem, The Raven.

It's funny what I find as I'm browsing the library shelves. I didn't know, until I picked it up, that Robert Westall had written a sequel (of sorts) to The Machine Gunners. I say a sequel of sorts because Fathom Five doesn't really allude to the events of The Machine Gunners. Chas McGill is now 16 and looking forward to the long summer vacation from school. One day Chas and his friend Cem find a strange object in the river - it's a large enamel bowl with a cardboard box glued inside the bowl. In the box is an empty cigarette packet, a gold watch with the hands tied together with yellow wires, which lead to a battery and a grey cylinder. Cem immediately assumes it's a bomb and they race away up the beach. However, Chas returns and investigates. Eventually he works out that the cylinder is actually a Morse Code tapper (the device that's used to transmit Morse Code) and then Chas realises that the equipment belongs to a spy. He talks Cem, and his other friends Audrey (who's now a reporter and apparently still "almost as a good as a boy") and Sheila (whom Chas fancies) into helping him to find the spy who's operating in Garmouth. Along the way he nearly gets the four of them killed in two separate dangerous situations, gets into trouble with the police, and inadvertently gets someone killed. But he does find the spy - but even that turns out to be a more complicated situation than he originally imagined.

This is an interesting book and became more and more compelling the further I read. You don't have to have read The Machine Gunners to read and enjoy Fathom Five (probably because in the original hardback edition, Chas was an entirely different character). Westall wrote a third Chas McGill book: The Haunting of Chas McGill, which I'll be picking up from the library on my next visit.