Publisher's Synopsis
The Liverpool Blitz is over… The seven-year-old boy who was evacuated in The Green Gates Story, comes home after many months away, and is faced with changes to his life: house moves, new districts, new faces… No sweets, because Mum's used the coupons for sugar. What are bananas? What's ice-cream? White bread? Upon his return to his home city and with his evacuation experience behind him, he views his life ahead as a series of hurdles, but the War is ongoing… Toys? - Pretend games and a good healthy imagination. Free-time? - Fun of collecting waste paper, scrap metal, bones and rags, in support of the war effort. His first trip into town, shopping with Mum, and the surprising sight of big blackened shells, once shops, now dark spaces between buildings, which had suffered direct hits, torn apart innards and burnt deposits. Blast waves obliterating shop windows and doors of adjacent buildings, displaying: Heaps of broken bricks Shattered concrete supports Splintered wood floors hanging drunkenly, with massive heaps of dust and debris deposited on the piled remains, awaiting attention and clearance. How to cope with the unnecessary death of a classmate, killed at play, after accidentally falling through the blitzed roof of an unsafe bomb-damaged house? When the supply and demands of shortages cause the theft of a family bicycle. Kids discovering the incomprehensible: German POWs sitting smoking, chatting and laughing, employed in collecting and stacking usable bricks from a bomb site, watched by a grey-haired bespectacled British soldier sat in his parked army lorry when he was not reading a dog-eared copy of Lilliput magazine. Same kids, frowning and mindful of captured British soldiers packed into overcrowded huts inside barbed-wire enclosures, overlooked by machine-gun towers, in the Fatherland!
