The Persephone Classics edition of this book for adults by the author of Ballet
Shoes: Noel Streatfeild is famous for her children's books but also wrote numero
us novels for adults, of which Saplings (1945) is her tenth. It describes an Eng
lish family, with four children, from the summer of 1939 onwards. 'Her purpose i
s to take a happy, successful, middle-class pre-war family - and then track in m
iserable detail the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of
thousands of such families,' writes the psychiatrist Dr Jeremy Holmes in his Aft
erword. At turns moving and shocking, this is a powerful, emotional portrait of
children growing up under the shadow of the war.
