Patricia Bell

The Clouds Will Blow Away Patricia Bell

The book is illustrated with little drawings as if done by memory by the girl child herself whose story this is. Born six years before the Second World War, her babyhood is spent in the city of Birmingham. As war becomes ever more likely her father decides to become a farmer, although he knows precious little about farming. Desperate to escape the bombs he is sure will rain down on the city without warning, he will also escape the army...he remembers the First World War only too well. So he moves his wife and family to an Inn in a village in Herefordshire where, for a while, the children lead idyllic lives, taken under the wing of Mabel, a kindly countrywoman who befriends their mother. Alas, the only farm her father finds he can afford is far away in the West Country and the children are lost to poor childless Mabel. From the outbreak of war the family's lives and circumstances are altered completely but our little heroine takes to the farm like a duck to water. Sadly, as the war progresses, the old ways are thrust aside by the governmental demands on the farmers to produce ever more food for the hungry population, plunging agriculture into unprecedented change. Although hers is a childhood without television, computers, mobile phones and designer clothes, nevertheless it is a happy childhood in which she eventually manages to work out for herself, sometimes hilariously, all about life in her own good time. . But as we all know, even childhood has its ups and downs, because it is where we learn so much, a part of our whole lives, where love and loss, joy and sorrow, like light and shadow colour our landscapes just the same.