It is 1944, the last summer of the Second World War, and who would have thought a chance visit to a deserted mansion would so change Stephen Poole's young life? An intelligent, sensitive only child from a mining family in rural Nottinghamshire, Stephen finds himself caught up in an adult society altogether different from that of his working-class milieu, or any creation of his own fertile imagination. During these unfamiliar experiences, we are made to feel with him and for him as he makes his journey out of childhood into ...
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It is 1944, the last summer of the Second World War, and who would have thought a chance visit to a deserted mansion would so change Stephen Poole's young life? An intelligent, sensitive only child from a mining family in rural Nottinghamshire, Stephen finds himself caught up in an adult society altogether different from that of his working-class milieu, or any creation of his own fertile imagination. During these unfamiliar experiences, we are made to feel with him and for him as he makes his journey out of childhood into young manhood in a few short, eventful weeks. As we are drawn into Stephen's new-found world, and share his moments of elation, excitement, embarrassment and emotion, we meet a varied group of men and women whose lives touch his in that fateful summer. Father Gervais, Stephen's brilliant and mercurial schoolmaster; Colonel Weldman, the retired army officer who corrects some of Stephen's fanciful notions about the War; Sarah Birkett, passionate and lonely, a woman wrestling with a near bankrupt estate and a failing marriage; Lieutenant 'Scam' Rudenski, an American blackmarketeer; Lindop, the pathetic deserter; Linda Dyer, loveless and bored, a member of the Nottingham 'good war' set: Rebecca, the beautiful Jewess of Stephen's ever more complex fantasies. 'This is a thoroughly enjoyable book and one that can hold its head up high in the genre of wartime fiction.'
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