Overview

In August 1914, thirteen-year-old Amy was trapped on the Belgian seacoast as war was declared with Germany, alone with her younger brothers. British, resilient and feisty, she got back to occupied Brussels and began her war diaries. Amy knew Nurse Cavell and Ada Bodart, members of the secret network to get Allied soldiers across the frontier. She writes of zeppelins, food shortages, constant gunfire and spies. She confronts a 'sneering' German who demands to know where her brother is: 'I could have shot him, ' she comments. Then it all changes: in 1917 her mother attacks her and Amy is moved to a Catholic boarding school nearby. Constantly in trouble for being disruptive, answering back, whistling, laughing in church and climbing onto roofs 'for fun', she longs for the love and approval of her teacher - and her estranged mother.

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9781781323670

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Monica Kendall was born in North London in 1954 to a Polish father and a Jenkins/Hodson mother. In the 1970s, after travelling overland in her gap year to Nepal via Afghanistan, she read Arabic at Oxford. In summer 1975 she was in Lebanon when the third round of the civil war broke out but managed to return in time to play Dionyza in Shakespeare's Pericles, performed in Sam Wanamaker's tent on the South Bank, where later he built the Globe.At Oxford she also played Beatrice on a tour to the United States, and Desdemona and the Duchess of Malfi at the Oxford Playhouse. Professional acting for a few years took her to Southwold, Swindon and St Andrews, and two plays for the BBC. She went into publishing, did a Masters degree in Medieval Studies at University College London, and reared a son who is also a writer. Her previous book was an edition of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (Pearson/Longman, 2004). Her Jenkins ancestors knew the Brontës in Brussels and Yorkshire, which is the subject of her next book, The Brontës and My Family.

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