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UK Authors - General fiction - |
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Waiting for the Tide |
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 Waiting for the Tide byJulia Bryant Hodder & Stoughton 392 pages, 1999 ISBN 0340751053 Reviewed by our UK Editor Rachel A. Hyde Portsmouth during the First World War is only sometimes full of sailors home on leave - but it is always full of sailors’ wives and families. They have to exist on their spouses’ meager pay and supplement it as best they can, bringing up children, caring for elderly relatives and invalid ex-sailors. It is a hard life, for nobody knows when it will be their turn for the telegram boy to deliver the devastating news that a loved one has died at sea, but it is not without its joys. Young Lily Forrest and her grandmother Beattie are keeping the home fires burning for Beattie’s son who is away at sea, when they receive the news that Lily’s brother’s ship has sank. It is her birthday and she is twelve years old. Next door the feckless Vine family have to be looked after. With three children and another on the way, Dolly falls to pieces when she hears that her husband has just suffered the same fate. Meanwhile Miriam Slattery works as a barmaid at her aunt’s pub and is in love with a handsome young sailor. When she is raped following his departure to sea and falls pregnant - whose baby is it? And will Alec want her back if she tells him the truth? There is plenty going on at all times in this novel as the characters suffer the pangs of love, loss and childbirth and the joys of parenthood and the various small victories over life’s vicissitudes. Providing a backdrop to all this is the turbulent period of the war and afterwards. The characters celebrate Armistice Day, go to the pictures to see Charlie Chaplin and Lillian Gish, try to help the starving victims of the war as they sell matches or beg and try to make ends meet. It is a novel about survival, of triumphing over the odds and making the best of what you have. As it deals with poverty I wondered on opening it whether it would be another typical "clog and shawl" tale about the sufferings of various unfortunates. I was pleasantly surprised and couldn’t put it down, reading far into the night. I eagerly await the next chapter in the lives of the Forrest family. |
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