AUTHOR PAMELA RUSHBY
PAMELA Rushby is the author of over 200 books for children and young adults, as well as children’s TV scripts, documentaries, short stories and freelance journalism. Pam has been an advertising copywriter, pre-school teacher, and producer of educational television, audio and multimedia. She has won several awards, including the NSW Premier’s Ethel Turner Prize, four CBCA Notable Books – and a bag of gold coins at a film festival in Iran! Pam believes the strangest, most riveting, heart-breaking, laugh-out-loud stories aren’t fiction. They’re real. They come from history. And she loves tripping over unusual incidents from history – and then writing about them.
Her historical novels include When the Hipchicks Went to War (Hachette 2009), The Horses Didn’t Come Home (HarperCollins 2012), Flora’s War (Ford Street Publishing 2013), The Rat-catcher’s Daughter (HarperCollins 2014) and Sing a Rebel Song (Omnibus 2015).
Learn more: pamelarushby.com
For example, Flora’s War began when I picked up an old book and saw a photograph of soldiers in World War I in a hospital in Cairo. Their hospital ward was set up on the merry-goround of a Luna Park funfair in Cairo – because there were so many wounded after Gallipoli that many very odd buildings had to be used as hospitals.
The Ratcatcher’s Daughter
Pamela Rushby
Unwrapping Parties that Greataunt Iphigenia conducts in London. However, Hattie is soon on the run, desperate to save the bodies of ancient Egyptians from being unwrapped and their souls from wandering in darkness forever.
Look out also for a historical novel about girls who joined the Australian Womens Land Army in World War II. Pamela has been awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship to undertake the book. (OMNIBUS 2016). This is a historical story set in the Blitz in London, and in Townsville during World War II, when the city was bombed a number of times by Japanese aircraft. Ten-year-old Margaret Rose is sent from London, when her parents are killed in an air raid, to live with her aunt’s family in Townsville. This was possible under the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB) scheme, when British children were evacuated to the colonies for safety: Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Margaret Rose leaves one city under siege and finds she’s come to another. And another kind of battle erupts when she and her 11-year-old cousin Lizzie meet – and don’t get on at all. An eerie sound began in the night. A few short, sharp blasts followed by a wail that went up and down, up and down.
‘Air raid!’ Margaret Rose appeared in the doorway, eyes wide. ‘It’s an air raid warning!’
The banshee wail went on and on. Was it just another practice? Or could it, this time, actually be real? We rushed out to the verandah. It was brilliant moonlight. The air was so crystal clear and still that the siren’s wail carried for miles.
Bright shafts of light suddenly sprang up from the earth and wavered, piercing the sky. Searchlights.
‘I think – I think it’s real,’ Margaret Rose said.
‘Should we – ‘ I started. I wasn’t sure what we should do. ‘Ssssh! Listen!’ ‘What?’ I said. Far away there was a thread of sound, like the buzzing of a very distant insect. ‘Aircraft,’ Margaret Rose said. ‘That’s aircraft. And I don’t think they’re ours. The searchlight wouldn’t be on if they were ours.’
Not ours. So, if not ours, then – Japanese?
‘The Japanese are coming?’ I said. I could hear my voice come out as a thin squeak. We’d talked about the Japanese maybe coming, but it had been like someone saying the bogeyman will get you, not a thing that would ever be real. Now it was real. I wanted my mum and dad. If the Japanese were coming, I didn’t know what to do.