TO WAR WITH THE WALKERS
THREE SOLDIERS, THE WAR BRIDE, THE NURSE AND A DOCTOR: ONE FAMILY’S EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF SURVIVAL IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Annabel Venning’s account of the wartime experience of her grandfather Walter and his five siblings was widely praised. For Constance Craig Smith in the Daily
Mail, ‘Although it covers welltrodden ground — the Blitz, Dunkirk, the fighting in the Far East and the horrors of Japanese prisoner of war camps — the fortunes of this ordinary family have been woven into a heart-pounding narrative that feels fresh.’
The Walkers had a ‘cheerful, sporty, middle-class upbringing in Devon’, wrote Craig Smith. Edward and Walter joined the army and went to India, Peter became a tea planter in Assam, Harold trained as a doctor and Ruth as a nurse, and Beatrice, the youngest, became a model for Norman Hartnell. All survived the war but all were traumatised by it. Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the
Times was very moved: ‘I think of Harold, a surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, operating when a bomb killed the doctor next to him and fractured Harold’s skull. I think of Harold’s sister Ruth, a young nurse, trapped alone in the bombed basement of the hospital’s nursing accommodation. I think of Walter, in Burma in 1945, holding his nerve in his beautifully ironed officer’s uniform in the dizzying heat of battle, making a decision that would help to win the war, but would send a promising 23-year-old officer to his death.’
In the Bookseller, Caroline Sanderson praised this ‘unflinching’ chronicle of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. ‘We need to be reminded sometimes of the precise nature of those ordeals.’ And Venning is not sentimental. Suffering does not always ennoble: she was surprised to learn that Walter, the twinkly grandfather she remembered, had been thought a tyrant and a bully by his men during the war.