To The Last Page

Although the novel opens with the evacuation of young Anna Sands with a trainload of London children to the Yorkshire countryside at the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the young child's story falls into the background in favour of the romantic complications of the owners of Ashton Park, a large country estate that is to become the home to eighty-six children for the duration of the war while the capital is attacked nightly by bombing raids. The situation of Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, the childless couple who are to become the temporary surrogate parents for these children is a complicated one, Elizabeth finding that it doesn't satisfy the longing for a child that she is unable to have with her crippled and wheelchair bound husband. The situation might bring to mind Lady Chatterley's Lover where it not for the fact that it is Thomas here who longs to commune once again with nature and discover a pure love that he has never really known. These complications dom...