What an excellent, dark idea to set a children’s book near an American airbase in Devon during the Cuban missile crisis — it makes a change from the endless middle-grade novels set during the First and Second World Wars. Which is not to dismiss the previous wartime works by Emma Carroll, who has become one of our best historical fiction writers for children. This new story will only further burnish her reputation.
Stevie, a shy girl who finds reading a chore, and her best friend, Ray, the mixed-race son of an American who works at the base, live in World’s End Close, where nothing ever happens. And then, of course, it does when Stevie discovers a tall, thin, pale child hiding in her garden shed. The girl, who wears a bobble hat and carries a notebook, is being chased by poisoners, or so she claims. Stevie and Ray befriend her and hide her in an old pillbox, although they become increasingly unsure of her story.
Meanwhile, paranoia is high as the Soviet Union sends boats to Cuba and the talk is of imminent nuclear war. Then, while her mother is away, Stevie discovers the real reason for the death of her military father, the implications of which will force a change in her own behaviour.
This being a book by Carroll, animals play their part — Stevie’s dog Flea and a mysterious white boxer — and the location is beautifully drawn and sometimes familiar. When Stevie and Ray bunk off school to take a day trip to Budmouth Point, we get a glimpse of the landscape from her 2017 wartime tale Letters from the Lighthouse.
Carroll’s research is exemplary; we are reminded how, arguably, the shooting down of a US air force pilot stopped a nuclear catastrophe. Yet she never lets a history lesson get in the way of a stonking plot. Although the book is set in the early 1960s with a soundtrack of the Beatles, the Who and the parp of a Lambretta, it feels very now with its talk of race relations, peace accords and the power of the people.
The Week at World’s End 8-12 by Emma Carroll, Faber, 320pp; £12.99
