Winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian has earned a worthy place in the list of children’s modern classics. Set in the fictional English village of Little Weirwold at the outbreak of WWII irascible, elderly Tom Oakley unwilling agrees to take in the displaced evacuee, nine year
old Willie Beech. At first it would seem that the frightened
boy has gained an inhospitable billet. However, when he finds the belt Willie’s mother has packed in his suitcase ‘for when he’s bad’ and see the boy’s undernourished body covered in sores and bruises, Tom begins to get an insight into the boy’s suffering.
Having loved and lost his young wife and child, Tom has had no place in his life for sentiment; the old man spending the long, intervening years keeping his distance from others and any emotional involvement. But the vulnerable Willie touches something in Tom who goes to great lengths to help the boy, teaching him to read and encouraging his
love of drawing.
At first Little Weirwold appears remote and untouched by enemy
wartime action but inhabitants old and new soon suffer the constraints of wartime. The school is overcrowded and not everyone welcomes the evacuees. Glimpses of food shortages, ‘making do and putting up’ with create a setting for this
story of redemption.
Margorian
gives us exquisitely drawn characters such as the irrepressible Zach whose parents work in the theatre and Anne Hartridge, the gentle teacher with whom Willie falls in love. Boldly, Margorian gives Willie’s mother no redeeming features and leaves the reader carte blanche to hate her. There is no, one happy ending in this story of discovery. Thrown together by circumstances, both Willie and Tom need rescuing and each manages to be the other’s salvation. This is a story for both
Children and adults.
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