The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson

Author:Kate Thompson [THOMPSON, KATE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

14

Grace

BANNED BOOK

Bambi, a Life in the Woods , by Felix Salten. This is a sweet story about a young deer who finds love and friendship in a forest, but the original tale of Bambi, adapted by Disney in 1942, has much darker beginnings as a novel about persecution and antisemitism in 1920s Austria. The Jewish author’s book was banned by the Nazis in 1935, who burned it as Jewish propaganda. Salten fled Austria in 1938. He sold the film rights for $1,000 to an American director, who sold them on to Disney. He never earned a penny from the adaptation and died in Zurich in 1945, alone, with no safe place to call home.

Four weeks on Grace was still reeling from the savagery of her losses. Nature was her consolation. It was a Monday morning at the end of May and spring had merged into bright, sun-sharp days. In the fields the corn turned brown to butter-blonde. Thick clumps of purple heather and yellow gorse glowed in the sunshine, the air filled with its coconut scent. Grace savored its tang in her mouth as she pedaled to and from the library each day.

Most people were more concerned with what was happening in their home than the passing of the seasons. Mealtimes were what her mother had dubbed “SOS”—soup or spuds. Nothing of any flavor passed their lips these days. But nothing had scoured Grace more than Red’s arrest and the closure of their book club. Their absence over the past month had felt like the removal of a limb.

When it came to the club, it wasn’t so much the books themselves, as book issues were at a record high. It was the feeling of companionship, the collective act of reading, which had made them all feel as if their suffering were a shared endeavor. The sense that somehow, their literary gatherings were protecting them from the occupation. Nestled in the sanctuary of the library, words flowing over and around them, had kept real life at bay.

Every week without fail Grace had secretly managed to visit Peter in hospital, thanks to Sister Morgan. If it hadn’t been for those precious encounters, she would have doubted he were alive at all. It was if he’d been swallowed into a vacuum of darkness. Without his continual, calm presence it felt like the library was missing a precious book.

Sighing, she pulled the Evening Post from the newspaper rack and turned to the section which reported sessions at the Royal Court. It was the usual fare. A farmer fined £30 for having an unregistered pig. A four-and-a-half month prison sentence for Winifred Green who worked at the Royal Hotel in Guernsey, where the chef was an ardent Nazi and to his frequent “Heil Hitler,” she had replied, “Heil Churchill.”

But nothing on Peter.

Red’s arrest had been a far splashier affair. The Nazi authorities had gone to town on that, ensuring that most of the front page of the Evening Post had been dedicated to the capture of “a most dangerous enemy of the Third Reich.

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