…..that I think I have Covid again, and I feel dog rough, so I am away to the sofa for a week to read books and watch Downton Abbey – this treatment seemed to help last time.
Also, I am searching for a book I read in the early 90’s, though it might not have been written then. I can’t remember the author, nor the title. It was about a young girl who was evacuated during WW2 to a farm in the countryside. She’s a sweet kid but gets the wrong end of the stick about everything, thus making it an amusing tale as she passes on misunderstood observations, and meddles in the love life of an older farm girl. Anyhow it’s driving me potty that I can’t remember the author’s name!
Right, I am away to my sick sofa!!
Wonky Words 
Oh, gosh – how on earth have you managed that in the middle or rural Devon? Anyway, I agree – Downton Abbey’s a good cure for all ills. That, and alcohol…
As for the book, heaven only knows. Sounds a bit Anne of Green Gables-ish to me!
Get well soon, dear! Jx
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Jon – I probably caught it at the vets. Grrr. My throat feels like it’s been sandpapered.
Not Anne of Green Gables!! No, it was funny, and there was many a mix up over innuendo! A friend leant it to me, and like a fool I returned in when I finished it. I doubt I’ll ever find out what it was called.
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Is this it? “Carrie’s War is a 1973 English children’s novel by Nina Bawden set during the Second World War. It follows two young London evacuees, Carrie and her younger brother Nick, into a Welsh village. It is often read in schools for its literary and historical interest.” did a google search with the description you gave (just to see if it might work) and this is what popped up! I hope it isn’t COVID and you’ve just a cold, sweetpea, but I hope you take a test. We just had to do that after attending a wedding! Fortunately, we all tested negative! xoxo
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You’ve had your fair share of Covid, Savvy, so you deserved a negative. Covid is rife at the moment – must be because of the wet weather forcing people indoors. Grrr.
Yep, I have looked up Carrie’s War, and that’s not the one, sadly. This book was more humorous than literary – thank you for looking though! I’m hoping someone may read my description one day and an answer might pop up. It’s bugged me for years, even to the point of looking up my long lost friend who leant it to me to see if she remembers – but that would be weird!
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What a coincidence, I’ve been reading about iron lungs and here you are with Covid!
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Mitzi – Let’s hope I have no need for an iron lung! But if there is I presume you will be on hand to advise?!
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Well….I know you got this, since you been through it before, but well wishes to you anyhow. It’s no fun being under the weather. I think I might be the only person to never get it yet. It’s the tankers of gin I drink you see.
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Wow, Mistress M! You must have iron clad immunity!! Or you could be right about Gin being the elixir of life!!
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Here’s a thought…why not ask the friend who lent it if she’d lend it again. Or at least tell you the title and author.
Sofas are excellent places to take the grumbles, or colds. Our sofa was being used to shout advice at at a Rugby match on tv so I took my cold to the spare bed. Seems to have worked…
Get well and keep the fluids up!
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Dinah – I haven’t my friend since 1993, she was a work colleague and she left to make a new life in York. Lovely woman, but none of us were good at staying in touch back then – maybe if we’d had email, etc, it would have been easier.
Sorry to read that you have a cold too, it’s grim – I can hardly speak. Get better soon!
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Oh I think I’m pretty much over the cold. Well, not as snotty and hacky as it was.
I still advise sofa-time tl you feel less wobbly!
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Dinah – Indeed! I’m staying on the sofa for the next 2 weeks.
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I hope you can find out about the book, somebody somewhere must know what it is.
Best of luck getting over the illness, whatever it may be. Colds and flus can be as tough as the dreaded covid
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Kylie – I’d like to come across that book again, unfortunately it was an obscure non best seller, but I live in hope.
I had a horrible cold in October when my head became 95% mucus! And I had a proper productive cough. This, what I have now, can’t make up its mind what it wants to be. Sore throat, and irritating non productive cough, this is why I suspect Covid – plus I’m already feeling a bit better. I loathe summer colds, and don’t often get them – hopefully I’ll be better by the end of the week.
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Found this :
“Johanna Reiss’s The Upstairs Room (1972), Michelle Magorian’s Good Night, Mister Tom (1981), and Michael Morpurgo’s Friend or Foe (1977)”. No clue about these titles except that they are novels and deal with evacuation (don’t even know which war ?).
Sorry.
Get well soon.
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Thank you for looking, Mr Mags! I don’t think it’s any of these as it was very light hearted – a bit of fluff by comparison. One day I might get the answer.
I am feeling a little better today, which is something of a surprise.
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I can only think of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, can you remember if there was ‘something in the woodshed’? The protagonist meddles in the lives of simple country folk, the 90s film adaptation is much better than the book, lots of bare chested farmers and a roll in the hay loft with mother watching. If you fail to find your book I recommend Letters From the LIghthouse by Emma Carroll is a good ww2 read and it’s set in Devon to boot!
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Can’t help, sorry, but Cold Comfort Farm sounds a lot like rehab …
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Mr Mags – I think we did Cold Comfort Farm at school.
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Mitzi – I looked up Emma Carroll, thank you for the suggestion. After looking I was going to reply here, but I had a coughing fit and spent most of yesterday fighting this wretched bug from the sofa. I ended up on Abebooks and now I am waiting for Deceptions by Judith Micheal to be delivered! I also ordered the sequel! I read them back in the 80s/90s – so many of those old bonk-busters were terrific reads though – they just don’t write books like they used to.
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Correction it was something nasty in the wood shed, we never do find out what Ada Doom saw in the wood shed when she was a little girl that disturbed her so much in later life. I saw something equally disturbing when I was 8 hiding in my sister’s wardrobe while she was entertaining the window cleaner.
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“The War That Saved My Life” by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.
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Hello and Welcome, Mr Albert!
Well this is very curious as the plot to The War That Saved My Life does sound like the plot I am describing. The issue is that I read the book in 1993/4, and KBB’s book was first published in 2015. Ack. So close.
Anyhow, thank you for trying!
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Luckily I’ve only had covid once. Sorry to hear you’ve succumbed again. No idea about the elusive book. But why are you so keen to get your hands on it?
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Nick – Well, it could be Covid – no test this time to prove whether it is. The hacking cough is very Covid like, as is the feeling better, then feeling 10x worse!
You ask a good question – why am I so keen to get my mitts on that book? I think it’s more about the failure of my memory to remember the title or the author! Especially as I know I enjoyed the yarn. If only I’d kept a list of books that I’d read! I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but it niggles me.
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Hello Ms Scarlet, how are you feeling now? Better, I hope, as I have stayed away so as not to catch anything. Like Maddie, I too haven’t managed to catch COVID yet – I was never any good at the catching sports. Or the hitting and jumping ones. Or the throwing and running ones. Or the team ones.
Anyway, I have no ideas about the book. I did some googling, but it was fruitless – I got Carrie’s War and lots of newly published novels. I hope you remember/find it soon.
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Apologies, Mr Devine, I am very late replying – I thought I’d done so already.
How can both you and Maddie have escaped The Covid???! You are both very lucky and possibly have innate immunity. You should be made into a vaccine! Of course, I am very jealous of your superpower.
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It’s August 4th now and I hope you’re all right and proper as you can be now. I believe I had my first bout of covid in May. I didn’t know what it was and then I read an article about the newest Covid variant around going around and it matched to a T! I did not think to take a Covid test. We have a couple but they expired months ago and their reliability was questionable before they were expired.
I also thought your book description sounded Ann of Green Gable-ish, but alas, I can be no help in this quest unless you need someone to put a pot on for tea.
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Apologies, Melanie, I thought I had replied- I am much better now, and am using my bout of Covid as an excuse to do not very much. So, yes, tea would be very nice!
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It is a strange thing about these pieces of memory, like the book you read and remember after years. For me it is some scenes from a film I watched as a kid that made me laugh. I only know that it was a short film, and was included / was connected to, that long gone “Rose of Montreux”. When I remember it correctly, this was price for short funnies. But I saw this as a kid, so it may be fifty years since.
In other connections sometimes a speck of memory pops up, and it can drive me mad that I can not find / verify what it was. I had successful searches too, like the one with the phone booth (I put it on my blog, it’s somewhere on yt), and an Austrian grotesque about VW cars (somewhere on yt).
What vexes me is how the memory works, it seems to be totally arbitrary. As you know, I am prone to vanish in the rabbit hole, I just want to understand it better, the trigger. But I guess this is fruitless, it just works. And sometimes the search is funnier than the result.
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Exactement, Mr Mags! Why do these specks of memory pop to the forefront of the brain and distract for days, sometimes years on end?! But maybe it is for distraction sake – making use of idle brain cells as much as idle hands. I have things that I should be getting on with but these things are not as entertaining as my old book quests! Which says it all really. Last week I did find one of the book titles that I’d been looking for for 20+ years. I felt mild relief and then not much else! I certainly don’t want to read that particular book again. But an itch has been scratched, and the search was much funnier than the result!
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