"The opening volume of her childhood s, The Great Western Beach (2009), described the first 12 years of her family life in , where all was not well in her parents’ marriage; As Green as Grass begins when the family moves to a house called Melrose in the village of , , where all continues to be not well between Mummy and Daddy. ... What the book is really about is escape: from Melrose, from working as a local schoolteacher in Devon, from a grinding job as secretary in a stuffy hut in the grounds of . ... After the war Smith decides she would like to work in s, and the next thing she knows, she’s on a boat to India with as well as ‘ — Bunny’. She’s the junior, the dogsbody of the filming team, but adores it and, again, we luxuriate in this new escape. Ralph — Bunny wants her to be ‘his girl’, but she escapes from him, too, and marries a much nicer man, who dies six years later. And then, the long silence."
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Novelists from EnglandChildren's authorsAutobiographers from EnglandWomen born in the 1920sPeople from Cornwall
Original Language: English
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Ysenda Maxtone Graham,
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emma_Smith_(author)
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Emma Smith (author)
(née Elspeth Hallsmith; 23 August 1923 – 24 April 2018) was an English , children’s writer, and autobiographer. Her autographical memoir, ' (1948), won the 1949 . Her novel, The Far Cry (1949), won the for fiction. Her second and third volumes of autobiography, The Great Western Beach: A Memoir of a Cornish Childhood between the Wars (2008) and As Green as Grass: Growing Up Before, During and After the Second World War (2013), were critically acclaimed. She also wrote a non-fiction book Village
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