"Our display is quickly over, since fireworks, we know, cost money, and we three children, from a very early age, are made aware that money is a commodity of which we have wretchedly little. We also know that we mustn't speak of this. Our poverty, like my fear of explosions, is something to be ashamed of, and so to be concealed from the world outside the family. One day my mother, throwing a handful of scrumpled-up rubbish on the fire, notices with horror that amongst the rubbish is a . Ten shillings is a fortune! Too late! It's gone for ever in a lick of flame. Kneeling on the hearthrug, she bursts into tears. This is the first, but not the last time I behold my mother weeping."
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Novelists from EnglandChildren's authorsAutobiographers from EnglandWomen born in the 1920sPeople from Cornwall
Original Language: English
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(384 pages; 1st edition 2008)
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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