"Billy's War" by Tony Whelpton

Billy Frecknall is nine, almost ten. He lives with his mother in Nottingham. His father is in the army, but they haven’t heard from him in more than a year, sine he shipped out with the British Expeditionary Force to France in January of 1940.  

It’s now 1941. London and the other industrial cities have borne the brunt of the German air blitz. Nottingham has been spared, until the night the bombs drop, and directly on the factory which is the area air raid shelter. Billy’s mother is killed; Billy wakes up in the hospital with a broken leg. The only person left to care for him is Aunt Florrie, his mother’s older sister, a woman best known for the parade of men to her home and being as mean to Billy as she is to her own two children.

 

He has to find his father, and the only place to do that is the War Office in London. Billy begins a journey to the capital and the War Office, aided and abetted by soldiers on a train, a waitress at St. Pancras Rail Station, and a young woman who works for the adjutant general. The only information Billy can provide is his father’s name; he doesn’t know his military number, his unit, or where he might be, only that he went to France with the BEF.

 

Tony Whelpton

Billy’s War by Tony Whelpton, first published in 2014, is the story of Billy and his friends, and how a boy with grit, determination, and resourcefulness manages, against everything stacked against him, to find the father he’s so desperately searching for. It’s also a story of Britain at war – the air raids, daily life during wartime, rationing, and the kindness of strangers.

 

Whelpton has been a teacher, writer, journalist, and broadcaster. The author of some 30 textbooks (and two books on cricket), he turned to fiction in 2012 with Before the Swallow Dares. His novels include The Heat of the Kitchen, There’s No Pride in Prejudice, A Change of Mind, High Time, and At Dead of Night. He grew up in Nottingham in the UK, and happens to share an experience with the fictional Billy Frecknall—he remembers the bombs coming down in 1941.

 

Billy’s War is a fun, entertaining, and, at times, moving story of a little boy trying to find what’s left of his family. At times, some events might seem improbable, but then this is wartime, and the improbable often happens in war.