A01=Emma Smith
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As Green Grass
Author_Emma Smith
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Boating fraternity
Breakdown MI5 RAF
Cargo boats ropes bail engine
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BM
Category=DNC
Category=JBSF1
Category=WGGB
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
England in the 40s 1940s
eq_biography-true-stories
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Grand Union Canal Carrying Company
India documentary Paris France
Language_English
Memoir of WW2
Newquay to Crapstone move
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Price_€10 to €20
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Richly evocative setting
Sense of place
Siblings father mother
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Teenage girls leaving lives behind
Teens fighting for country
The Far Cry
The Great Western Beach
The Opportunity of a Lifetime
Wartime life and reality
Women who replaced boaters
Young people teenagers
Maidens' Trip
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‘Wonderfully written, humorous and humane, and beautifully evocative of the time' - Independent Summer Reads
‘Smith's writing exudes wisdom and humour, and her descriptions ... are vividly drawn' - Times Literary Supplement
‘Hope and energy radiate from every sentence of this lovely volume as it emerges into the light after its long sojourn in the cemetery of forgotten books' - Daily Mail
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A classic and unforgettable tale of three girls who abandon their middle-class comforts for an adventure of a lifetime during the Second World War
In 1943 Emma Smith joined the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company under their wartime scheme of employing women to replace the boaters. She set out with two friends on a big adventure: three eighteen-year-olds, freed from a middle-class background, precipitated into the boating fraternity.
They learn how to handle a pair of seventy-two foot-long canal boats, how to carry a cargo of steel north from London to Birmingham and coal from Coventry; how to splice ropes, bail out bilge water, keep the engine ticking over and steer through tunnels. They live off kedgeree and fried bread and jam, adopt a kitten, lose their bicycles, laugh and quarrel and get progressively dirtier and tougher as the weeks go by.
Maidens' Trip is a classic memoir of the growth to maturity of three young women in the exceptional circumstances of Britain at war.
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Product Details
- Weight: 196g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jul 2011
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Language: English
- ISBN13: 9781408801253
About Emma Smith
Emma Smith was born Elspeth Hallsmith in 1923 in Newquay, Cornwall, where until the age of twelve, she lived with her mother and father, an elder brother and sister, and a younger brother. Her book, Maidens' Trip, was first published in 1948 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Her second, The Far Cry, was published the following year and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
In 1951 Emma Smith married Richard Stewart-Jones. After her husband's death in 1957 she went to live with her two young children in Wales, where she proceeded to write and have published four successful children's books, a number of short stories and, in 1978, her novel The Opportunity of a Lifetime. Since 1980 she has lived in the London district of Putney.
In 2008 she published The Great Western Beach, her memoir of her Cornish childhood. Once again, it gained widespread critical acclaim.
