London is in ruins, and the war is almost over, when Gracie Turner and her neighbour, Jessie Tucker, decide to relocate to Sussex on the South Coast of England, where a couple of railway carriages lie empty and abandoned. Mr. Turner and Mr. Tucker are still away, fighting in the war. Will they return? It was a question asked by many, though life was scarcely better in London, where the search for shelter from the bombing raids became a nightly necessity if you wanted to survive. Country life had a slower pace. In fact, it might have been almost possible to forget that a war was going on, were it not for the absence of fathers, brothers and sons, and the ration books, and the regular news updates on the 'wireless'.
It was little Matilda Turner who found Peri Periwinkle. She was lying on a pile of shells, just out of reach of the waves. Where had the baby come from? Had she been washed in by the tide? It was impossible to say, so Matilda picked her up, and took her back to the old railway carriage that she shared with her mother Gracie, and Nanny Turner, and her little sister, Belinda.
A series of adventures fill the seasons but, all too soon, Peri reaches an age when she is curious about her beginnings. Who are her parents? And why did her mother leave her on the beach within easy reach of the incoming tide? Didn't she care about her, whether she lived or died?
Peri Periwinkle represents a child's eye view of the years leading up to the wedding of Princess Elizabeth Windsor and Philip Mountbatten, followed soon after by her Coronation. It recalls the street parties, the Union Jacks hung from windows and church steeples, the masses of red, white and blue flowers in overflowing pots, and hanging baskets and ornamental flower beds, the crepe paper hats and the fancy dress parades. Perhaps, more importantly, it recalls the advent of television for the masses, the black and white images, lacking colour and definition, primitive, but nevertheless, quite magical.
'Peri Periwinkle of Rye Bay' is a feast of nostalgia for anyone born in the years before, and after, the war, and anyone who holds memories, however vague or fleeting, of life in the years leading up to the advent of the 1960s
Although a book, ostensibly, for children, it will appeal to anyone who is interested in how society has changed since those heady days in 1945 when it was announced that the war was finally over.