Six Spoons of Sugar

by Richard Holdsworth

This is the story of a little boy and his family evacuated at the start of WWll to a tiny village in "deepest Berkshire"! It actually happened but as I have had to change some names and places, I've made the village “Bumblethorpe.”

Lots happen. Dad gets arrested as a Nazi spy... he wasn't of course, but it didn't help after Dad had bought a rambling old house and it was bedevilled with strange noises... bangs in the night, and a spooky figure is seen flitting across our back garden on misty nights.

The little boy - me - is given a hard time at school by the local kids especially Smith Junior who has already pushed one kid in the Thames that he didn't like!

There's never a dull moment in Six Spoons of Sugar (the allocation during Food Rationing).  And because I start a scrapbook of cuttings from dad's newspaper, news broadcasts from BBC and pics from all over, the book contains lots of hard facts to back up the view of the war from the little boy's perspective.

The book has come second (twice) in Lifewriting at the Winchester Conference – the award sponsored by the Queen’s English Society.