Michael Rosen: Please Write Soon. Another history of the present
Michael Rosen is adept at writing books for young people which also have important things to say for people of all ages and Please Write Soon(Scholastic 2022) is part of that.
The book is based on a real story from Michael Rosen’s family, but here two fictional cousins, Solly in London and Bernie in London, exchange occasional letters during the years of the Second World War. Solly is evacuated to the countryside when London suffers Nazi bombing (his mother remains in the Capital) and writes of his experiences of rural life. Bernie has a rather more dramatic time- being forced as a Jew to flee his home and become in effect a refugee ending up in a Russian camp and then as a soldier, fighting at Monte Cassino in Italy one of the epic( and terrible) battles towards the end of the war.
The ending is a poignant one which I wont spoil- get the book and read it for yourself.
Themes from the book, displacement, not knowing what was happening to close relations and friends, uncertainty about the future, are familiar to so many around the world now as they were in the 1940s. There is also a lot of humanity in the book, with Bernie noting that a bear had been adopted by his unit of soldiers.
The book has a focus on poppies, a symbol of Monte Cassino, which explains why my late father who fought at the battle (but was hardly the most ‘patriotic’ of people) always wore one. There is a also quite a bit about the wartime experiences of an obscure North London football team, Arsenal. Whatever happened to them?
The book, while fictional, is in many ways a history of the present. Its framework is based on historical fact around which personal experiences, feelings and thoughts develop and speak across the decades as a history of the present as much as of the 1940s.
It’s a book Priti Patel and Boris Johnson should be reading this Easter, but won’t be..
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