Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Until the Road Ends, by Phil Earle.                  Junior Fiction.

 

 

         Beau is a stray barely existing on the mean streets of London in 1939;  life is haphazard at best, cruel for the rest of the time – until he is rescued from death by Peggy, His Girl, His Saviour, and brought back to her home in Balham to live safely with her family.  Who put up some half-hearted objections which she dispenses with in seconds:  her younger brother Wilf has Mabel, Queen of the Couch, a cat far too full of her own self-importance, so Peggy is entitled to have her very own pet, too.  Who could deny the fairness of that arrangement?  Only Queen Mabel, who loathes Beau on sight and wastes no time in telling him so in the most scathing of tones, but he doesn’t care, because someone, Peggy, loves him!  It is a wonderful, heady feeling and Beau hopes it will never end.

            But.  In the way of all Happily-ever-afters, nothing remains the same:  Hitler and his planes eventually start bombing London, and it is decided that London’s children should be evacuated to ‘the country’ where they will be safe – oh, and people should ‘put their pets down’ because food will be rationed and there will be none to spare for cats and dogs. 

            Peggy and Wilf are devastated.  They don’t want to leave their darling mum and dad, but they will do so only if mum and dad promise to keep looking after Beau and Mabel;  they couldn’t bear it if they were to come home at the end of all the conflict to find that their most-loved pets in the entire world had been killed because they needed to be fed.  Their parents, being honourable people, agreed, and the children were sent off to the coast 100 miles away, to live with Aunty Sylvia, Dad’s sister, who didn’t know one end of a child from another.  But what could be done?  Needs must.

            And Beau went out nightly with Peggy’s Dad who was an air-raid warden, a job Beau became famous for, because Beau could smell people buried under the rubble;  in fact he was so good at it that no-one dare say he should be put down- until the terrible night when a huge bomb destroyed their lives forever, and Beau – and Mabel – are on their own.

            But not quite.  Their next-door neighbour Bomber, a carrier pigeon fully trained in delivering military messages convinces them to try to reach their much-loved Peggy and Wilf:  If it can be done, it WILL be done!  And Beau and Mabel’s adventures begin in earnest.

            This is a beautiful story, predictably heart-breaking and fraught with suspense – but also based on fact:  there really was a dog trained to find people under the rubble;  he sniffed out more than 100 people buried alive beneath their homes.  His name was Rip and he was a Hero.  As so many were at that terrible time.  FIVE STARS.  For readers 11+.