| Synopsis: |
The story of a saintly vicar, his more practical wife and their nine children in a country vicarage before, during and after the First World War. When Esdras, with his robust biblical quotations for every occasion - not always appreciated, and his brothers Tobit and Sirach go off to boarding school, Miss Crosby, a governess striving for women's emancipation, arrives to teach the younger children; clever Judith, home-loving Esther and twins Susanna and Baruch. But we know that the childhood idyll cannot last, that the cataclysm is approaching. For a family of nine children in their teens and twenties can hardly hope to come through the Great War unscathed. But tragedy is met with stoicism and courage, indeed is barely mentioned, and lives are picked up and resumed in a very different post-war world. Noel Streatfeild was herself the daughter of the vicarage, aged 18 when war was declared, and as her own war work volunteered in a hospital kitchen, wrote and put on plays in aid of the Red Cross, and left home to be a munitions worker at Woolwich Arsenal. Parson's Nine is her second novel, originally published in 1932. |