Grim, uplifting and funny, this fictionalised family saga weaves memories and historical records stemming from real-life stories of a Welsh girl and a Kiwi boy who would never have met, if it wasn’t for Hitler.
Evie, born and bred in the Valleys of South Wales, seems destined for a life in service, but the clouds of war draw her to Cirencester and work in a munitions factory. There she meets Frank, a boy from the Bay of Plenty, who is stationed with the 11th Forestry Company of the NZ Army. As war swirls around them, they find themselves in London, a young couple with everything to live for but with death their constant companion.
Publisher: Heritage Press https://heritagepress.nz/
ISBN: 978-1-991163-05-9 RRP: $39.99
Available from Heritage Press in print and ebook, and in bookshops throughout NZ
It’s been a long time coming, but War Bride is finally out there. Zana Bell spotted it in Wanaka!
War Bride Book Launch
May Bain Room
Whangārei Central Library
Tuesday 3 October, 5.30 – 7.00 pm
Register for attendance by email: info@lit-links.nz
Or phone:
0276889108
094596653
Please note: The library no longer lists authors’ events or manages registrations.
War Bride – rEVIEWED by lynn jenner
https://www.anzliterature.com/member/lynn-jenner/
War Bride
By Patricia Fenton
Published 2023 by Heritage Press
Review by Lynn Jenner October 2023
War Bride, Fenton’s debut novel for Heritage Press, is the very readable, engaging, uplifting, and carefully researched story of Evie and Frank, two young people who fall in love against the background of Britain during World War Two. I’m not letting the cat out of the bag by saying that the love story ends with Frank and Evie married, and Evie on her way to a new life as the wife of a soldier from New Zealand who will be returning home with his bride.
Evie is a girl from the Welsh valleys who gets her first job as a housemaid when she is fourteen and Frank is a boy from the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand who also starts work at fourteen. Frank’s first job is in the family’s saw milling business. Evie and Frank’s lives are very different in geography and culture but both families are hard up, still feeling the effects of the Great Depression. Both Evie and Frank have had to grow up quickly.
When the story starts Evie and her family are living in the Vale of Glamorgan, barely getting by. Fenton’s descriptions of the hand-me-down clothes Evie wore, the things the family eats and how desperate they are for the two shillings a week Evie earns, are one of the stand out achievements of the novel. Fenton is the next generation from Evie and Frank, and she does not come from Wales, but she makes the reader feel as if she knows Evie’s life intimately and personally. Fenton’s evocation of Frank’s life as a boy working in forestry and living a rough physically demanding and dangerous life with other men is equally well brought to life. Fenton’s use of slang from the period is another treat for the reader. I could often hear my older male relatives talking when I listened to Frank and his friends. The novel has very obviously been extensively researched, but it wears its research lightly. The period details are specific and authentic, but they never overpower the love story which is the engine of the novel. Rather, the research is the strong base on which the story rests.
The war, as well as bringing fear and peril to everyone, and requiring all the young men to join the armed forces, gives Evie’s family a way to escape from poverty by moving to England to take up war work. For Evie, there is the opportunity for work in a munitions factory and to earn much more than she ever could as a housemaid. For Frank the war means joining the army as a member of the 11th Forestry Company, being taken to Britain, and spending most of the war in Cirencester, cutting and milling trees which were used to prop up bombed buildings so that people could be rescued. It is hard dangerous work, out in all weathers and operating the milling equipment, but Frank has been trained to cope with all this by his earlier life in New Zealand.
With Evie working in the munitions factory and Frank cutting pit props in the forest, the scene is set for them to meet. No courtship runs entirely smoothly and theirs is no exception. Frank falls ill, the Army moves Frank around a bit, bombs fall in London, Evie’s mother thinks that at only eighteen she is too young to marry, and the young couple’s love is tested. But by VE Day, they are a married couple.
War Bride is dedicated to Prudence and Leonard Fenton, the author’s late parents-in-law, whose story inspired the novel. Many of the events in the novel are based on the stories Pru and Len used to tell, but this is a novel, not a family history. As the author says in her dedication, ‘To the greatest extent possible, I’ve aimed for accuracy and authenticity according to the historical setting, but…it’s a work of fiction’. Evie is a War Bride as the title of the novel tells us. Pru Fenton, the real-life war bride who inspired the story, was one of 3000 brides brought back to New Zealand by New Zealand soldiers returning from Europe and the Pacific.
The obligation to be respectful of the facts of a family story and the need to keep readers interested in a novel is a tricky balance. In my view Fenton has navigated this issue very successfully, making a convincing and beautifully described novel set in rural New Zealand, Wales, Gloucestershire and London, during the time between the late 1930’s and the end of the war in Europe in 1945. This book will be of interest to readers in New Zealand, Wales and England. It will be of particular interest to anyone with a connection to the foresters of the New Zealand Army.
I couldn’t put this book down. Now I’ve finished it, I am hoping Fenton writes a second book to tell the story of the young couple as they leave Britain and start their life in New Zealand.
New Review
Check out this review of War Bride published in FlaxFlower Reviews this week:
A new FlaxFlower review has been posted on
http://www.flaxroots.com/flaxflower
helping to spread the word about NZ books
And now at last, the sequel:
After the War
‘From this day forward.’ When Evie uttered those words, they were about day-to-day survival in the midst of a world war. How could she have envisaged the future that lay ahead with her Kiwi soldier after the war? A future of triumph and tragedy, heaven and hell – and hiraeth for her Welsh homeland that would last as long as she lived.
After the War is the sequel to War Bride, published by Heritage Press in 2023.
Here’s what reviewers have said about War Bride:
I couldn’t put this book down. Now I’ve finished it, I am hoping Fenton writes a second book to tell the story of the young couple as they leave Britain and start their life in New Zealand.
LYNN JENNER (WINNER OF THE ADAM FOUNDATION PRIZE IN CREATIVE WRITING)
This is an outstanding story of two ordinary, recognisable and totally familiar people from opposite hemispheres who, but for World War II, would never have met.
The author’s skill in description and depiction of purposes and occurrences reveal an outstanding grasp of people and their motivations.
MJ BURR (AUTHOR, HISTORIAN)
Published by Heritage Press in February 2025
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