Emma Smith (author)

Emma Smith (author) Emma Smith (née Elspeth Hallsmith; 23 August 1923 – 24 April 2018) was an English novelist, children’s writer, and autobiographer. Her autographical memoir, Maidens' Trip (1948), won the 1949 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her novel, The Far Cry (1949), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Her second and third volumes of autobiography, The Great Western Beach: A Memoir of a Cornish Childhood between the Wars (2008) and As Green as Grass: Growing Up Before, During and After the Second World War (2013), were critically acclaimed. She also wrote a non-fiction book Village Children: A Soviet Experience (1982). Quotes We passed Football pitch football-fields and playing-grounds, and heard from open factory windows the magnified cheerfulness of "Music While You Work". Maidens' Trip: A Wartime Adventure on the Grand Union Canal Pocket Books Putnam 1948 https://books.google.com/books?id=l2guAAAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=playing-grounds 197 (208 pages) This was India, made for her amusement. Even the sun invited her to pour out her gladness, to soak up its immense generous heat and sweat out her salty thanks. Even the beggars pranced with hope. The Far Cry MacGibbon & Kee 1949 https://books.google.com/books?id=CX1AAAAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=pranced 116 (279 pages) Supper was as convivial a meal as our picnic had been. They sang songs for us, sitting round the table, unaccompanied, Byelorussian and Ukrainian and Russian songs. And they asked me to sing, in return, an English song for them; but I sing Off-key out of tune, and couldn't. Village Children: A Soviet Experience Impressions of the USSR Progress Publishers 1982 9780714719443 https://books.google.com/books?id=FmtEAAAAYAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=byelo- 20 (180 pages) Our fireworks display is quickly over, since fireworks, we know, cost money, and we three children, from a very early age, are made aware that money is a commodity of which we have wretchedly little. We also know that we mustn't speak of this. Our poverty, like my fear of explosions, is something to be ashamed of, and so to be concealed from the world outside the family. One day my mother, throwing a handful of scrumpled-up rubbish on the fire, notices with horror that amongst the rubbish is a Bank of England ten shilling note ten-shilling note. Ten shillings is a fortune! Too late! It's gone for ever in a lick of flame. Kneeling on the hearthrug, she bursts into tears. This is the first, but not the last time I behold my mother weeping. The Great Western Beach: A Memoir of a Cornish Childhood between the Wars pbk reprint A&C Black 2012 9781408840191 https://books.google.com/books?id=CPBEEO3wRvEC&pg=PA11 11 (384 pages; 1st edition 2008) Quotes about Emma Smith We meet in Smith's idyllic little house bordering Putney Lower Common Putney Common in London Borough of Wandsworth south-west London. There are overgrown roses in the front garden and the shelves are crammed full of books, family photographs and a solitary carved wooden bear. An almost-completed The Guardian Guardian crossword lies on a pile of paper next to her armchair. The whole thing is delightfully redolent of a slightly chaotic The Tale of Mrs._Tiggy-Winkle Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. As we sit down to talk, a man from pest control knocks on the door and removes a dead mouse from the kitchen. Smith is unperturbed. Elizabeth Day, Interview. Emma Smith: 'I'd swap all my books for my children' — The writer's 2008 memoir broke a silence that lasted decades. Now, on the eve of her 90th birthday, the bestselling novelist discusses her final book, As Green as Grass, a second part to her life story that recounts Britain between the wars and raising a family on her own 17 August 2013 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/18/emma-smith-green-grass-memoir-interview * The opening volume of her childhood memoirs, The Great Western Beach (2009), described the first 12 years of her family life in Newquay, where all was not well in her parents’ marriage; As Green as Grass begins when the family moves to a house called Melrose in the village of Crapstone, Devon, where all continues to be not well between Mummy and Daddy. ...What the book is really about is escape: from Melrose, from working as a local schoolteacher in Devon, from a grinding job as secretary in a stuffy hut in the grounds of Blenheim Palace. ...After the war Smith decides she would like to work in documentary films, and the next thing she knows, she’s on a boat to India with Laurie Lee as well as ‘Ralph Keene — Bunny’. She’s the junior, the dogsbody of the filming team, but adores it and, again, we luxuriate in this new escape. Ralph — Bunny wants her to be ‘his girl’, but she escapes from him, too, and marries a much nicer man, who dies six years later. And then, the long silence. Ysenda Maxtone Graham, As Green as Grass, by Emma Smith – review The Spectator 17 August 2013 https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/as-green-as-grass-by-emma-smith-review/ External links Category:1923 births Category:2018 deaths Category:Autobiographers from England Category:Children's authors Category:Novelists from England Category:People from Cornwall Category:Women born in the 1920s Category:Women authors from England