The Adventurous Four

I don't know about you but adventure stories have always had an appeal and two wonderful books in the series The Adventurous Four set off the Scottish West coast where four children with the oldest Andy aged 14 who's acquired already a good knowledge of the sea, islands and sealife is  helping his Dad,  encounter Nazi's thieves and gunrunners.
The series is very much set in Wartime arguably more so than any other of Enid Blyton's work and sees them taken prisoner by the Nazi's resolving to show them what Scots are made of.

These are my copies in the Deans Rewards series from 1973 where as with a few other series such as the Famous Five, the skirts and shorts worn by the children in the original  covers are replaced with Jeans although we all know children during the War never had Jeans!

Grave of the Fireflies

Coming up to christmas so I have been adding to my collection of full length Studio Ghibi anime movies.

This, possibly the bleakest anime Studio Ghibi have put out is based on an semi-autobiographical novel by Akyluki Nosaka tells the story of two Japanese children Seita aged 14 and his four year old sister Setsuko struggling to survive in war torn Japan with daily American bombing raids and napalm being dropped.
Their mother was killed on a raid on air raid shelter while their father, enrolled in the Japanese Navy remains unknown, they are left to fend for themselves as best they can and even a brief period being looked after by an elderly aunt who is very cold and distant proves no salvation, they set up home in an abandoned air raid shelter.
For a period this brings a sense of peace and solitude as they enjoy watching the fireflies keeping them company, the increasingly worsening situation with its food rationing , Seita finds it an increasing struggle to feed himself and Setsuko to keep them both alive.

Trip to RAF Hendon [Pre-blog]

Today I set out early with my younger brother to visit the musuem in North London by car taking a load of slide photographs with my Minolta X9 camera and Tamron 28-70 lens with a Flashgun as it doesn't have built in flash.
I'm not much for War related stuff personally but I found the bits relating to how people lived though the First and especially the Second World War interesting such as looking how childhood was affected with gas masks, evacuation of big towns and cities and rationing of candy and reduced things to play with such as toys.

This is the V2 Rocket that caused much damage over London and South-east in the 1944/5