Wartime in the Dales

Book excerpt: Diane Allen's The Yorkshire Farm Girl is a heartfelt novel of a family dreaming of a better life when WW2 looms on the horizon. September 1939. Friends Maggie Shaunessy and Lizzie Taylor are heartbroken to be evacuated from their Liverpool homes to rural Yorkshire. Lizzie is sent to live with a vicar in the village of Gargrave, while Maggie finds herself delivered by chauffeur to Hawith Hall and Lady and Lord Bradley. Both girls at the hall and the vicarage are far different to what they are used to – and both are very homesick. Though Maggie finds friendship too in the form of Alice, a young servant at the hall who takes Maggie under her wing. But change is coming to the Dales too, leaving the girls feeling harboring desperate plans of run away, back to Liverpool . . .