With Compliments, Adolf and Hermann
by
Norman Burtenshaw
A tale of the highs and lows of life in the Blitz
With Compliments, Adolf and Hermann is a magic blend of laughter and sadness, comedy and disaster, with brilliant descriptions of war time life as lived on the ground and in the air, by civilians and combatants.
The action all takes place during one day at the height of the London Blitz in September 1940.
On the ground, the owner of a car sales showroom, whose business has been ruined by the War, devises a scheme to use a shot down German aircraft to restore the war-torn wallets of himself and his friends; for the plan to work, he must thwart the efforts of the MoD to find the stolen plane. Meanwhile, his son, a 20 year old pilot, is fighting the Luftwaffe in the air and his daughter, a driver at an RAF airfield, is shot at by a German raider.
There is more fun with the frustrated wife of a philandering sailor, and two teenagers intent on losing their virginity, but the author has not avoided the harsh realities of living through a war. There are some particularly moving scenes which see people pulling together to try and save victims of the frequent bombing raids from the rubble. The wonderful combination of light-heartedness with a respect for the seriousness of what life was like during those years makes this book a pleasure to read.
Norman Burtenshaw lived through the war as a schoolboy in the Portslade district of Brighton. The birth of a brother meant he often escaped his mother’s attention when the sirens sounded. With a mouthful of scrumped apple this catapult king loved to fire pebbles at marauding German aircraft, and claimed to have ‘shot down’ a Dornier passing so low overhead that he could see the rivets; it crashed half a mile away on Hove Golf Course. On another occasion he was wounded by road chippings kicked up by machine gun fire from a Spitfire that was chasing a Messerschmitt. That evening his family had Wolseley Road sandwiches because some chippings were deeply embedded in the loaf of bread he had been carrying. He was decorated for this with strips of plaster and iodine stains but still had to go to school next morning.
ISBN: 978-1-906302-15-3
PRICE: £9.95 (plus P & P £3.00 UK, £4.00 EU, £6.50 RoW)
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Phone: 01438 820281
