Lifeboat 12

Susan Hood's Lifeboat 12 is a wartime story for 8 year olds, told in short lines of verse, about a boy sent out of Britain by sea in 1940.

What happens

Ken Sparks is thirteen and he opens an envelope he shouldn't. It's addressed to his parents and stamped on His Majesty's Service. What thirteen year old wouldn't have a look?

Inside is his own name. He has been picked to sail to Canada.

His stepmum snatches it off him and calls for his dad. His dad says the letter could save his life.

Ken doesn't want saving. He knows his stepmum has never liked him, and that his room can be rented out once he's gone, and both those things sit in his chest at once.

Then the bombs come to his own street. The family spend a whole night under the kitchen table while the cutlery rattles and his little sister cries herself to sleep.

So he goes. Ninety children on a liner, nine-course dinners, new friends, lifeboat drill twice a day. Five days out, an officer tells the boys they're six hundred miles from England and six hundred miles from the war, and they take off their life jackets and put on clean pyjamas.

Then BAM.

The verse is what makes it work. A page goes by in seconds, so a reader who'd stall on solid paragraphs can move fast, and the gaps between the lines carry a lot of the feeling. It never reads like poetry homework. It reads like a boy thinking.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a ship full of evacuated children that gets torpedoed in the night, and the book takes you into the water with them. There's a bombing raid before that, and Ken carries the belief that his own mother died because of him, since she was told not to have children and had him anyway. That last part is early backstory rather than something that happens in the story.

For a child who finds shipwrecks or the Blitz upsetting, this is the wrong book, and the jolly bits beforehand won't change that. For one already curious about the war, it's a very strong choice, and the short lines make it braver than it looks.

What to read next

For more children living through the same war, try When We Were Warriors. Emma Carroll tells three of their stories, and the first starts with a bomb landing on a boy's street while he's out fetching chips.