The Great Escape

Megan Rix's The Great Escape is a Second World War adventure for 10 year olds about three family pets left behind when the children are sent away.

What happens

It's summer 1939 in North London. Robert is twelve and his sister Lucy is nine. Buster the Jack Russell is helping dig the Anderson shelter in the back garden (and digging up Dad's missing slipper while he's at it). Tiger, the lazy ginger-and-white cat, just wants a sunny spot. Rose the collie used to be a sheepdog on Grandad's farm.

Then war is declared. Dad heads back to his airbase, Mum goes off to nurse on a floating hospital on the Thames, and Robert and Lucy are evacuated to their gran in Devon. The pets have to stay behind with Mrs Harris, an old friend of Mum's.

Mr Harris doesn't want them at all. He swats Tiger off his chair with a rolled-up newspaper, scoffs all the porridge himself and has heard talk in the pub about a place where pets can be "seen to".

You get the story from both sides, which is what makes it so gripping. One minute you're with Buster, begging for a crust in a kitchen that smells of cabbage. The next you're on a bumpy bus with Lucy as she holds the hand of a frightened five-year-old. There's plenty of fun along the way too (Lucy makes a very rude noise through her gas mask during a school drill, and the whole class gets kept in).

The grown-ups aren't always kind, to animals or to children. The evacuees are lined up in a chapel while villagers mutter that they should be sent back where they came from. Little Charlie wets himself in front of everyone. It's honest about how hard that must have felt.

Now for the hard bit. Mr Harris takes Buster, Tiger and Rose to join a queue of hundreds of owners bringing their pets to be put down. A child who can't bear the thought of an animal in danger will find those pages tough. But the whole book is about the three of them breaking free and trying to cross the country, so if your reader loves an animal adventure, they'll be rooting for them all the way.

What to read next

If this one's a hit, The Victory Dogs is another Megan Rix story set in wartime London. It opens in 1940 with Misty, a gentle dog who's about to have her first puppies, bolting from home in terror the moment the air-raid siren starts.