This Kindle edition of Lucky Girl Goodbye includes its sequel, A Bit of Time.
Renate Greenshields writes of a happy childhood in a small town near Hanover in north west Germany.
When she was 10 years old war broke out. Renate had to join the Hitler Youth. Her father, a Lutheran pastor, sheltered Jews in the Rectory and the family were under constant surveillance from the Gestapo. In 1946, at the age of seventeen, Renate and the English town commander of Lehrte met and fell in love. Barely eighteen years old Renate came to England as one of the first war brides and certainly the youngest.
Renate writes in A Bit of Time of her first five years in England as the wife of a farmer-artist, how she learned to adjust to the English way of life, coped with homesickness, a foreign language and bringing up her children.
“A touching and funny personal story. Renate Greenshields’ account of her journey from girlhood in wartime Hanover to married life and motherhood on a Devon farm, is a sheer delight.”
Diana Souhami, winner of the 2002 Whitbread Biography Award.
“Everybody, who like me, was brought up to hate and despise Germany should read this book. How human those old enemies were. Renate Greenshields has given birth to a little masterpiece of memory and has let us leap out of time.”
John Fowles.
“If proof is needed – and in these noisy, in-your-face days, it is – that a book can give infinite pleasure with a low-key but fascinating story, well told, Lucky Girl Goodbye and A Bit of Time give it. A heart-warming and gripping story of a German girl’s war, and her post-war odyssey.”
Lynne Reid Banks
Renate Greenshields writes of a happy childhood in a small town near Hanover in north west Germany.
When she was 10 years old war broke out. Renate had to join the Hitler Youth. Her father, a Lutheran pastor, sheltered Jews in the Rectory and the family were under constant surveillance from the Gestapo. In 1946, at the age of seventeen, Renate and the English town commander of Lehrte met and fell in love. Barely eighteen years old Renate came to England as one of the first war brides and certainly the youngest.
Renate writes in A Bit of Time of her first five years in England as the wife of a farmer-artist, how she learned to adjust to the English way of life, coped with homesickness, a foreign language and bringing up her children.
“A touching and funny personal story. Renate Greenshields’ account of her journey from girlhood in wartime Hanover to married life and motherhood on a Devon farm, is a sheer delight.”
Diana Souhami, winner of the 2002 Whitbread Biography Award.
“Everybody, who like me, was brought up to hate and despise Germany should read this book. How human those old enemies were. Renate Greenshields has given birth to a little masterpiece of memory and has let us leap out of time.”
John Fowles.
“If proof is needed – and in these noisy, in-your-face days, it is – that a book can give infinite pleasure with a low-key but fascinating story, well told, Lucky Girl Goodbye and A Bit of Time give it. A heart-warming and gripping story of a German girl’s war, and her post-war odyssey.”
Lynne Reid Banks
