There Was a Time

by Frank White

From an author who lived through - and served in - the conflict, a novel set in an English village at a turning point of the Second World War. A Lincolnshire village on a glorious summer's morning in 1940, the countryside as still as a painting. In the blue sky above, the fate of the whole war will soon rest with the RAF and their desperate effort to win the Battle of Britain. If they fail, Hitler's next step will be invasion. And as the scene comes to life before us over the next six months, this shadow of war will not disappear - the conflict will take husbands and sons away, bring in evacuees from the city and soldiers to defend the coast. There will be more money from war work, but less to spend it on - legitimately at least. Everywhere, the feeling of change is in the air. From the pub to the church, the humblest cottage to the biggest farm, from a struggling single mother to the lady of the manor, the paper boy to a traumatised bomb disposal volunteer, this superb jewel of a novel portrays a community of people and weaves together their stories with passion, betrayal, intrigue and suspense.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

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Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This WW2 book is set in one year of the war, 1940. It's not your usual war book in that it doesn't make the bombing and the fighting the main part of the story. It's about a village, a simple country village and the people who live in it and the lives and loves of them all and how the war affected them.
It's a story of humanity laid bare in all it's glory and it's a great read.

[Thebooktrail · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visit the locations in the novel

I found this novel a really striking one in many ways. I read the author’s note before going into the story and I was then compelled to read the acknowledgements in the back as I felt there might be even more to discover. And there was. This novel has many personal reasons attached to it, why this author wanted to write it and felt compelled to do so. That set the scene nicely and a lump was in my throat even before I started it to be fair.

The story itself more than does justice to what Mr White set out to achieve and I hope he’s happy with having written such a personal account of a time gone by. This is in fact not just a novel but a personal account of a time that has been set in writing many times but never quite in this way. It was like reading a diary as it was based on true fact yet given characters and events which really helped create a glimpse of the past and of what the human spirit can really achieve.

Thank you Mr White for a very poignant novel and a personal story of how the world once was. I always wanted to speak to my gran and grandad about the war but sadly never got the chance. I feel now that I’ve spent time with someone they might have known.

[Rachel Hirstwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frank White’s novel, set in a Lincolnshire village in 1940 evokes a nostalgic, unchanging English countryside at a time when England was at war. Alongside this written evocation are tiny peen and ink illustrations that rather reminded me of books I had as a child - Swallows and Amazons comes to mind.

The novel has a complex array of characters, dwelling on each person in the village and their small part of the war effort. Behind closed doors in this peaceful country village, things are not what they seem. At times frustrating for its lack of depth, the stories cover deeply emotional and traumatic themes with a very British stiff upper lip. The remarkable thing about this novel though, is what is not said, it relies deeply on the reader’s ability to imagine what is going on behind the narration; the emotions, conversations and battles that are hidden from our view. For me, I think this novel has the potential to be developed into a really good TV series.

[Andrew Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't often get to read books set in Lincolnshire & I always like reading about places that are very familiar through different eyes. I enjoyed this book without it being brilliant. I found it somewhat darker than I expected. It is about the war which of course leads to tragic events although the war is more of a presence in the distance impacting on peoples lives and their fears. This is about normal peoples lives in a village I may know , or rather like a village that I might know on the coast. Interestingly the sea is not a major character, it is there & it is important, attack may come from it, but it is just there.
Possibly too many characters who do not connect with each other although maybe that is the point. Unconnected lives experiencing their war in their own way. People coming & going. Nothing like as good as Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor but slightly similar in that life goes on regardless.
Just a note, not all women in Lincolnshire are big buxom types. Maybe it is what the author likes!!!!

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charming, episodic slice of life novel covering life in a Lincolnshire coastal village from June to December 1940. The characters are well drawn and you get a real feel for village life of the period. Some may not get on with the episodic nature, which means some stories have a definite arc whilst others have no definite conclusion. A decent mixture of cosiness, sly humour, drama and issues; just like real life

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this story set in a village in 1940.Funny as well as sad but held my attention through out.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - 4 stars.

'There Was a Time' by Frank White is an enjoyable read, which regards the community spirit of an English village during the early period of the Second World War. The conversational tone reflects this sense of community, and although tinged with melancholy, potentially foreshadowing the unfortunate and heartbreaking moments throughout, the overriding sense you get is of hope.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book a great deal. Even though it was set during a terrible war it gave me comfort. These characters were all ‘in it together’ working for the good of their country. Unlike where we are today with all the hatred and destruction and pure evil.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Imagined story of life in an English village during early years of WW2. Gentle and descriptive writing from the author who experienced the war first hand.

[Mike Futcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frank White makes a game attempt to create a portrait of England in 1940, not with dramatic Spitfire dogfights or urban Blitz-spirit indomitability, but simply by providing a chronicle of life in an uneventful village from the spring and summer of that singular year all the way through to New Year's Eve. White reasoned that, in 21st-century Britain, there were fewer and fewer people around who actually remembered that time, and so – at the age of 86 – sat down and wrote this modest novel.

It is a feat, and not just because of the author's advanced age. It does succeed in providing "a true bit of old England" (pg. 156), with green country lanes, small cottages, parish politics and potato pie – and mustn't-grumble characters to populate it all. But it doesn't resort to cliché and the book feels fresh. You almost want to turn on the TV to watch the cricket after reading it. (Almost.) There are sentimental moments and some which might seem cliché to a cynical, modern audience – for whom veneration of the war generation's 'Blitz-spirit' has become so set in stone it has atrophied – but sometimes things become clichés precisely because they are true, or mostly true.

However, the book underwhelms at times, despites its successes. We follow far too many characters in the village, and with so many plotlines (in a rather short book), it can be easy to get lost in the morass. The first part of the story is rather poor, with White setting in motion a near dozen different plotlines simultaneously, none of which seem particularly interesting (it is an unassuming village, after all). If the reader perseveres, some of the plotlines do separate themselves from the pack, but many are undercooked and they each end too mildly. As a drama or an engrossing read, the book fails.

But as a snapshot of a lost age, written with valuable and entirely admirable intentions, There Was a Time is very good. That wartime generation can seem peculiar to us nowadays, not least because our own sense of community and belonging has been discarded and ignored and flayed away from us, and White does us a service in helping us comprehend this older time, which will soon inevitably descend solely into the realm of national myth. At its best, There Was a Time feels like a minor Constable painting; at its lesser moments, it is like Emmerdale set in wartime. Though far from perfect, White's intermittent success in steering his book away from pastoral pastiche makes it a worthwhile endeavour.

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who has an affinity for novels set in past time periods (especially those of the first and second world wars) I throughly enjoyed this book.

I picked this book up at my local bookstore when it was first released and have read it multiple times. White creates many in-depth and frequently enjoyable characters who are easily relatable and fun for anyone who reads this novel.

One of the many things I enjoyed about this novel was the way in which the locations where described, after reading this novel for the first time I wondered if the locations where real and to my surprise they were which made me enjoy it even more. As someone who moved to Britain at a young age I have always felt an immense pride when reading, talking, listening to things from this country. This novel brought out a sense of British pride to me once again.

Another quirk this novel has which I thoroughly enjoyed was the fact that White almost forces the reader to imagine what is happening behind the scenes of the storyline, as someone who loves imagining alternate endings to novels or side pilots for insignificant characters in any novel I read, this was definitely something which I was delighted to do when reading this novel.

For many reasons this novel gets 5/5 stars from me. I recommend it to all.

[Ken Sampson · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Apr 2018] What a different book - Set in 1940, it describes a period of six months in the life of a Lincolnshire village. It begins by setting out the inhabitants all focused in their thoughts around the worry of Dunkirk and the fear of a German invasion. The village is just a typical sleepy place where people are trying to get on with the lives in what was extraordinary times. Slightly like along the lines of a fictitious Akenfield.

All the usual things happen evacuees, rationing, the death of servicemen, but also gossip, affairs, and day by day events. There is a strong gripping narrative, delivered at pace, with engaging characters well described in vignettes that you dip in and out of. It draws a list of people, some with Great War experiences, some lonely, some living in faded glory. There is no overarching story, no major theme, no surprises and no real conclusion - just a bold list of characters doing what people did at that time. A rewarding, comforting and an interesting book - well worth reading. The book ends with the partial chapter of another book by the same author - a particular annoyance of mine. I really wish publishers would not do that.

[R. Snork Maiden · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a 3.5 stars (Good Reads we would love 1/2 stars!). I really enjoyed this book, though it wasn’t outstanding in content or style, the nature of it being a snapshot of a very intense time during the life of a village on the home front in WW2 really worked and felt significant. The characters were tangible and all of the issues were pertinent and played out in thousand of lives at the time. The idea that the author (who hadn’t written a novel for 50+years) was inspired to write this because of the fact that the generation of people who witnessed and experienced this period of time first hand are fading away now and it felt important to record it, really came across. The portrayal of women felt very ‘of its time’, sometimes uncomfortably. Maybe intentional. Anyway, it drew me in and I appreciated what it was trying to achieve.

[Rosemary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled with this book, it was an look at a small village and how the different people who lived there coped with the first year of the war. There were a few engaging segments throughout, especially the section regrading the attack on the air field and the question as to whether the officer had been killed by enemy action or murdered by his own men. I felt the overall story slightly disjointed but that might have been more to do with me and my struggle to get into the book rather than the book itself.
An optimistic ending with a feeling of hope that many would have felt at the end of 1941 into 1942.

[Derek Mcknight · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a nice feel good book that gave a snap shot of a Lincolnshire village at a difficult time. It’s 1940, the troops have just been rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk and England is in fear that the Nazis will soon invade. But life goes on, the village life continues and while the war influences things there is still something very normal about the struggle to make ends meet. Love, babies, jealousies, drama. While it doesn’t go anywhere, there is no real start or end you just get wrapped up in village life for a while

[Andrew McClarnon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is quite a unusual book, as it seems like a loose collection of stories surrounding a village in 1940, as its inhabitants get drawn into the growing war. While the Dad's Army setting lulls you into a sort of nostalgia, each strand also pivots on some rather emotional drama, there's sons and husbands called up, evacuees, squaddies, late flowering love, 5th column terrorism, unexploded bombs and, occasionally, the sudden appearance of the Battle of Britain. The writer's style brings this up close, and acts as a sort of narrator, pulling back the curtain on this now distant period.

[pete flowerdew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely Book

I can't begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this book. I dreaded the appearance of The last page, and navigated it with sense of real loss.
I was there in tis village with these people, suffering there heartbreak, wanting to comfort those in desperation, but never despising the bad ones. The tragedy of the war overrode all individual concerns.
I was born during the war and have gathered from parents and others the impressions of deprivation,of loss of inconvenience, but this book brought it home to me the uselessness of it all.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as I listened to the audio book of Eric Larson's The Splendid and the Vile - a nonfiction account of WW2 during the air raids and Churchill's time as prime minister. I would listen to the nonfiction account of the war and then read about how it was impacting the home front outside of London. This is a book about nothing and about everything. A broad cast of characters each trying to live their lives, some making bad choices...it doesn't stay with any one person for very long but by the end it feels like you've lived in the village all our lives.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much was made at the time of this novel’s publication in 2017 of the author’s first hand experienced of World War 2 and the veracity of his writing. Not that ‘There Was a Time’ contains anything a halfway competent writer with internet connection or library card couldn’t have researched and marshalled into a narrative. White’s story of a coastal Lincolnshire village in 1940 is little more than a tawdry potboiler full of affairs, betrayals, jealousy, black marketeering and backstreet abortion. Most of the plot strands peter out and the prose style drifts between utilitarian and lazy.

[Hilary Tesh · Rating 1 out of 5]

In the first few pages of this book Mr Geiger and Fraulein Hertz are arrested as enemy aliens. This does not count as a spoiler because you are not going to hear their names again before the last few pages! And that sums up the big problem with this book. The author introduces names in profusion but very few of these people are ever developed into characters who reappear later in the text. All the reader learns about Walter and Lorna Booker, for instance, is that they are in the village pub on page 81! When a character does reappear, they are stereotypical - the enterprising school boy, the retired RN Commodore, the cosy mother figure looking after evacuees etc - and their stories are sketchy and superficial. They are certainly not “beautifully-drawn characters” as Gervase Phinn’s review on the back cover claims, nor is the book “a triumph of the storyteller’s art” as suggested in the blurb. With due respect to the elderly author who, like my own mother, experienced the Second World War through his teenage years, I wouldn’t have bothered to finish this book if I hadn’t paid full price for it in an independent bookshop!

Postscript a little later; at least this book gives a taste of how ordinary people really lived during wartime. I just gave up on The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir which, in comparison, is a dreadful soap opera with barely a nod to historical accuracy.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

i have rated this four stars, as I really enjoyed it and although it isnt perhaps anything completely different- after all there are lots of novels set in and around WW2- but because of its almost gentle simplicity in the way the life of the village and its people opens up during one period of time in WW2, and how they just carry on and cope and how their lives change

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just really a'day in the life' of a village during the war. Sort of ambles along with interacting stories of folks lives with all the joys alongside the hardships. I found it a pleasant distraction from my normal genre which is thrillers/mysteries. Not too taxing and an easy listen. Narration was enough to give the characters their individual voices.

[Andy T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally absorbing view of life in a small village after Dunkirk.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good view on village life during WWII, which is a view worth reading and learning about, very well.written.

[Emily Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual take on World War Two History.

[Bernard Mcmahon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in a Lincolnshire village during the Battle of Britain, There was a Time weaves the lives of the many characters into a charming, at times funny, but evocative story. A compelling book.

[Glenda Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book and captivating read about village life during the second world war. I am sure most of the characters could belong to any village at the time.