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A Little Love, A Little Learning
It is the year of the Queen's Coronation and Joanna, Kate and Poll who are eighteen, twelve and six are living in a riverside suburb of London with their mother Ellen, and their stepfather Boyd. Accepting his wise, unstinting love in their apparently secure lives, they are incurious about their vanished natural father. But the past arrives to upset the present in the person of Aunt Hat, a gossipy old friend with a husband imprisoned for assaulting her, and who seems to bring news from a different world of chaos and drama. The real danger, however, comes not from Aunt Hat's indiscretions but the girls themselves . . .
Perfectly balanced between pain and laughter, A Little Love, A Little Learning combines a touching and convincing family portrait with the lively evocation of a small community.
Perfectly balanced between pain and laughter, A Little Love, A Little Learning combines a touching and convincing family portrait with the lively evocation of a small community.
238 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1965
11 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Nina Bawden
62 books93 followersNina Bawden was a popular British novelist and children's writer. Her mother was a teacher and her father a marine.
When World War II broke out she spent the school holidays at a farm in Shropshire along with her mother and her brothers, but lived in Aberdare, Wales, during term time.
Bawden attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Her novels include Carrie's War, Peppermint Pig, and The Witch's Daughter.
A number of her works have been dramatised by BBC Children's television, and many have been translated into various languages. In 2002 she was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash, and her husband Austen Kark was killed.
Bawden passed away at her home in London on 22 August 2012.
When World War II broke out she spent the school holidays at a farm in Shropshire along with her mother and her brothers, but lived in Aberdare, Wales, during term time.
Bawden attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Her novels include Carrie's War, Peppermint Pig, and The Witch's Daughter.
A number of her works have been dramatised by BBC Children's television, and many have been translated into various languages. In 2002 she was badly injured in the Potters Bar rail crash, and her husband Austen Kark was killed.
Bawden passed away at her home in London on 22 August 2012.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 21, 2017
Bawden deals wonderfully with the minutiae of family life here, and whilst not a great deal happens in the novel, it is nonetheless compelling.
August 31, 2021
Nina Biden knows how to tell a story.
At the heart of this one is kindness, with courage, forgiveness and love tossed in for good measure.
At the heart of this one is kindness, with courage, forgiveness and love tossed in for good measure.
December 1, 2023
While the English writer Nina Bawden is probably best known for her children’s books, especially Carrie’s War and The Witch’s Daughter, she also wrote several novels for adults, mostly focusing on the challenges of family life. Her 1965 novel A Little Love, A Little Learning is one such book – a subtle, well-observed story of the pains and joys of growing up. Carrie’s War aside, A Little Love… was my first experience of Bawden’s fiction, and while I didn’t love it as much as I expected to, there’s more than enough here to encourage me to try another.
Set in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the novel is narrated by twelve-year-old Kate, who lives with her family in the fictional suburb of Monks Ford, some twenty-five miles from London. Kate and her two sisters – eighteen-year-old Joanna and six-year-old Poll – have been raised by their mother, Ellen, and stepfather, Boyd, the warm, generous, open-hearted local doctor who loves the girls as he would his own. Having grown up with Boyd as her guardian, Kate has no impression of (or curiosity about) her biological father – as far as she is concerned, his absence has not been missed.
My father had not gone out of my life, he had, quite simply, never existed in it. I never even missed the idea of him, since, as most fathers were away from home at that time, his absence was not remarkable, nor remarked upon. As far as I was concerned, then, Boyd had not taken his place because there was no place to take. The role Boyd played was entirely his own… (p. 131)
For Ellen and the girls, their comfortable life in the suburbs is a world away from the hardship of Mile End Road, the family’s previous home before Boyd rescued them from poverty. Nevertheless, when Ellen’s old friend Aunt Hat (short for ‘Hattie’) comes to stay, the equilibrium within the family is gently disturbed in subtle and surprising ways.
She was dressed in the fashion of a few years before, known as the New Look: a full, tight-waisted skirt and girlish, frilled blouse, fastened at the neck by a brooch of painted shells. The curls and clothes gave her a romantic air. Her talcum powder smelt like icing sugar and, indeed, she reminded me of a frosted cake, soft and meltingly sweet… (p. 23)
While Ellen is practical, liberal and gentle, Aunt Hat is emotive, sentimental and indiscreet, minded to forgive her third husband, Jack, for his short temper and volatility. In short, Aunt Hat has taken refuge with Ellen and Boyd while Jack stands trial for domestic abuse – a charge that will likely put him in jail for a minimum of nine months if convicted – yet she still holds a soft spot for him. Kate is especially intrigued by this visitor’s arrival, triggering long-buried memories of a disagreement between her mother and Aunt Hat just before Ellen moved the family to Mile End Road.
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2023...
Set in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the novel is narrated by twelve-year-old Kate, who lives with her family in the fictional suburb of Monks Ford, some twenty-five miles from London. Kate and her two sisters – eighteen-year-old Joanna and six-year-old Poll – have been raised by their mother, Ellen, and stepfather, Boyd, the warm, generous, open-hearted local doctor who loves the girls as he would his own. Having grown up with Boyd as her guardian, Kate has no impression of (or curiosity about) her biological father – as far as she is concerned, his absence has not been missed.
My father had not gone out of my life, he had, quite simply, never existed in it. I never even missed the idea of him, since, as most fathers were away from home at that time, his absence was not remarkable, nor remarked upon. As far as I was concerned, then, Boyd had not taken his place because there was no place to take. The role Boyd played was entirely his own… (p. 131)
For Ellen and the girls, their comfortable life in the suburbs is a world away from the hardship of Mile End Road, the family’s previous home before Boyd rescued them from poverty. Nevertheless, when Ellen’s old friend Aunt Hat (short for ‘Hattie’) comes to stay, the equilibrium within the family is gently disturbed in subtle and surprising ways.
She was dressed in the fashion of a few years before, known as the New Look: a full, tight-waisted skirt and girlish, frilled blouse, fastened at the neck by a brooch of painted shells. The curls and clothes gave her a romantic air. Her talcum powder smelt like icing sugar and, indeed, she reminded me of a frosted cake, soft and meltingly sweet… (p. 23)
While Ellen is practical, liberal and gentle, Aunt Hat is emotive, sentimental and indiscreet, minded to forgive her third husband, Jack, for his short temper and volatility. In short, Aunt Hat has taken refuge with Ellen and Boyd while Jack stands trial for domestic abuse – a charge that will likely put him in jail for a minimum of nine months if convicted – yet she still holds a soft spot for him. Kate is especially intrigued by this visitor’s arrival, triggering long-buried memories of a disagreement between her mother and Aunt Hat just before Ellen moved the family to Mile End Road.
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2023...
May 29, 2017
It is the year of the coronation, and Joanna, 18, our narrator Kate 12 and seven-year-old Poll are living happily in Monks Ford – a suburban commuter town on the banks of the Thames – with their mother Ellen and their adored step-father Boyd. The children play in their garden, building a camp under the trees, walk to and from school, part of a friendly suburban community who all think the world of Boyd – the local doctor. Boyd has surrounded his step-daughters with wise, unquestioning love, he and Ellen always answer their questions with honesty – the children have grown up with a strange encyclopaedic medical knowledge, quite matter of fact about all kinds of things their peers have no idea about. Ellen and Boyd are very modern parents allowing the girls to develop understanding about things other 1950s parents are still shielding their daughters from. While Boyd is attentive and loving, Ellen is sterner, finding it much harder to show her feelings.
Everything starts to change when Aunt Hat comes to stay. Aunt Hat isn’t a relative, she was a good friend of Ellen in the days before Boyd came into her life. It was a different time that the younger girls can only remember dimly if at all, and Aunt Hat was Ellen’s only friend. Aunt Hat is very different to Ellen, working class, gossipy and a little indiscreet she hints at problems in the past, and helps to evoke the memory of the girls’ absent father – who they have been oddly incurious about thus far.
Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2017/...
Everything starts to change when Aunt Hat comes to stay. Aunt Hat isn’t a relative, she was a good friend of Ellen in the days before Boyd came into her life. It was a different time that the younger girls can only remember dimly if at all, and Aunt Hat was Ellen’s only friend. Aunt Hat is very different to Ellen, working class, gossipy and a little indiscreet she hints at problems in the past, and helps to evoke the memory of the girls’ absent father – who they have been oddly incurious about thus far.
Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2017/...
November 4, 2012
Superb read...amazing how a child's lies can change the tenor of life for an entire family and involve them in a terrible tragedy...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews