Bombs and Blackberries: A World War Two Play Award-winning author

Read it! Sing it! Act it! Imagine it! Top author Julia Donaldson brings the war to life in this thrilling classrom play. Manchester, 1939. World War Two has started, and the Chivers kids are being sent away to the countryside. But it’s not much fun, so they’re delighted when it looks as if the Germans aren’t going to invade after all. Soon the children get to come home again, and life goes back to normal. Well, except for the gas masks and ration books, of course. But then the air-raid siren goes off, and this time it’s scarily real…

A history play by the best-loved author of The Gruffalo

Explores KS2 history/literacy topics in a creative way

Lots of parts – ideal for use with large or small groups

Appealing colour pictures and handy notes on staging

Running time: approximately 45 minutes.

Product Details

Catalogue number

6715 in Books and Resources for Schools Catalogue 2022

Format

Paperback

ISBN

9781444949698

Date published

May 3rd, 2018

Other details

48 pages

Condition

New

UK edition

Author/Illustrator

Julia Donaldson

Julia Donaldson is author of many of today’s best-loved picture books including The Gruffalo and Stick Man. Best known for her collaborations with Axel Scheffler, each of these vivid rhyming stories is a triumph of imagination. She was also the Children’s Laureate 2011-2013.

More about Julia: “I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him).

Mary and I were always creating imaginary characters and mimicking real ones, and I used to write shows and choreograph ballets for us.

I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married.

Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta.

The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting, mainly for children’s television.

One of my television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book in 1993, with illustrations by the wonderful Axel Scheffler. It was great to hold the book in my hand without it vanishing in the air the way the songs did. This prompted me to unearth some plays I’d written for a school reading group, and since then I’ve had 20 plays published.

My real breakthrough was The Gruffalo, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately – he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow – but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

My novel The Giants and the Joneses is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic Princess Mirror-Belle who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old.

When I’m not writing I am often performing, at book festivals and in theatres. I really enjoy getting the children in the audience to help me act out the stories and sing the songs.”