Beneath Safer Skies

Fleeing the heavy bombing in Kent in 1940, Anthea Toft was eight years old when she arrived with her mother to live on a remote farm in deepest Shropshire. The contrast between her sheltered middle class life in the Home Counties, and that of the hard-working rural existence of the farming folk with whom she found herself, is vividly recorded in this remarkable account. A sensitive and nervous child, Anthea recalls with astonishing clarity the events that changed her young life at that time. A fascinating snap-shot of the farming communities and a lost way of rural life in Shropshire during the second world war. Anthea's account as a child-evacuee is interspersed with photographs and highlights from letters written between her parents at the time.

Anthea Toft was born in Kent, but moved as a child evacuee to Shropshire during World War II. She later trained as a teacher and returned to live in the county to work with blind children. Between 1978-90 she and her husband ran a home and rural training centre on a smallholding in the Shropshire hills with the help of a group of young people with special needs. Today she lives in retirement in Church Stretton, Shropshire.