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    The Oaken Heart
    The Oaken Heart
    The Oaken Heart
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Oaken Heart

    Written by Margery Allingham

    Narrated by Georgina Sutton

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Margery Allingham, already a successful crime writer, was living quietly in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy (‘Auburn’) when the Second World War broke out. Her house became an Air Raid Wardens’ post and a First Aid centre, and Allingham herself became responsible for 275 East London evacuees in a rural community of just over 600. Commissioned by American publishing friends to recount what life was like, she began The Oaken Heart in the autumn of 1940, when the Battle of Britain gave way to the London Blitz. Bombs fell, even on the Essex countryside, and a German invasion was fully expected. She conceived her work as an honest letter to America. Places were given fictional names but otherwise she told it like it was, whether funny or painful.
    Unsentimental yet personal and rich in detail, this is an evocative first-hand account of day-to-day realities in a small community upended and terrified of the future – like so many villages of the time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateOct 26, 2021
    ISBN9781781984079
    The Oaken Heart
    Author

    Margery Allingham

    Margery Louise Allingham is ranked among the most distinguished and beloved detective fiction writers of the Golden Age alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. Allingham is J.K. Rowling's favourite Golden Age author and Agatha Christie said of Allingham that out of all the detective stories she remembers, Margery Allingham 'stands out like a shining light'. She was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a very literary family; her parents were both writers, and her aunt ran a magazine, so it was natural that Margery too would begin writing at an early age. She wrote steadily through her school days, first in Colchester and later as a boarder at the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she wrote, produced, and performed in a costume play. After her return to London in 1920 she enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where she studied drama and speech training in a successful attempt to overcome a childhood stammer. There she met Phillip Youngman Carter, who would become her husband and collaborator, designing the jackets for many of her future books. The Allingham family retained a house on Mersea Island, a few miles from Layer Breton, and it was here that Margery found the material for her first novel, the adventure story Blackkerchief Dick (1923), which was published when she was just nineteen. She went on to pen multiple novels, some of which dealt with occult themes and some with mystery, as well as writing plays and stories – her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, was serialized in the Daily Express in 1927. Allingham died at the age of 62, and her final novel, A Cargo of Eagles, was finished by her husband at her request and published posthumously in 1968.

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    • 5/5
      Uniquely expressive, in-depth, and heart-felt account of what it was like living and surviving in the village of. Auburn, England during WWII.