Britain and the Second World War

        The author, Nina Bowden has wrote a novel containing this extract about how she thinks evacuee’s led their lives living with a foster family.

         I can not prove that the source is reliable because the author has wrote a novel for children but also this is a secondary source as it was written in 1973. Because the novel is a fiction book, I think that the author may have included some fictional devices to boost the novel up to make it more interesting by exaggeration and bias.

        Although the author wrote the novel 28 years after the Second World War, the extract could still be reliable but this would depend on whether she was there during the time of the war or not and whether she had had experience as an evacuee or maybe a teacher or mother of evacuee’s and with this in mind is why I would think that the extract would possibly be reliable but is not proven. Even if the author was not there at the time, I am almost certain that Nina Bowden would have spent a lot of time doing forms of research and interviewing people to form ideas of what some foster parents may have thought when looking after the evacuee’s and maybe with this evidence she could of included it with some fictional devices.

        The extract is basically about the children’s foster parent’s thinking that the children are too poor to own slippers and this leads to the foster parent ‘s believing that the evacuee’s are poor, although evacuee’s came from all walks of life.

        Regardless of the possibilities that I have looked at, it still remains an unreliable source of material.