Cover: Holly Ovenden
‘The problem with being a Berliner in 1948 - there was only so much daydreaming possible before reality came banging at the door.’ (p 69)
Berlin skies
Robin Scott-Elliot’s considerable talent is in building highly engaging stories around real periods and events in history. His novels are ‘historical fiction’ that is genuinely, and brilliantly, both. And this, his latest, is most certainly no exception.
Although there have been many children’s novels set around WWII (some of them truly outstanding) I can’t think of much at all about Berlin in the years following the war. But now we have two come out at more or less the same time. They are very different though, and both exceptionally good. Dan Smith’s recent The Wall Between Us* is, as the title suggest, about life during the period of the Berlin Wall. Sweet Skies is, however, set a little earlier, at the time of the Russian blockade of West Berlin.
Dark skies
At the centre of this story are three young West Berliners in 1948, all poorly-clothed and skinny, like most of the city’s children. Protagonist, Otto, is now missing an eye and wears a patch, his friend Karl lost a leg and walks on crutches, whilst Ilse is an orphan living in a derelict cellar. All three characters are beautifully drawn; they spring vividly off the page and into the reader’s imagination. In a way they represent all that has been experienced and endured by children living through war, including the devastating bombing of their home city. And now they have the almost equally terrifying close presence of the hostile Russians, entrenched in their own Eastern sector of the city. Currently the Russians are completely blockading the isolated West Berlin and preventing food supplies from entering..
Equally powerfully evoked is Berlin itself, the sad, tense and often dangerous shell of what was previously a thriving, vibrant, city. With seven out of ten houses damaged and most of the centre of the of the city utterly flattened, these often cellar-dwelling kids live literally in and under a rubble field, their days’ soundtrack the mechanical din of desperate clearing and rebuilding. Add the intense pressure of the partitioned Berlin, intimately hemmed in by the hostile Russians, defined by bleak poverty and rife with desperate black marketeers.
Candy skies
To these surviving kids the saviours are the Brits, and even more especially the Americans. Otto particularly has caught something of the American Dream. He watches the US planes fly in daily with the food supplies West Berlin so badly needs and he dreams of being a pilot, perhaps even one day of escaping altogether to the ‘land of opportunity’.
But for the immediate present there is chocolate, candy dropped on makeshift handkerchief parachutes by incoming US supply planes and chased by eagerly waiting young hands.
For a readership of today’s children, who take sweets and chocolate almost for granted as part of everyday life, it takes remarkable writing skill to capture every moment of anticipation, each stage of savoured experience for children who have hardly ever eaten chocolate before. But that is exactly what Robin Scott-Elliot does. We share with our three young Berliners the intense sensory pleasure of Hershey bars, the wondrous flavours of American candy and the totally new phenomenon of chewing gum.
Storm skies
For Otto though, there is far more tragic, devastating experience on the way when his former war hero father is unexpectedly returned from prison in Russia. Not only is he physically broken, but unable to adapt to the Berlin he finds, or to his drastically affected hone life.
‘“ I don’t think my father is well - it’s the camps, in Russia, the war, I don’t know.”
“ I think the war does that to fathers. And mothers . . . And us. It hurts us all, outside and inside.”’ (p 218)
Otto finds himself on the brutally sharp end of his damaged father’s frustrations. There are several heart-rending scenes in a relationship that also represents what has been destroyed, perhaps irreparably, by war. For Otto, and the other children, there are still bitter skies here as well as sweet ones.
All of this has much to teach us about both the generalities of war and the specifics of post-war Berlin, but that does not exclude Sweet Skies being an exciting and highly engaging story too. The children have to try to survive as best they can, and Otto has his ambitions to pursue - at almost any cost. Their escapades with friendly, but ultimately unreliable, American airmen, with a German quisling and particularly with a dangerous Russian spymaster, could turn out to be genuinely deadly.
Dramatic skies
This is a gripping, gut-punching story; thrilling but also so much more . It is about war and the effects of war. It is deeply important. It helps us see the aftermath WWII from very different perspective. The way it also highlights the very real jeopardy in relationships with Russia that were to develop into the Cold War (and re-emerge in our own time) makes it highly relevant too.
The skies over Berlin were for a long time black and this novel helps us to share that experience, if only vicariously. The sweet skies of dropped candy did and do bring elements of hope, and promise, without being unrealistically sentimental. This book enriches us all, just as war impoverishes humanity.
The cover by Holly Ovenden skilfully combines many elements of this novel in one compelling image. The reproduced photographs add further to its authenticity, reminding us starkly that although the story is fictional the human truths, frailties, horrors and tragedies it captures are all too real. It is a fine book.
