After waving goodbye to the rocks, cliffs and sands of Newquay's Great Western Beach, Emma Smith (born Elspeth Hallsmith) and her family move to the Devonshire village of Crapstone, on the outskirts of Dartmoor. But it is not long before family tragedy strikes and Emma's father's frustrations with his life as a bank clerk - and his unrecognised artistic talent - bubble to the surface in a terrible breakdown. Emma's mother, no less decorated in the Great War than her husband, rallies impressively from this disaster. Indeed for a spell, life at home, the unbroken round of dances and hockey matches is jolly enough to make the possibility of war seem remote, even unlikely. But when, in 1939, the impossible becomes a reality. Emma's pretty older sister Pam immediately enlists with the women's branch of the RAF and Jim, her philosopher brother, swaps life as a conscientious objector for driving an ambulance in France. But what should Emma do? A chance bequeath sends her to secretarial college and then a blameless job with MI5 in Oxford, but Emma yearns for fresh air. Surely there is something more she could do? A chance mention of canal boats in a newspaper - girls needed to man cargoes along Britain's waterways - sparks a whole new adventure: hard manual labour, weeks without washing. Freedom! When the war ends Emma's adventurous spirit takes her all over the world: to literary London where she meets Laurie Lee; to India to during the Darjeeling tea harvest; to the coast of France where she writes a book and falls helplessly in love; and to Paris where, nursing a broken heart, she sees a then-unknown Edith Piaf on stage and is snapped typing on the banks of the Seine by a photographer named Robert Doisneau.
As Green As Grass is a remarkable coming-of-age memoir. Endlessly engaging and capturing English life before, during and after the Second World War, it tells the story of an unusual young woman maturing against a backdrop of enormous social change.
