"Coronation Street": The War Years Saga

by Christine Green (Author), Daran Little (Author), Christine Green (Author), Daran Little (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.28

  In Part I, 'Coronation Street at War', it is September 1939 and 16 year-old Elsie Tanner walks into Coronation Street. Newly married, pregnant and full of hopes and dreams, she has little idea of the difficult times ahead. But within days her husband has enlisted, leaving his teenage bride to face the neighbours alone: snotty Annie Walker; shy Esther Hayes; cocky Jim Todd and Ena Sharples. With their menfolk overseas, the women of Coronation Street are forced to make do, supporting each other through the tragedies of the War. In Part II 'The Way to Victory' the German bombing continues, the Yanks have been posted overseas and, for Elsie Tanner, the world seems to be a colourless place of dreary munitions work and the restrictions of rationing...But all this is about to change as the end of the war draws nearer. Coronation Street: The War Years Saga tells the story of the enduring resilience of the plucky residents of Weatherfield, as they struggle through hardship, absent sweethearts and loss, to emerge as the more mature characters that formed the backbone of the longest-running serial drama. on TV.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.28

  It is 1914 and for fifteen-year-old Ena Scholfield and millions of other young women life will never be the same again. As she joins the waving and cheering crowds outside the Bijou Playhouse on Rosamund Street, Ena watches childhood pals, workmates and neighbours proudly marching off to War. Mothers, sisters and sweethearts promise to write and pray for the young soldiers and suddenly Ena feels she has to do her bit too. She grabs a passing, frightened-looking lad and asks for his name, saying she'll write to him and pray for his safe return. Ninetten-year-old Albert Tatlock stammers his name and unit number before disappearing into the crowd. While over the following four years a friendship develops between Ena and Albert, it is Ena's friendship with Mission caretaker Gladys Arkswright that brings her into daily contact with the occupants of Coronation Street and she is welcomed into a community bereft of young men, but one where there is never a dull moment. At the Rovers Return Inn, landlady Nellie Corbishley is unaware that her resident barmaid Sarah Bridges is slowly poisoning her. While young Alice Buck from No. 9 faces rejection from her family and the neighbours after becoming pregnant by neighbour Vic Piggott the night before he marches off to War. She is forced out into the gutter just days before news reaches the Street of the terrible toll the Battle of the Somme has taken on the Weatherfield residents. The Weatherfield women have endured hardship and tasted more than their fair share of tragedy before. Larders may be bare, loved onew may lie in foreign fields but the women of Weatherfield have an inbread ability to lift their skirts, stick out their hips and dance in the face of adversity. As Ena changes from a timid girl into a confident and feisty woman her attitudes towards her close-knit family, her neighbours, love and life are honed on bitter experience. As Armistace arrives and the battle-weary boys come home, Ena throws her temperant commitments to the wind and, for the first time, enters that satanic hole, The Rovers Inn. Packed full of wartime romance, emotional hardship and resilient humour, Keeping the Home Fires Burning embraces all that the show's twenty million fans love about Coronation Street.