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The Voices of the Children
A delicate and heartfelt story of the golden, ephemeral, uncertain world of childhood, this novel—set in a rural mining village in South Wales in the years leading up to the Second World War—re-creates a magical but alive world that resonates with the real and imagined memories childhood.
- GenresFiction
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
About the author
George Ewart Evans
29 books14 followersGeorge Ewart Evans was born and raised in the mining community of Abercynon, Glamorganshire, Wales. He wrote a series of books examining the disappearing customs and portraying the way of life as it had been in rural Suffolk. "Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay" is probably his best known book. The publication of his books gave him deserved recognition as a pioneering oral historian. He was also an accomplished story writer and wrote short-stories, novels and poems.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 7, 2012
George Ewart Evans was born in Abercynon, South Wales in 1909, and became a school teacher, settling Norfolk. It is in Norfolk that he began work on the volumes that would make his name: Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay, finally published in 1956, had a rocky road to publication, but once out there, its collection of oral history of Norfolk farmers became a bestseller. Evans produced more volumes, collecting more tales of vanished and vanishing ways of life; he became a documenter of the changing values and traditions of rural Britain. It is this knowledge of the ancient and forgotten that infuses The Voices of the Children, his semi-autobiographical work, written before his major successes, and telling the story of the small mining community in those post-First World War years.
The Voices of the Children, handsomely presented by the Library of Wales, and with an introduction from the artist and writer George Brinley Evans, who describes this as “a book full of stories of childhood, the uncertainty and excitement that comes with growing up.” The world of Abercynon is created here with a light but dextrous touch. His prose, appearing initially simple, recreates the voice and sight of the child with skill. He captures the voices of the children wonderfully. Take this comment at a cold mountain stream: “Ginger Williams got down on his knees and, cupping his hands, took a mouthful of water. ‘Lovely,’ he said, ‘only it’s cold enough to freeze your old granny.’” These little details, the syntax of Ginger’s sentence, the authenticity of it, create a bold tableau. It reveals Evans as a prodigious writer of children, and of lost worlds.
Sometimes, and often happens with the literature of the nostalgic, the haze of refracted memory can soften up the image, blur the edges and the cruelty, or it can exaggerate it, overdramatize events into the absurd. Evans manages to – mostly – maintain the balance between these two poles. Only in a few sequences does he allow the romance to overwhelm – such as near the end when our young hero falls for a girl for the first time, and they run hand-in-hand across the fields. But we allow him this romance, because it seems necessary and because it reveals the boy to us fully: despite the poverty, he can still dream. Despite the path laid out, there is another way.
The Voices of the Children is no more than a mere novella, a collection of tales that illustrate what life was like in the Welsh valleys all those decades ago. There is no real plot, just a collection of incidents – though we do see characters, such as his sister’s Dinah’s courting by John Prosser, their engagement, marriage then parenthood in the corners of our hero’s tale – and he does learn some life lessons: that babies aren’t as bad as they seem, that he can survive in the world – The Voice of the Children works best when it isn’t focussed on any details of its ‘plot’. Where it works is in the recreation – of shop life, of farming life, of village life, all long gone. The travelling gypsies, the locals with their nicknames: Jack Ragtime, Mrs Wilkins Checkweigher that tell us more about them than any other description could (such nicknaming is common in Wales, often to the point of one’s real name not being known; I once heard of a councillor losing his first election because he used his real name, not his nickname, so nobody knew who he was). It is this manner of thing that Evans captures best.
George Ewart Evans’s reputation might have dimmed over the years – the interest in the oral history of the Welsh mining villages, and Norfolk farms may now be of interest only to local historians – but it is refreshing to see a publisher taking a chance on republishing such material.
As a side note, Matthew Evans, or Baron Evans of Temple Guiting CBE, a Labour politician, one-time director of Faber & Faber and governor of the British Film Institute, is George Ewart Evans son.
The Voices of the Children, handsomely presented by the Library of Wales, and with an introduction from the artist and writer George Brinley Evans, who describes this as “a book full of stories of childhood, the uncertainty and excitement that comes with growing up.” The world of Abercynon is created here with a light but dextrous touch. His prose, appearing initially simple, recreates the voice and sight of the child with skill. He captures the voices of the children wonderfully. Take this comment at a cold mountain stream: “Ginger Williams got down on his knees and, cupping his hands, took a mouthful of water. ‘Lovely,’ he said, ‘only it’s cold enough to freeze your old granny.’” These little details, the syntax of Ginger’s sentence, the authenticity of it, create a bold tableau. It reveals Evans as a prodigious writer of children, and of lost worlds.
Sometimes, and often happens with the literature of the nostalgic, the haze of refracted memory can soften up the image, blur the edges and the cruelty, or it can exaggerate it, overdramatize events into the absurd. Evans manages to – mostly – maintain the balance between these two poles. Only in a few sequences does he allow the romance to overwhelm – such as near the end when our young hero falls for a girl for the first time, and they run hand-in-hand across the fields. But we allow him this romance, because it seems necessary and because it reveals the boy to us fully: despite the poverty, he can still dream. Despite the path laid out, there is another way.
The Voices of the Children is no more than a mere novella, a collection of tales that illustrate what life was like in the Welsh valleys all those decades ago. There is no real plot, just a collection of incidents – though we do see characters, such as his sister’s Dinah’s courting by John Prosser, their engagement, marriage then parenthood in the corners of our hero’s tale – and he does learn some life lessons: that babies aren’t as bad as they seem, that he can survive in the world – The Voice of the Children works best when it isn’t focussed on any details of its ‘plot’. Where it works is in the recreation – of shop life, of farming life, of village life, all long gone. The travelling gypsies, the locals with their nicknames: Jack Ragtime, Mrs Wilkins Checkweigher that tell us more about them than any other description could (such nicknaming is common in Wales, often to the point of one’s real name not being known; I once heard of a councillor losing his first election because he used his real name, not his nickname, so nobody knew who he was). It is this manner of thing that Evans captures best.
George Ewart Evans’s reputation might have dimmed over the years – the interest in the oral history of the Welsh mining villages, and Norfolk farms may now be of interest only to local historians – but it is refreshing to see a publisher taking a chance on republishing such material.
As a side note, Matthew Evans, or Baron Evans of Temple Guiting CBE, a Labour politician, one-time director of Faber & Faber and governor of the British Film Institute, is George Ewart Evans son.
January 30, 2021
I absoloutely LOVED this book!
Been on my book shelf for years and years but never picked it up - then to find that it is signed by the author as a gift to the presumably father of the lady who gave me the book!
Being from the area he writes about and knowing Abercynon well (!) it had even more of a meaning and a wonderfulness for me.
Capturing a lost and unique time of life in the valleys, bringing the best things about the valleys to life as well as the realites of the challenging life of the mines. Woven into the story are real people, places, and events and told in beautiful langauges through the eyes of a coming to age pre-adolescent boy.
Such a wonderful hidden gem!
Been on my book shelf for years and years but never picked it up - then to find that it is signed by the author as a gift to the presumably father of the lady who gave me the book!
Being from the area he writes about and knowing Abercynon well (!) it had even more of a meaning and a wonderfulness for me.
Capturing a lost and unique time of life in the valleys, bringing the best things about the valleys to life as well as the realites of the challenging life of the mines. Woven into the story are real people, places, and events and told in beautiful langauges through the eyes of a coming to age pre-adolescent boy.
Such a wonderful hidden gem!
July 15, 2023
Rather lovely novel by a writer more famous for his oral/ social history books, and indeed there is a fair amount of that sort of material in this semi autobiographical fictional account of childhood in the South Wales vallies covering both the industrial and rural settings. I thoroughly recommend both the book and the Library of Wales series it is published in.
August 20, 2022
Much as I admire George Ewart Evans's exemplary documentation of the lives of others -- he was an astute interviewer and an attentive listener skilled in the art of retrieving buried memories -- I am less impressed by his creative imagination. If you have read his autobiography The Strength of the Hills you will find yourself revisiting familiar territory in this thinly disguised fictionalised version of the author's own childhood. Perhaps the opportunity to construct his characters from elements of his personal history and preoccupations was a welcome relief from the discipline of observing the distance between subject and scribe and respecting the separate identities of the men and women he interviewed in pursuit of their recollections.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews