Unraveled Wednesday

 Joining in for Unraveled Wednesday today with As Kat Knits.

I have been working on my Victory jumper and am really enjoying it. It is a very simple pattern to remember so makes great TV knitting. 

It is worth taking a look at the Ravelry project page for the pattern as there are some wonderful colour combinations that have been knitted.

I worked on it last night while watching this movie, Another Mother's Son.  I must admit to not knowing much about the history of German occupation of English territory during World War II. I feel it really was not mentioned much and is just coming to light in more recent times. 

The movie is based on the true story of Louisa Gould, a shopkeeper in a small rural Jersey village. Her own two sons are fighting in the war and Louisa takes in an escaped Russian POW, as she would like another woman to do for her sons.

As you can imagine, this heartbreaking movie ends in tragedy. 

The screenplay was written by Louisa's great-niece. 

Louisa's brother, seen on the left of the picture played by Ronan Keating, was one of only two English men to survive Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

In 1995, a plaque was unveiled in Saint Ouen, Jersey, dedicated to Louisa. Burriy (the Russian POW) and Louisa's surviving son, Ralph, met for the first time at the unveiling.

In 2010, she was named a British Hero of the Holocaust. 

The German occupation of the Channel Islands first came to my attention when I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. I adore this book. I must have read it five times and cry every time. 

For non-fiction accounts, there is The German Occupation of the Channel Islands by Charles Cruickshank. 

And Model Occupation by Madeleine Bunting. 

For a child's account, A Child's War: The Occupation of the Channel Islands Through A Child's Eyes.

Have you read any of these, or any books about the occupation of the Channel Islands? I would love to hear about them. 

Now I suppose I should talk about what I have actually been reading rather than books related to a movie I watched!

My current read is Promise by Minrose Gwin. Another interest of mine is books set in the US South, particularly historical fiction. This book is about the aftermath of a true event, the Palm Sunday (5th April 1936) tornado in Tupelo, Mississipi. This book is a fictional account of those events. 

The Tupelo tornado is the fourth most deadly tornado in US history, with the death toll between 216 and 233. The author grew up in Tupelo and she says in her Author's Note, that she thought she knew everything about the tornado. But she was wrong. She recently discovered that African-American casualties were not included in the numbers. They made up a third of the town's population and were simply not counted. 

This book is about much more than the tornado. It is about black/white relationships in the town leading up to the event and how the tornado changed these. It is about destruction and salvation, good and evil, our innate humanity, racial divides, set against the terror and force of the tornado.

I literally wanted to rip through the pages without putting this book down. It was totally compelling. Well, well worth picking up this book.

And one interesting fact about the tornado. Amongst the survivors were a one-year-old boy and his parents, who lived in this house.

That little boy's name? Elvis Aaron Presley.