To War with the Walkers

One Family's Extraordinary Story of the Second World War

By: Annabel Venning

Narrated by: Annabel Venning

The miraculous story of the Walkers, six siblings who survived Blitz, battle and internment and whose incredible experiences tell a new social history of WW2, told by historian and Walker descendant Annabel Venning.

How would it feel if all your sons and daughters were caught up in war?

What would it be like to spend six years fearing what a telegram might bring?

That was the heart-wrenching reality faced by so many families throughout the Second World War, including the parents of the Walker children. From the Blitz to the battlefields of Europe and the Far East, this is the remarkable story of four brothers and two sisters who were swept along by the momentous events of the war. Harold was a surgeon in a London hospital alongside his sister Ruth, a nurse, when the bombs began to fall in 1940. Peter was captured in the fall of Singapore. Edward fought the Germans in Italy, and Walter the Japanese in Burma, while in London, glamorous Bee hoped for lasting happiness with an American airman.

In To War With the Walkers, Annabel Venning, Walter's granddaughter, tells the enthralling and moving tales of her relatives, six ordinary young men and women, who each faced an extraordinary struggle for survival.

©2019 Annabel Venning (P)2019 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

"A sensationally good book...I see reflections of my own family, and beyond them, like those mirrors tilted slightly into infinity, I can see literally miles of others lined up, inexorably linked forever by a shared experience...this is an exceptional book and should be required reading in modern history classes." (Joanna Lumley)

"An extraordinary, compelling picture of a family entwined in the Second World War...at turns funny, sad, redemptive and tragic. Fabulous." (James Holland)

"A moving book...This account of one family's experience takes us to hidden crannies of the war that more official accounts might not bother with...Once read, never forgotten." (The Times)