Children at the Shop

This novel, published in 1967, is set in Kent. Although presented as an autobiography, it is for the most part a fictional memoir. The 'shop' referred to in in the title is the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Although the author did live near Woolwich for some of her childhood, her depiction of a childhood in this military setting was informed more by her imagination than by experience. The narrator befriends a cadet called Myers, son of a doctor in Salisbury, and she gives an account of his experiences in the First World War: "He survived the perils of the First World War, won the D.S.O. and bar, married a daughter of a rich industrialist, eventually became a brigadier-general, and retired to the south of France." With the exception of that snippet, the account ends in August 1914 with mobilisation interrupting a family seaside vacation.

The author, Ruby Ferguson (née Ashby, born 28 July 1899) was the daughter of a Methodist minister. She grew up in Yorkshire and was educated in Bradford. Her first cousin, Spencer Ashby, of the Middlesex Regiment, was killed in action on 2 July 1916. She studied at Oxford, where she did a degree in English. She started work as a secretary in Manchester but quickly began writing as a sideline. Her first novel was published in 1926; it and most of her early output were in the crime genre. Her ninth book, the 1937 romantic novel, Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, was her most successful novel for adults. She is best known for her Jill Crewe books, a series of nine pony-riding books primarily written for her step-granddaughters, published between 1949 and 1962.

One of the novel's minor characters is Astrid, a Danish student who lives with them in an arrangement similar to an au pair. She agrees to marry a German and the narrator is horrified:
“Golly, Astrid. Do you have to go and marry a German?”
“That I cannot help. I meet him, we loff, it is fate. He is so nize.”
“When you get married, will you have to go and live in Germany?”
“In Bremen, yes.”
The narrator later mentions that Astrid wrote from Bremen to describe her new home —
“That was in the summer of 1914 and the last we ever heard of Astrid.”