ABSTRACT
War is one of ‘the harder facts of life’; war is all around us; war infuses, directly or indirectly a large proportion of the books on children’s shelves. As Barbara Harrison in her pioneering study of books about the Jewish holocaust wrote: ‘war is an ever-present reality for vast numbers of children; we who can choose to keep our children ignorant are a minority’. The emphasis by critics is on the educative virtues of war books. In Belgium and the Netherlands there had been a flood of literature about the Second World War, as opposed to Portugal, although the project did include some historical material from Portugal, where the past of colonial voyages of exploration is very dominant in the way war is represented for children. The images in British books about the Second World War tend towards mythologising such concepts as ‘our finest hour’, and the tone of Dutch, Flemish and French stories tends to be much grimmer.
