93-year-old author slows down

Afternoon tea and crackers are just as much part of the routine for 93-year-old Margaret Wharton as scheduling book promotions and calling publishers.

The British author has written five books about her life as the wife of an American soldier.

In her latest book, “Seeing through Savernake,” Wharton tells about her adventures as a young woman before and during World War II.

“This book is not just a personal history, but a reference to how people lived their lives in that period,” said Karen Izbinski, Wharton’s publisher.

When the war broke out, Wharton was in her first year of teaching elementary-age children in the southern English town of Marlborough, in Wiltshire.

She was involved in a government program that required teachers to evacuate children from the larger, more dangerous cities to less dangerous areas.

“Young men were going where they had to go and we were going where we had to go,” she said. “It was a madhouse. Kids crying and mothers not wanting to part with them.”

It was during these times that Wharton began writing about her experiences.

“If you’ve seen or done something worthwhile, I think you have a right to write it,” she said. “It’s history.”

Wharton believes she witnessed many worthwhile things, and the scenes have stayed vivid in her memory, she said.

Wharton said she remembers standing outside of a miner’s cottage in a tiny Welsh town where she had taken the evacuated children when the war was declared.

But the fighting didn’t start immediately.

“Here we were waiting for war and nothing happened,” she said. “If you’re expecting something like that, you want it to happen. You can’t spend your life waiting for it when you know it’s coming.”

The happier times of war have also stayed with Wharton.

She remembers getting to know American soldiers when they first arrived in England during the summer and fall of 1942.

“England is a town where people walk,” she said. “Very often all you do is walk and talk and that very often encourages a man to say ‘Will you marry me?’ and the girls say yes, and there you are.”

Wharton walked and talked with the American soldier she would eventually marry in Savernake Forest, the place that inspired the title of her most recent publication.

Writing is not Wharton’s only talent, said Paul Joffrion, her social worker. Several of her watercolor paintings hang in the Health Center at Carolina Meadows where she lives.

The cover of Wharton’s new book is a painting of Savernake Forest she did herself.

“Seeing Through Savernake” is currently only available on Amazon.com, but Izbinski hopes to get it into some of the local and Triangle area bookstores.

Wharton said she has no plans for another book.

“I’m too old,” she said and laughed. “I didn’t even expect to write this last one.”

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