CATEGORY
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FIRST APPEARANCE
Arthur Ness and the  Secret of Waterwhistle, Pt 1 

Summary

Arthur Ness is a young boy who, along with Teresa Smith, is a main character in the Arilon Chronicles. He lives in London during World War Two, with his mother, Abigail and father, Duncan. 

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In 1940 (25 RE), the year he first went to Waterwhistle, he was ten years old. He was a naturally scared child, frightened by just about everything.

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Evacuation from London

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During World War Two, from September 1940 to May 1941, Britain was subjected to sustained bombing from Nazi air forces. This was known as The Blitz. To protect young lives, thousands of children were evacuated from various cities to live with strangers in the countryside. Arthur was one such child.

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In December 1940, Arthur arrived at the Nottinghamshire village of Waterwhistle. He had been told he would be living with a kind, old couple - Lord and Lady Roberts. Instead, he was met by a fearsome woman called Lady Eris who had moved into the Roberts' house. Of Lord and Lady Roberts, there was no sign.

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This tall, scary woman soon had Arthur scrubbing floors, doing back-breaking labour in the garden and cleaning the house from top to bottom every day.

Although he hadn't known it at the time, not only was this Arthur's first contact with Waterwhistle, it had also been his first contact with the world of Arilon.

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The Silence of Waterwhistle

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In the 1940s, people didn't travel around the country as easily as they would in later decades. They also didn't have things like television so it wasn't easy for a person to see what life was like outside of their own small part of the country. A London-based child of this era would never have seen the countryside with his own eyes before, nor cows and sheep. So being in Waterwhistle was a huge culture shock for Arthur Ness.

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The one thing he had heard about people from villages, though, was that they were meant to be very friendly. Strangers would supposedly chat to you in the street, something that rarely happened in a big city like London. However, Arthur found that this was certainly not the case in Waterwhistle. Nobody spoke to anyone. Nobody spoke at all, except when they absolutely had to. This seemed very strange, even to a newcomer like Arthur.

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Eventually, a chance meeting threw new light on this silence and set Arthur on a path to an adventure he did not believe he was at all equipped to handle.

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Arthur's naturally scared disposition would be challenged greatly on that adventure and he would have to make the choice of whether to stay as he was, or step forward and take control, for the sake of his new friends and the village of Waterwhistle.

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Everything that happened to Arthur is recorded in the books of The Arilon Chronicles.

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