Life must be filled up

*sighs* It would be nice to have a story (like The White Riders or No Entry), where getting Jim Decks out of trouble is not the main theme. I’m with Meryon on how dishonest he is and get tired of Tamzin’s misplaced loyalty (which is supposed to be a great virtue in her). Their different views lead to the first real quarrel, until Tamzin is made remorseful after Meryon’s heroic saving of Hookey Galley’s life, which she knows he will never speak of. Continuity error here: in The Nightbird we’re told that innocent-looking Snowey Peplow will stop at nothing, yet here he’s described as having ‘a law-abiding nature’. The nefarious goings-on of Jim and Hookey are getting tiresome by now and from this book onwards, I tire of Tamzin’s perfection and Meryon’s possessive attitude to her.
(  Dolphin Summer (1963) )

Is anyone still with me on this read? I don’t mind because it’s a useful record for me.

This is another book about night time haunting. The first scene is the church’s annual ‘harvest of the seas’ service, which all the local fishermen attend because it would be bad luck not to. This year is different because catches are so low that the fishing folk can barely make a living. Tamzin finds out that it’s because ‘they Frenchies’ are not only poaching in Westling’s waters but using illegal small-mesh nets. Her first thought is to talk to Jim about it. Remembering their adventures in The White Riders, they plot a haunting by a ghost ship, a sort of Flying Dutchman, to frighten the French away. Jim’s old boat The Thunderer will be made seaworthy again and dressed with white sails to look ghostly. This time, they tell their parents first and all seems set until Rissa’s parents say it would be all right if the vicar went, too. Tamzin finds that her ever-surprising father has not only known all along about the poaching (‘Vicars hear things,’ as he says in an earlier book), but is willing to join in, as it’s for the good of his parishioners.


They need tar, ropes and sails and all cost money In no time there’s a regular working party, including Mr Grey, painting and hammering away. Even Diccon is allowed to sit on a cradle suspended from the side, happily painting with tar (he’s only seven!) Roger makes a war drum and practises producing eerie sounds on his mouth organ. Rissa will swing the banshee wailer they used when they were White Riders. Meryon gets hold of some headlights to light up the sails and Tamzin provides some broken stained glass for spooky colour changes and a bee smoker. They’re a cheerful team on the whole (Hookey Galley is never cheerful). The first rehearsal goes well and as it’s only a practice, Mrs Grey and Diccon join in, along with Billingham, who quickly reverts to being a ship’s cat. Everything seems set for more haunting but then Jim ‘changed me mind’. Why? And why does he disappear for a few days to ‘Aunt Ada’s’? Tamzin observes that Snowey Peplow hasn’t been around, either and remembers Mrs Merrow saying that Snowey looked like a saint but would stop at nothing and she wonders … (One of the nice things about these books is that almost all the inhabitants of Westling have known each other since they were children.)

Of all people, it’s Smiling Morn who suggests that they get ‘that Hookey Galley’ to take them out while Jim is away. He agrees; he may be disagreeable but he’s a fine sailor. There will be red sails this time but otherwise, everything as before. They close with a French boat, a coastguard launch appears and there’s a general melee before everyone is back on the Sarah, including Jim, who was on the French boat (up to his old tricks) but: no vicar! He’s been taken hostage. The adventurous side of the scholarly Mr Grey is the great revelation of this book. He can steer a boat, is a strong swimmer and ‘once played rugger for Oxford’. You’d never believe he’d of took to a rough life so natural, wouldja? observed Snowey …and him so righteous.’ ‘Thass because he’s righteous that he done it,’ said Jim …’But I count he enjoy it, all the same.’ said Snowey.

No sleep for poor Mrs Grey that night, with a missing husband. Jim assures her he knows just where the vicar is and will get him back. Next day, the rescue party sets out, ready to do battle if necessary, like the Sussex men of old, to get back what is theirs i.e. ‘parson’. They arrive at a secret French port and a deserted village. Making their way to the church, they find it packed and Mr Grey, speaking French, just winding up a service. He joins the others cheerfully and says he supposes there will now be a night sailing. You have to remember it’s only ten years since the end of the war and who knows what Mr Grey got up to? The news is good and bad: he has persuaded the French villagers to give up poaching but also, to the disgust of Jim and Snowey, smuggling. This is a really exciting story.
(  Operation Seabird (1957) )

Hidden in a Dream (1952)

What a cover! A picture of Meryon lying unconscious with a head wound would hardly entice the young reader, you’d think. The book begins with him coming round, groggily making his way to the vicarage and collapsing. He has concussion.

This is a surprisingly domestic book. Tamzin is depressed because her father is swapping parishes with an East End clergyman for four weeks and she dreads the waste of the summer holidays. Ever the saint, Mr Grey comes up with an alternative plan: he will go to London alone while Mrs Grey and the children spend their time in a Martello tower. It has been inhabited before but I can’t imagine anything more uncomfortable! Surely, even in summer it would be cold? Mrs Grey is doubtful but decides that it’s possible, so an orgy of cleaning and whitewashing begins. Mother and Diccon will sleep in the tower room, the others in tents on the roof. A makeshift washing area is arranged but where did they go to the loo? Writers of this date seldom mention such important details.

While all this is going on a mystery develops. Old Jim tells Tamzin that an unfortunate pony has been left outside a pub all day in the heat with no water. There’s a tub cart with him and a box in the cart but no sign of the owner. The pony is taken to the vicarage to be cared for, the police are informed but there’s no sign of the owner and no missing person has been reported.

The move to the tower is successful and they make it quite homely. After a day or two, Meryon seems quite recovered, but can’t remember what happened to him. He seems fine but Tamzin is constantly hearing him shouting in his sleep. The other two don’t notice until one night it’s so bad she wakes them and they discuss what to do. Tamzin confides in her mother and the two visit their doctor to ask for advice. What is the best way to help Meryon? His accident turns out to be connected with the mysterious tub cart and all ends happily, with the bonus of the four friends finding that Roland, currently living at the vicarage, is a very decent sort and not the horror they had imagined. It’s odd that when Meryon is not quite himself, the others feel lost because they look to him as a leader. What? It’s Tamzin who comes up with all the mad ideas.

( another book )

Sorry, I still find it too much faff to put a lot of pics up on Dreamwidth, so if you like looking at book covers, you’ll have to check out LJ.

I decided to deal separately with the first two books in the series: Wish for a Pony (1947) and The Summer of the Great Secret (1948). These are about Tamzin Grey and her best friend, Clarissa (Rissa) Birnie. They are the most ‘pony’ books of the set and in the next book, The Midnight Horse, the girls meet Meryon and Roger, so that two friends become four and the books are very different. Monica Edwards was writing about the Romney Marsh of her childhood, just as in the Punchbowl series she was describing the real farm she and her husband ran in Surrey.

Tamzin is the daughter of the Vicar of Westling, has her hair in plaits and usually wears shorts. In the first book, she is ten, knows everyone in the village (and they know all about her), and has a lot of freedom to swim in the sea, row Jim Decks’ ferry boat and run around with Rissa. Her parents are just about perfect (or so I thought as a child). She’s a dreamy girl, good at English but not much else. Rissa lives in Dunsford (Rye). Her family is better off than Tamzin’s (her father owns a timber yard) and her mother is fussy. Tamzin has an attic bedroom where she’s allowed to stick pictures of horses all over the walls; Rissa has to put up with a pretty pink and grey room which is her mother’s taste, not hers. She’s cleverer than Tamzin and good at maths.

Both girls are mad about horses and think of little else, so there’s great excitement when they learn that the Hillocks Riding School is to spend the summer locally and exercise the horses on Dunsford sands. After they bravely stop a valuable runaway horse, they are heroines and given the freedom of the stables. They get plenty of riding and even acquit themselves well in a gymkhana. This is the last time a gymkhana is ever mentioned; Tamzin and Rissa love riding for the sake of it, not for winning rosettes and it’s such a pity that for years Monica Edwards was categorised as a writer of pony books, when she really wasn’t. By the end of the book, Tamzin has her own pony (no spoilers as to how), so on the face of it, this is a conventional story: girl wants pony, can’t afford one but gets her heart’s desire anyway. What sets the book apart is the quality of the writing and the very believable characters. My favourite parts are the depictions of family life at the Vicarage; Tam’s baby brother Diccon and his strange taste for salt, her father busy with his chickens and bees in the garden or writing a sermon, her mother busy with the house, Diccon and parish work. I like the way Monica Edwards always gives the detail I like in a novel; Mrs Grey putting bread and butter on ‘a blue and white plate’, for instance.

The vicarage building is real and still standing, although obviously altered now. Since 1979, it’s been run as a B&B and you can see it here. Tamzin’s attic bedroom can be seen at the top of the house. Wish for a Pony was reprinted twice (?) in Collins’ Children’s Press imprint. The earlier, undated one, with the familiar blue spine, has a jacket by Anne Bullen; Geoffrey Whittam designed the cover for the 1966 edition. I see that dealers are asking £10.00 even for these cheap editions (they originally cost 2/6). There are many other editions.

Although I enjoy this book, my favourite (not the best) of the whole series is
( The Summer of the Great Secret )

The Lone Pine series began in 1943 with Mystery at Witchend and finished in 1978 with Home to Witchend. Twenty books, so I set myself quite a task reading the whole lot straight through. I enjoyed it more than I had expected to.

Saville kept to a formula in these books, which is probably just what young readers liked: they knew what they were going to get. The examples I’m giving here are taken from Lone Pine Five, 1949. Every book has endpaper maps showing where the adventure took place. An introduction follows, in which Saville explains which places are real and can be explored and which are imaginary. Next is the history of the Lone Pine Club and how it was founded. Members agreed to the rules and signed their names in blood. The rules are kept in a tin buried by the original lone pine tree, near Witchend. The most important rule is ‘to be true to each other whatever happens’. Next come brief character sketches of the members; these can vary slightly from book to book.
( more )

I’ve been watching Wonderland on Sky Arts (available on Freeview in the UK). There are four episodes, dealing with children’s literature before the Second World War. It seems to be repeated quite often, so if you missed it this time, you may catch it later.

It’s a pleasure to see children’s literature taken seriously and discussed intelligently. The main theme is that the ‘wonderlands’ which have become so well-loved often developed as a result of an unhappy childhood or tragedy which affected the authors. You may be as surprised as I was to hear ‘Streatfeild’ pronounced ‘Streetfeild’:-)

There’s a good review here and here’s a brief trailer.

I’ve just heard that the wonderful illustrator and author Shirley Hughes has died, aged ninety-four. She kept drawing until the end, so probably three generations of children (and adults) have been able to enjoy her work. Treasured memories for people younger than I am.

All five of Pamela Brown’s Blue Door books for £7.99 from The Book People. See here. The set includes Maddy Again, which is super-rare and expensive in hardback.

I loved these books when I was a child and can still enjoy them today. Golden Pavements is my favourite. Photos of my books on LJ.

The Week Before Christmas by Freda C Bond is the second of four books about the Carol family, which I mentioned briefly here. The cover and black & white drawings are by Mays, who illustrated Noel Streatfeild’s Curtain Up and many of the Jennings books.

The four Carol children live with their parents in a smart London flat, with ‘Posset’ as they call her, coming in every day to do the work. How agreeable. At the start of the Christmas holidays the younger children, Squibs and Tony, fear that things will be dull until Christmas. Instead, in the week of the title they find themselves hunting for their mother’s stolen ring, tracking a missing child, getting on the trail of turkey rustlers and befriending a nice refugee family. Tony’s life is busy as he has a good singing voice and is very involved with the local church choir. He takes religion seriously as does older sister Susan, who goes to a boarding school run by Anglican nuns. You can tell what sort of girl she is when she takes a liking to a girl they meet, thinking, ‘I bet she’d make a wizard prefect.’ Lawrence is also at boarding school and turning into a languid, arrogant public schoolboy. At home with his family he becomes quite human and as keen on adventures and planning a Christmas charade as the rest of them.

From the jacket blurb: What we especially like about Freda Bond’s books is that they are happy stories about real-life people, who manage to have adventures in their everyday comings and goings. Her children and grown-ups alike are lovable and natural – the sort of folk who might live next door to you. If your neighbour happened to be a famous actress, that is. As far as I’m concerned, the Carols need never have any adventures at all; I like just to read about their daily lives in post-war London.
( Angela Thirkell and more )

I’ve read nearly everything Jacqueline Wilson has written and, as I’ve said before, I prefer the books she writes about modern children with modern problems to her Victorian series. Clover Moon is set in vague ‘Victorian times’. Clover lives in Hoxton with her father, sister, stepmother and a horde of half-brothers and sisters. Even though her father is in work, the family is desperately poor and the children looked down on as ‘street children’: dirty, ragged and always playing in the alley. They don’t go to school. Stepmother Mildred treats Clover like a skivvy and childminder and beats her so badly that the neighbours notice. In spite of this, Clover remains feisty and optimistic, dreaming of a better future. She has a friend, a hunchbacked old doll maker who teaches her to read and write or, as Mildred would have it, ‘get above her station’. It’s the sauce factory for Clover as soon as she’s old enough to work there.

How she escapes this fate by running away and finding a better life makes for an engrossing read, if an unlikely story. It’s interesting to compare this book with Victorian morality tales like those by Mrs O F Walton which also deal with ‘poor children’ and how they can be rescued. In Mrs Walton’s world, religion plays a great part in the redemption of her characters, an option Wilson would reject. Part of the problem I had with this book is the first person narrative. It reads as though a nine year old girl had been told the story and asked to put it in her own words. That’s how anachronisms like ‘she disrespects me all the time’ creep in. It irritates me, but perhaps not the children the book is intended for.

At the end of the book there is a section about the history of child protection laws in Britain and advice on how to contact Childline if necessary. Very good. Not good is a page called ‘About the Victorians’. This is historically inaccurate, appallingly simplistic and didactically imposes on children opinions about things they can know nothing about.
Another triumph for Jacqueline Wilson, because of course the book is compulsively readable and will be an instant bestseller. But I stick by my reservations and wish that Dame Jacky would write more books like Double Act, one of my favourites.

I read this courtesy of NetGalley.

Lots of other Jacqueline Wilson reviews here.