Inner Child - December

'One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of voices I sometimes hear a moment before I sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.'

There was only one book it could be this month and my copy is almost this exact size.

There's something so completely in tune with my childhood about that Edward Ardizzone cover, so many books of the fifties and sixties that bore his trademark illustrative style come to mind.
That's all made me hunt around for them and I'm adding in a few more from  the 1960s that possibly came out too late for me to appreciate them as a young child but I still treasure them, the Nurse Matilda series by Christianna Brand, also illustrated by Edward Ardizzone who was her cousin.

'Once upon a time there was a huge family of children and they were terribly, terribly naughty...'