dovegreyreader scribbles

The School on North Barrule ~ M.E.Allan

I was in the mood for some unashamed nostalgic reading a while ago. I had been unashamedly over-indulging in Game of Thrones and I think a person needs some respite now and again. Wars and treachery seemed unlikely in a boarding school on the Isle of Man in 1952. Mind you go back a thousand years or more and I reckon life was possibly more like Game of Thrones than we care to imagine.

Scouring the shelves I came across a little collection of books bought some years ago from Fidra, a publisher of children's fiction and I had always had a soft spot for The School on North Barrule because of the cover. What's not to like about the idea of a boarding school on an island where the girls wear shorts for their uniform and you are sent out riding on your bicycle, but nor had I read anything by Mabel Esther Allan...except I think I must have done as a child. Mabel was in her writing prime during the 1950s and I feel sure I would have borrowed these from the library.

Born in 1911 in Wallasey in Cheshire, a Mersey-side town opposite Liverpool, and blighted by sight issues, Mabel seems to have had a miserable childhood which might have been partially ameliorated by reading boarding school stories, and with it came the determination to write her own. Autobiographical writing including in this edition reveals that on June 5th 1944, the day before D Day, Mabel was suddenly blessed with perfect vision, and having feared blindness all her life she was not going to waste this gift. By the end of the war she had sold her first book and proceeded to write 160 more between then and 1994, including several under various pen names ( Jean Estoril, Anne Pilgrim, Priscilla Hagon)

Mabel Esther Allan was surely impossible to miss in a 1950's children's library

And so to North Barrule...

Voirrey and Andreas Quilliam set sail from Liverpool for boarding school on the Isle of Man thanks to a gift from an aunt. Their father, a Manx man has died and the family have fallen on hard times, so the paying of school fees is a generous gesture for which Voirrey is extremely grateful whilst Andreas sulks for England, is a complete pain and promises trouble.

North Barrule is a disciplined but self-regulating school where snobbery is 'almost unknown', the atmosphere is relentlessly happy and the freedoms granted the children are extensive. Responsibility breeds trust and with it comes the fun...and I almost wanted to go too.

Does anyone else remember going to Brownie Revels or Guide Camp in the back of a lorry?

We did didn't we...I haven't imagined that because I thought of it as all the pupils hopped into the lorry for a school trip across the island.

The book is surprisingly well written. So often there are the jarring over-prosaic moments to contend with in children's literature of the past that can lead to huge disappointments as an adult reader. I'm thinking of The Young Detectives by R.J.Macgregor, possibly my favourite read of all time as a child, and now wholly unreadable for its pedantic insistence on never using an apostrophe when two words would be more correct. Who knew I was being groomed in the correct usage at such a young age.

There is of course the brightest cleverest girl in the school at North Barrule, Christian Brent to whom Voirrey is drawn. Misunderstandings will be resolved, mischief will be forgiven, there will be resolution, reform, relocation and ultimately the sense of belonging that Voirrey especially yearns for. Desperately proud of her Manx descent, and possibly more knowledgeable about the island than the locals, Voirrey strives hard to live up to the ideals and be accepted.

I on the other hand just about know where the Isle of Man is, but beyond that my knowledge is sorely lacking. The Tinker loved it there and it was one of his holiday destinations with two friends (brothers) both of whom had, like him, been widowed, so he would have known all the locations in the book very well whilst me, I have had to source a map.

So the book was a wonderful wallow, highly recommended if you are in need of one too.

Meanwhile does anyone else recall reading Mabel Esther Allan...

Or are there other boarding school books you favoured...

Chalet School and Malory Towers fans...on your marks...get set...go, we have not had an indulge for a while now and I think we deserve one...it is time.(with a nod to RJ McGregor on that final sentence.)

 

 

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A Return to St Bride's...

Judith Kerr, Tigers, Red House & Lions & Hippospotamuses...

That title just about covers this gallimaufry of a post..

Do you ever sit through something on the TV for the sake of it...because you're knitting or sticking stamps in your stamp album or something, and it'll do??

Silent Witness (umpteenth repeat) and I never really liked it first time around, all that wistful gazing into the distance as if seeing something the rest of us can't, and I was spitting bones the next day when I realised that I had missed children's author Judith Kerr on Imagine.

Thank heavens for iPlayer, and still some time left to watch if you missed it.

Judith Kerr, ninety years-old this year, and giving Alan Yentob a run for his money as she sprinted up the stairs ahead of him, while Alan puffed along behind trying to keep up. It was another exquisite programme in this series; quiet, gentle revelations about creative lives, and in the case of Judith Kerr (pronounced Karr I now discover after all these years) taking her back to the childhood home in Berlin from which she and her family had fled in 1933. Her father, Alfred Kerr, a theatre critic and a man with 'a talent for happiness', was second on the Nazi's death list, and how remarkable that in the haste to pack Judith's mother thought to include her nine-year old daughter's wonderful paintings. There was something very special about listening to Judith Kerr recall the way that she had drawn them, along with the feelings and sense of achievement that she remembered at the time. Her recollection of Nazi sanctions against Jews being allowed to keep pets was all the more powerful for the quiet questioning voice, and the pauses that allowed the rest of us to wonder why too.

I wandered around my shelves seeking out When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr's fictional but autobiographical account written to set the record straight after she had taken her children to see The Sound of Music.  They had assumed that this is what her childhood escape, complete with singing contests, stolen carburettors, convents and alps, must have been like and their mother was horrified.

This was all by way of an introduction to this year's Red House Children's Book Award, because when the books arrived (thank you Dominic) and I saw How to Hide a Lion, by Helen Stephens, I was instantly reminded of Judith Kerr's enchanting The Tiger Who Came to Tea which we read over and over again back in the day. Children love the controlled fear factor and when Iris takes the lion indoors they have to be very quiet 'as mums and dads can be funny about having a lion in the house.'

Yes, I always objected, did you??

Animals feature in all the shortlisted picture books and I might just be quoting the rhymes from Hippospotamus by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross for ever more...

'It's notamus! What rottomus!
You clottomus!" hissed Snake.
"This lippy hippypotamus
Is allergic to cake.
Cut out chippochoccomus
Eat lettuce for a week.'

Children will adore all of these and so will the grown ups

I can't believe it is over a year since I wrote about the last Red House short list, if you have grandchildren to read to the list is well worth a look for some ideas about what children might enjoy nowadays.

Now in existence for thirty five years, which must make us one of the very early subscribers, Red House has been a reliable source of good children's literature in all that time, and I still have most of the books we bought from them. There used to be great excitement, in those pre-internet days, about books arriving in the post.

It all reminded me of that Children's Book of the Month Club (did it emanate from Foyle's??)  that some kindly relative must have enrolled my brother and I in back in the early 1960s, when a suprise book would arrive each month. Massive disappointment for me if it happened to be Biggles, likewise for my brother if it was a Monica Edwards Punchbowl Farm book, on the other hand a massive fight to the death as to who would read the book first if it was Malcolm Savile.  

There are three age categories for the Red House Award, the children vote for the winners, and if I could wind the clock back say...fifty-two years maybe... I have a feeling that my vote might go to to Atticus Claws Breaks the Law by Jennifer Gray...

Meanwhile the grown-up child in me absolutely adores The Land of Neverbelieve by Norman Messenger which Offspringette has now snapped up to do some story-telling work with her classes.

Best let the children decide, which they will early next year.

The Happy Campers meet Brian Selznick @PortEliotFest

Enormous thanks to The Happy Campers who have started filing their reports so here's the first, and please note all these pictures were taken at the second event at the dovegreyreader tent, not the Bowling Green, as you will be able to tell by the absence of the ... oh you'll figure it...over to The Happy Campers...

One half of the Happy Campers - © Tommy Hatwell (all rights reserved)

The other half of the Happy Campers - © Tommy Hatwell (all rights reserved)

The Happy Campers had pitched their tent with expert speed and competence, thrown their motley possessions around inside and put on a brew before the heavens opened. It was exactly the same as last year, apart from the fact that then there was no brew, yours truly having forgotten the pan to boil the water…..No such lapses today - our 2012 Port EliotFest had been organised with lists, more lists, schedules and contingency arrangements. Nothing would be forgotten, lost, missed, regretted or double booked because I had a master plan, designed with military precision to make the most of every minute of this fantastic three day festival.

 

A glance at the first page of said plan reminded us that our first event was a trot round to the Bowling Green to hear Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, talk about the process of crafting his children’s books. He combines beautifully drawn picture sequences with text, to tell wonderful, imaginative stories. They are hefty tomes too, not ones for reading last thing at night when arm muscles are a bit tired. I was eager to see the man behind such unique creations, and hear him explain how his book inspired Scorsese’s Oscar winning film, Hugo. When asked how he wished to be introduced to the Port Eliot audience, he said ‘Oh, tell them that I wrote a book and it was made into a film.’ Such self - deprecation is disarming.

Brian Selznick ~ dovegreyreader tent Port Eliot 2012 © Tommy Hatwell (all rights reserved)

Wearing intense orange skinny jeans, Brian Selznick is tall and slim, with dark curly hair. He bounces on to the stage and immediately radiates an energy, humour and enthusiasm which are infectious. ‘I am going to stand so you can see my pants’, he quips (nb he is American, so for pants read trousers, not Y fronts). The pants are startling against the bright green of the tent backdrop.  In no time at all he is sharing the details of how he came to write children’s books; certain that if he cared about the character and the things the character was interested in, then the reader would care too. Maurice Sendak, who wrote Where the Wild Things Are, advised him to ‘make the book you want to make’, and the word ‘make’ really does capture the essence of Selznick’s books as visual works of art that have been truly crafted.   He goes on to talk about the connection between film and book; how he wanted to make the book feel like a movie, to use the ‘page turn’ of a picture book to mimic the things a film can do - those cinematic features.  When the page in a picture book is turned, everything changes and transforms, so there must be a way, he thought, of making the experience of reading a novel feel like watching a movie.

Brian Selznick eye to eye with Wonderstruck © Tommy Hatwell (all rights reserved)

One of the things Brian Selznick does is to take out all words which are purely descriptive and replace them with picture sequences, so the reader moves through time as the picture sequence is read. Another device is how the ‘close up’ of a picture mimics the zooming in of the movie camera.  When Scorsese filmed the ‘picture sequences’, in the book, he deliberately simulated the ‘page turns’ using cuts. So film technology enhanced the story, and the story helped to shape the film. Apparently Scorsese used every drawing in The Invention of Hugo Cabret in the film storyboards. The film was like a realisation of the book’s images, it gave them scale and showed how things might relate to each other. ‘Everything became real in front of your eyes’ said Selznick. In the end the script and his own story merged so that he couldn’t remember what was script and what was book text, but the illustrations kept their purity.

The author now sees the film Hugo as a vision of his book, the particular vision of the director. We are shown stills from the film Hugo, which help us to understand this vision and Selznick then goes on to explain how he draws… how a drawing starts as a list of words which say how the drawing will look. He then makes thumbnail sketches, which turn into bigger drawings. Information from research and photographs is then used to finalise the image, which is actually about a quarter of the size of the drawing which appears in the book.

 It is surprising how thrilled Brian Selznick was for his book to be adapted by Hollywood. He is a scion of a great film director, and you would think he would take the Hollywood thing in his stride, but he was as over awed, he says, as anyone else when Scorsese came calling. We all laugh when he says with pride ‘my baby married royalty!’

The audience enjoying Brian Selznick at dovegreyreader tent Port Eliot 2012 © Tommy Hatwell (all rights reserved)

 

I didn’t think beforehand that hearing Brian Selznick talk would be my 2012 Festival highlight. Sometimes you get a real sense of being in the presence of a truly original talent.  I couldn’t wait for Saturday morning when he was going to be in the dovegreyreader tent…..I rushed off to buy a copy of his latest book, Wonderstruck, and I recommend that you do, too. 

Brian Selznick's books © Tommy Hatwell (all rights reserved)

PS from dovegreyreader... Thank you Happy Campers. Post to follow about the knitsuke we presented to Brian before he left...very funny moment.

 

 

 

 

 

The Invention of Hugo Cabret ~ Brian Selznick

Plans are now seriously underway for this summer's Port Eliot Festival, 19th to 22nd July, which also means planning is in progress for the dovegreyreader tent, which will be up in the walled garden again and offering a welcoming bunting-clad, plein-air literary salon with added knitting and cups of tea.

I am not sure who will be taking the guest spots on the sofa yet, but at the last meeting I had with Cathy St Germans, and as we ran through the Festival line-up, the name Brian Selznick came up ...

'Is that any relation to...'

'Yes... and you must read The Invention of Hugo Cabret.'

There were further endorsements from around the room and really who am I to argue.

Brian Selznick is an artist of extraodinary skill and The Invention of Hugo Cabret a fabulous flight of the imagination, a form of graphic novel for children and subsequently a film. The book has solid rather than speech bubble text, and hundreds of full page greyscale illustrations to accompany, and the illustrations, in true graphic novel form, often tell as much of the story as the text. In fact the first forty-five pages are pure picture so when the book arrived you can imagine who grabbed it first.

So Bookhound was flicking away really fast through these forty-five pages and there's me saying..

'You're not supposed to read it that fast..."

'But I have to, it's telling the story already...'

And you too can see those opening pages here.

And when I wrestled it back and settled down with this weighty 535 page tome that afternoon I did the same, expecting to be reading this one for weeks but eventually finishing it the same day, because how could I not.

The story is set in Paris in 1931 and a boy named Hugo Cabret, who lives in the walls of a train station has, in the absence of his uncle, taken charge of the clocks around the station, secretly winding them all up on a daily basis. Hugo's father was a clockmaker until his death and having left Hugo the enigma of a partially restored automaton, the mystery to be solved... what exactly will the automaton write with the pen it holds in its hand if Hugo can manage to get it working.

By the time the name Georges Melies emerged I was already on the edge of my seat...well approaching the edge of the sofa on which I was reclining, and with this book well propped up because it is very heavy, but I was immediately back in Paris in about 1999 with Offspringette.

We had left 'the boys' at home and gone for a girly few days to Paris, shopping and sightseeing just before Offspringette went off to university, and we had done a very proper job on walking around Pere Lachaise cemetery, ostensibly to visit Jim (Morrison) and it had poured with rain and we had got very lost in this Parisian hinterland of the dead. Offspringette was headed for a degree in film and media and then a traineeship at the BBC so, this being her, she had done her homework and when we stumbled across the grave of Georges Melies there was delight all round. The father of special effects in the motion picture and I had never heard of him, so it was all explained to me whilst standing there, soaked to the skin looking at this..
And as I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret it all came back to me. The sad story of the man who made film magic but couldn't move with the times and who quickly went out of fashion in the 1920s. Ensuing bankruptcy meant most of his films were sold for the silver content and destroyed and Georges, a demoralised and broken man, set up a toy kiosk on the Montparnasse railway station.

Brian Selznick weaves all this beautifully into this book which is in itself a wondefully filmic read. To read pictures in books perhaps a skill many of us children of the 1950s were expected to leave behind in our childhood, so to find a book like this, where the expectation is that the reader will do exactly that, always feels like a bit of a furtive treat. I would have absolutely adored this book as a child and its opening sequence of black-bordered pictures transported me back to the wonder of the Majestic cinema in Mitcham. I felt as if I was watching on the big screen, each picture slowly increasing in size as the panorama of Paris and Hugo's life unfolds.

First published in 2007 I am sure many of you will have seen this book, or seen the film Hugo, but if not it would make a great gift for a child near you ... and then you could read it before you wrapped it up and wheel-barrowed it round there...besides which it also has beautiful scenes set in a bookshop and you know how much we all love those...

So back to where we started, I am hoping to get a glimpse of Brian Selznick at Port Eliot and perhaps I can point the Happy Campers in the direction of his main event to report back for us, because I feel sure it will be one worth seeing.

 

 

One Dog and His Boy ~ Eva Ibbotson

I don't know why on earth I have been dragging my heels about settling down to the late Eva Ibbotson's writing.

Not the first idea.

It's not as if I haven't seen her name in lights around the internet and the review pages, and I have diligently acquired the books as I have seen them mentioned, but just never really settled down to read them. I suspect my attention was first drawn in Eva Ibbotson's direction when I read Manja by Anna Gmeyner and realised that Eva was Anna's daughter. Manja remains one of the most powerful and disturbing books from the Persephone list that I have ever read and I have always been grateful to them for bravely bringing such a different book back into print. If you haven't read it and perhaps think of Persephone books as generally warm, comfy hot-water bottle reads, then think on, because Manja could not be more different in the way it tracks the lives of a group of children in Nazi Germany making such stark contrasts with the terror that is going on around them.

Incidentally don't miss this beautiful and poignant piece by Eva Ibbotson on the salvation that was Hampstead Library when she and her family first came to London as refugees from Germany in 1934...

'I was eight years old when I came to Britain as a refugee - and was not particularly grateful. Mostly this was because after years and years of being a sheep coming to the manger, or a grazing cow, I had at last landed the part of the Virgin Mary in the nativity play at my convent school in Vienna.

And then ... Hitler....'

So thanks are in order yet again to this year's Red House Children's Book Awards shortlist for another read that might have passed me by. I don't know about all this Orange and Booker stuff any more but I'm definitely going to add the Red House list to my reading every year from now on. Really refreshing reading towards the end of another year of grown-up books, and Eva Ibbotson's final book, One Dog and His Boy, completed a few weeks before her death at the age of eighty-five in October 2010.

Having read a couple from the shortlists that deal with the gritty and challenging subjects of loss and bereavement and terminal illness, I am slightly relieved to see that the Nation's Children still love books like this too because I know I enjoyed them .

Does anyone else remember reading The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford??

I still have my copy bought with 3/6d of my pocket money from the school book club and I was transported right back there to the animal journey apsects with One Dog and His Boy, as young Hal, remarkably resistant to the over-indulgence of his wealthy but emotionally neglectful parents pleads with them, not for the toy department of Hamleys, but a dog. When Hal's dream comes true and young Fleck appears on his birthday let joy be unconfined until it becomes clear that Fleck has only been rented for the weekend from Rent-a-Pet and will have to be returned on Monday.

Add together a timely release of five dogs including Fleck from Rent-a-Pet by a kennel maid, a happy reunion with Hal followed by young Hal's decision to make the journey north to go and live with his grandparents with all the dogs in tow, and of course Eva Ibbotson has all the material for one of those wonderfully gently anarchic, parent-free voyages of discovery. This one lacks nothing, with all the potential for nasty grown-ups to reap their just humiliations and punishments, and for some changes of heart and a bit of forgiveness and redemption where needed all making this book such a joy to read.

Alison Lurie in her fascinating book Don't Tell the Grown-Ups - Subversive Children's Literature, expands wonderfully on all these themes...highlighting the importance for children of the books

'...that recommended - even celebrated, daydreaming, disobedience, answering back, running away from home, and concealing one's private thoughts from unsympathetic grown-ups.'

The books that don't support the status quo

'...and whose values may not be overtly of the conventional adult world but which appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change.'

Yeeeeeeesssssss. Eva Ibbotson captures all that and more in One Dog and His Boy.

And I must mention the little illustrations by Sharon Rentta which are delightful and enough to make you want to head down to Battersea Dogs Home and claim a 'Tottenham Terrier' of your own. Beautifully atmospheric images of the dogs in all their moods, especially Fleck in his extremes of misery and clutching his bit of cuddly blue flannel ...

and happiness...

This book is on the Books for Younger Readers shortlist and it is the children who will vote... if you know any could you sort of twist their arms a bit and say vote for this one?? 

No, no I didn't mean that, just shut them in a cupboard or something until they agree.

This is a book that would bring pleasure to all ages, so highly recommended for a child near you, but just make sure you read it yourself first and benefit from the wonderfully, warm feel-good inner glow this book will give you.

Final words to Alison Lurie...

'Too often we leave the tribal culture of childhood ...behind, we lose contact with instinctive joy in self-expression: with the creative imagination, spontaneous emotion, and the ability to see the world as full of wonders. Staying in touch with children's literature and folklore as an adult is not only a means of understanding what children are thinking and feeling; it is a way of understanding and renewing our own childhood.'

No I've changed my mind, final words to Eva Ibbotson and Hal...

'For a few moments Hal, sitting opposite, just let her cry. Then something horrible happened. The anger he felt with his parents began to get weaker...and weaker still. He missed it badly, this rage which had kep him going on his adventure. But there was nothing to be done about it; it was gone. His mother had done a wicked thing; she was foolish and misguided - but she was his mother.

    He put an arm round Albina.
    'It's alright,' he said. 'It's over. It's alright.'

And the very final leap to Fleck.

 

 

A Monster Calls ~ A novel by Patrick Ness from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd

Did I say I couldn't read anything else fictional until I had finished 1Q84?

Well I didn't mean it because a book arrived and I changed my mind, and can I just quickly apologise for more death... what with Jamie's sister Rose and Prince Albert I know I've put you through rather a lot lately, if only writers wouldn't keep writing about it.

It was serendipity to receive an e mail late last Sunday evening from Red House Children's Books with news about the short list for the their Children's Book Award, and this just the night before I was due to post here about My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher, and then my delight when I saw  that Annabel's book had been shortlisted in the Older Readers category.

I think we may have been amongst the earliest subscribers to Red House here chezdovegrey when they set up some thirty years ago, and I clearly remember the doors that they opened for us, and for starting off our reading as a family, and after all what a great way to spend the Child Benefit. Three small children and we still have the stack of books we bought, many becoming the stuff of family legend...

I Want to See the Moon, On Friday Something Funny Happened... and all the wonderful Lucy and Tom series by Shirley Hughes. Those small children might now be thirty, twenty-eight and twenty-six but we still get Lucy and Tom's Christmas out every December, it's part of the tradition ... and another Shirley Hughes favourite of ours Dogger, and then there were the Ahlbergs giving us Each Peach Pear Plum, Peepo and The Jolly Postman. And what about The Tiger Who Came for Tea and The Hungry Caterpillar and Peace at Last, all new then but timeless classics now. The stack of books now suitably dog-eared but precious and much-loved for the memories they hold, even perhaps the sort of thing I would walk past in a charity shop or a jumble sale without a cursory glance, condemning as far too scruffy... I shall think on that next time.

So the e mail came as a lovely reminder that Red House is still there and has gone from strength to strength, now running its own awards for books shortlisted and voted for by children, and the winners will be announced in February. I was very grateful to Red House who then kindly offered to send me any other books from the shortlist. I've started with the Older Children's category, but I've enjoyed this reading so much I think I might make my way through them all...it's all a bit refreshing after the Booker.

The one thing that strikes me is how little the realities of death seemed to crop up in the books I read as a child. Perhaps the 1950s was still too near to the war for comfort and children were being shielded from any more grief after so many years of it... perhaps I just missed the books, and you are probably all going to come up with plenty of titles now. But interesting that the two I have read off the Red House shortlist so far deal with death head on.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd and published by Walker Books, with fabulously atmospheric illustrations by Jim Kay, is another brilliant read so deserving of a place on any shortlist.

Philip Pullman calls it..

'Compelling...powerful and impressive.'

Meg Rossoff thinks it is...

'Exceptional...This is storytelling as it should be - harrowing, lyrical and transcendent.'

I'd add in astonishing, amazing and what a wonderful collaboration Patrick Ness has created with the late Siobhan Dowd; a writer who had left the baton charged with characters, a premise and a beginning for this book before her untimely death from breast cancer in 2007, and which Patrick Ness has picked up and run over the finishing line in superb style... in Patrick's own words 'Go. Run with it. Make trouble.'

Talking of running, congratulations to Patrick Ness who ran the Dublin marathon last week to raise money for Breast Cancer Campaign in memory of Siobhan Dowd, and has way exceeded his fund-raising target.

I have only read one of Siobhan Dowd's books, Bog Child and always meant to read the others, now I certainly will, but I will also seek out Patrick Ness too. By his own admission he had never met Siobhan and nor could he contemplate mimicking her voice, but he did let the idea grow and develop..

'Siobhan's ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.'

That story is the life of thirteen-year old Conor, mostly lived within a nightmare because his mum is dying of cancer. We know that, she knows that, all Conor's friends and teachers know that, and deep down Conor knows that, but it will take some extraordinary encounters with a monster who appears in the shape of a gnarled old yew tree to help Conor come to a trusting acceptance of what is happening and to understand why he has to let his mum go.

The illustrations are monochrome throughout, moody and giving real credence to Conor's inner sense of chaos at being out of control of events and his life, and the significance of the yew won't be lost on those with some knowledge of chemotherapy. Several of the drugs used in the treatment of breast cancer have been developed from yew clippings, but the whole sheebang has put Conor into territory he never asked to be in and, like little Jamie in My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece, he is a complete mess inside. Set apart from his friends and knowing something they may not... that really bad things can happen, Conor has to cope with the cruelty of children too. It's hard to imagine really isn't it... children being bullied when they are in such fraught emotional turmoil, but it is not uncommon, and often a reflection of all children having to learn coping skills in new situations like this. There is no pre-learned behaviour, it all has to be learnt anew and the road is rarely straightforward.

Likewise the all-consuming grief of an adult, in this case Conor's grandmother, which may eclipse that of a child, is incredibly well portrayed.

Conor is at an interesting age too. Whilst Annabel Pitcher's Jamie, at ten, might not quite have known the questions to ask, Conor at thirteen knows exactly what to ask but just can't bring himself to put it into words... how will he manage without his mum... where will he live... how will life carry on....what will happen...

It's at least a ten hankie read and by the final page I had tears in my eyes that just wouldn't stay there, but the most invigorating part of all this is that it is children, not adults, who have chosen this book for the Red House shortlist. A book that is unafraid to embrace, confront and challenge head on the fact that loss happens, and the more any child can learn how to cope with it in childhood... to learn that to love is to grieve when that loss happens, perhaps the better and more useful the coping strategies they take into adult life with them. And you would hope most children learn this through hamster and goldfish funerals rather than as Conor had to, but it would seem 21st century children are unafraid to read books like this, and clearly value them when they have.

The book is slowly gathering in the plaudits it deserves too..

It has been longlisted for the Carnegie and Greenaway medals...

And last week won the Galaxy Awards ~ Children's Book of the Year, which means it is now in with a shot at Galaxy Book of the Year, it's already had my vote even though Claire Tomalin is racing up on the rails. I'd love A Monster Calls to get the recognition it deserves, both for Patrick Ness but also, I feel sure he would agree, for Siobhan Dowd....and more generally for the fantastic quality of children's literature out there.

But I have a feeling that it is the voice of the children that matters here, and the Red House shortlisting that may be the most significant.

 

The Happy Campers are too absolutely impressed with Lauren Child @PortEliotFest

‘The 1970s were a very long time ago!’

The famous children’s writer unleashes a softly spoken barb and it lodges in the breast of every festival goer who can remember buying proper Curly Wurlies (is that the correct plural?– help – maybe Wurlys looks better) and watching great TV like Banana Splits and White Horses chiz mone drone. Is rubbish dubbing better than subtitles from Italian? Oh dear, promised Dovegrey I would not mention The Leopard’s shortcomings any more except where they are properly relevant.

Back to the renowned author of the Clarice Bean books and Charlie and Lola.

When Dovegreyreader asked me to check out some of the children’s events at the festival she apologised and bribed me with a seat on her sofa near Edmund de Waal. ‘’I know it’s a busman’s holiday, she wheedled, but I’d really like to report on the Literary Provision for Young Minds and you are just the person to help me out here……..’ (translation...buzz around the children's bit would you Angela)

Even I am not immune to flattery, so despite it being my day off we happily settled back in our chairs to hear fascinating details about Lauren Child’s inspirations and the creative process which brings all her characters to life.  Clarice Bean was the first thing she wrote where she ignored the advice of publishers and trusted her own instincts. Wanting to come up with an idea for an animation, she visualised the story like a comic strip, where the text and pictures are interrelated. That is why each page is so different from the one before. Anyone in the adult audience who had mistakenly thought that writing books for children was somehow easier, or different, was made to think again. We also heard about the little girl Lauren Child saw on a train years ago who was the ‘real’ Lola, and what an engaging description it was.

The children in the audience asked the most interesting and perceptive questions, as children do, and one lucky little girl won a  Ruby Redfort T Shirt inscribed ‘ bored beyond belief’ and no, it wasn’t referring to an Abba tribute band but the redoubtable Ruby herself, who has a number of pithy catchphrases. Linda would have loved this for herself, to wear at screenings of The Leopard (oops!), but after I had earlier tried to wrest a gold inflatable Hermes horse balloon from a Fed Up Dad who had to carry it everywhere, we thought we would get thrown out if there was another such incident.

Needless to say the longest ever queue at the book signing tent snaked round and round the walled garden and the Lauren Child section looked like it had been consumed by the book eating dragon from the mural in the Round Room.

I looked at Lauren’s Princess and the Pea (where the illustrations were painstakingly constructed in 3D to make it look like the interior of a doll’s house) and thought of my confusion, when very little, upon hearing this story. Being a child of the 1970s, the  only peas I had experience of were marrowfat processed peas out of a tin, and I simply could not understand how such a pea could be felt through that many mattresses and feather beds. 

Even a princess must have squashed that soft and soggy pea flat, surely?

 

 

 

The Alice Behind Wonderland ~ Simon Winchester

I do have all the books, all dipped into over the years, Morton Cohen's Lewis Carroll A Biography, considered the definitive work, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild - A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach, the book that purported to have discovered definitive reference to those lost pages of Lewis Carroll's diary. Pages that seem to have been dated around the time that there was the unexplained and irreconcilable rift with the family of Alice Liddell, Carroll's muse for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the young subject of the controversial photographs. Then there is The Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf and The Agony of Lewis Carroll by Richard Wallace and so it goes on, the author of Alice in Wonderland it seem a never-ending subject for reinterpretation and renewed understanding.

I'm not quite sure where the Lewis Carroll, 'guilty' or 'not guilty' of offences against children debate rests at the moment, though there is little doubt in my mind that, were he to be judged in the context of present-day sensibilities and safeguarding awareness, he'd be banged to rights pronto for 'that' over-revealing photo and not allowed near a child unless supervised.

And there can be little doubt that Alice Liddell, was an ethereally beautiful and photogenic little girl with a gaze that almost defies description, so when The Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester arrived I was in half a mind whether to read it or not. Would this be more of the same-old same old or perhaps a different perspective on a man, who for all his perceived faults and transgressions left us the legacy of one of the most famous children's books of all time.

Coming in at just under 100 pages I decided I could afford to risk it and was almost pleased to discover that Simon Winchester has tip-toed around the paedophile sensation approach, acknowledging that the absent diary pages do leave room for 'ambiguity and speculation' but steadfastly refusing to tread further on those egg shells. Simon Winchester prefers to explore his subject through the medium of the photography, a burgeoning phenomenen of which Lewis Carroll was an early enthusiast. And a very good exponent of the craft he was, not only capturing the images but doing his own developing too. Carroll's photographs are recognised as of the highest compositional standard and I was interested to discover that many of the originals now lie in the vault of the Princeton University library. Copies are available but it has been declared, by the current Curator of Manuscripts, that the actual Alice picture itself will not see the light of day again, ever, for fear of light deterioration. Simon Winchester clearly did his level best to lay eyes on those originals whilst researching this book but

' after some courteous chafing, I felt obliged to abide by his ruling.'

 There is a fascinating potted history of Carroll's life in a rather decadent and loutish Oxford and his unusual elevation to a Fellowship at Christ Church college whilst still an undergraduate; an honour which guaranteed him lifelong residence, food and a grant of £25 a year with no requirement to work  for any of it, so clearly someone somewhere recognised something about him worth rewarding.

Simon Winchester includes a good account of the history of photography woven around the life of Lewis Carroll, his friendship with Family Liddell, the mysterious falling out and the later life of Alice too. I had no idea that one of the very few signed copies of Alice in Wonderland was given by Alice as a gift to a young Princess Elizabeth, or that the original manuscript, which I have
often looked at in the British Library, was presented to the British people by a group of US book lovers after the Second World War. It had originally been in Alice's possession and sold to a US buyer when she hit hard times but eventually handed over with great ceremony  and received by the Archbishop of Canterbury no less,

'as an expression of thanks to a noble people who held Hitler at bay for a long period single-handed.'

And it's obvious that this postcard from The British Library was my bookmark for this read, a fascinating little book that explores a life we think we may know well enough, but recounted from a really unique angle, so an interesting and useful addition to the Lewis Carroll shelf....and now it occurs to me...

I may never have read the original.

How on earth has that not happened.

Have you read it?

The original rather than an abridged version?

War Horse @ the New London Theatre

There's been a good game going on in West Devon recently called 'Spot the Spielberg' because our bit of Dartmoor is one of the preferred locations for the filming of War Horse and Stephen is on our Manor, so we are taking it all very seriously.

Radio Devon ran a little phone in slot for Spielberg sightings and of course as the maestro has been staying at that nice hotel up the lane (thanks for the intelligence Jim the Postie) we'd probably have had plenty of sightings to report had we been looking. The Gamekeeper did return from the local pub with news that Stephen was in there enjoying the smelly-welly-dung-spit-and-sawdust ambience, but the GK and his ilk are very hard to impress so they all pretended not to notice, as you do.

Why is that?
Do you see someone famous and then work very hard not to notice?
I was standing right next to Angela Rippon at the counter in Boots a while back, it was her voice that gave it away of course and then I tried my utmost to be nonchalent as she bought her hairspray and I stocked up on shampoo.

If ever we go to the theatre we tend to sit up in the dress circle, foregoing the stalls as a bit too expensive and anyway you're too near and can't see everything. So when I was debating my War Horse visit with Will Rycroft, who is currently playing Major Stewart in the production, and Will very kindly offered to book my ticket for me, I sent off my cheque and guessed he'd know where the best seat might be.

Too right, Row D Seat 3 people.

Not so near the front that you are kissing the stage, but near enough to feel completely involved in the action and the exact spot where some of the most dramatic of that action takes place. I'll own up that my heart sank when a row of children filed into Row C because The Woman in Black experience remains a traumatic memory, but I should have known better than to fret because these were American children. Impeccably well-behaved (I know, I'm sure UK children can be too, just not at the Plymouth production of The Woman in Black) to the point where I didn't even notice them, and nicely short so I could see over their heads.

I suspect the story of Michael Morpurgo's War Horse is well-known, and my thanks again to Curzon who sent me both the book and the play after she had seen it a few years ago. Set in Devon on the eve of the Great War, Farmer Narracott heading to the auction three sheets to the wind blows the mortgage money on a foal which his son Albert takes on and trains up. Joey is a bit of a mix, mostly a hunter but under pressure from his father Albert teaches Joey to plough. When the war breaks out and horses are required for the Front, Albert's father sells Joey to the army and off he goes to war. Inevitably distraught at the loss of his best mate it's clear Albert, though only sixteen, will follow.

So how on earth can all that be conveyed on stage?

If you've seen it you will know how magical this is, if you haven't this trailer will give you a clue and there are also some fascinating video diaries made by the cast all available on youtube..

It's all in the ears and the breathing; as the horse's torso rises and falls it gives a clear indication of mood and I could feel my eyes welling up as soon as I caught sight of the gangly foal, let alone the fully grown Joey in battle. I was near enough to the action to catch all the delicate nuances of equine expression, the tilt of the head, the arching of the neck, the swish of the tail and the twitch of the ears, the pulling back when cautious and uncertain, the ranging forward when fearless and all so cleverly done by the puppeteers. The notion that they are puppets is quickly forgotten, the puppeteers blending seamlessly with the horses and making all the horsey noises too through what must be a physically draining performance and surrounded by a great cast of actors.

So I'm completely immersed and only just stopped myself shouting out (in true Plymouth style) at a few key moments and I won't reveal the context but there is a moment when I wanted to shout

'Put it on Joey, he'll know what to do...'

and I'm crying at puppets and I wasn't the only one with tears streaming down my face by the end either... yes I saw you man sitting next to me, but an incredible theatre experience that I can't recommend highly enough. Bookhound wasn't with me on this trip but we will definitely be going again when he is. Nor can I quite see how this is going to translate into a film though I feel sure Stephen's got that sorted, but it was good to meet up with Will Rycroft aka Major Stewart afterwards and to complement him on that clever leap onto the horse with nicely co-ordinated draw of the sword and battle charge which seemed to be heading right for D3, so my thanks to him for nabbing me that brilliant seat.

I'm not sure whether Devon has made the trek up to London to see this but I really do hope if this production goes on tour that it at least comes down to Plymouth before it heads off to New York and everywhere else. We're pretty good at horse etiquette down here, slowing down when we see riders ahead of us in the car, proceeding with caution down the lane in case there's a horse around the bend etc, so we can only hope that translates to the theatre and the horses won't be spooked by any screaming .

The Children Who Lived in a Barn ~ Eleanor Graham

Sunday dawned hot and cloudless and with it the realisation that we had a Persephone tea with Cornflower organised for May 26th and suddenly it's May 23rd and I hadn't read the book. I was already on the naughty step for failing with the NTTVBG book and couldn't face two fails in a week, so I had to 'force' myself to take a chair into a shady corner of the garden (torture) and settle down to read a book I probably last read when I was about eight.
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham first published in 1938 and this edition graced with perhaps one of my favourite Persephone endpapers, 'Arrowhead' taken from a contemporaneous fabric designed by New York-based John Little.

The design considerably scaled down for the endpaper, but timeless (I'd buy yards of it even now) and a perfect choice for a book with such a rural setting.
I can only begin to imagine how completely I would have escaped into this book as a child, and though my original copy is lost I remember the cover very clearly indeed and I probably wanted my mum to cook something in a hay box, just to see, in fact I have an urge to stick a rabbit casserole in one right now and see if it works.
Hay mark 5 and recheck in twelve hours.
So the Dunnet parents fly off at a moment's notice to see to the ailing grandmother somewhere in Europe, telling the children that they are perfectly old enough to look after themselves, or rather that thirteen-year old Susan and eleven-year old Bob are quite capable of looking after nine year-old twins Joseph and Samuel and baby of the family six-year old Alice. I've specified the ages because what happens next would make any parent's hair stand on end but clearly more pressing issues grabbing the headlines in 1938 when the book was written.
Quickly evicted from their rented cottage the children set up home in a nearby barn where the adventure rapidly becomes a saga of survival against starvation and the attentions of the deeply unpleasant and disparaging district visitor (to uncomfortably akin to my own profession for my liking) and the local busybodies who threaten children's homes and adoptions every time they spot a dirty hankie.
Yes clean hankies, clothes, faces, hands and nails feature strongly as an outward indicator of well-being and poor Susan, readily slipping into the maternal role, has her work cut out keeping on top of it all, getting up at 4am to do the washing before getting everyone up and ready for school.
Bob settles into the requisite fatherly shoes, collecting wood and expecting a meal on the table and suggesting that Susan darns his socks.
And bless Susan, with the patience of Mother Teresa and the qualities of a well-trodden door mat does the whole lot with a constant and cheery smile though thankfully the occasional moment of rebellion and acerbic comment is allowed to poke through.
The adults who should know better are mostly vile and uncaring towards the children who seem to take all the punches on the chin and come out fighting in order to stay together, even the twins pledging saintly behaviour in their quest to become choir boys and earn 5s a month.
Jacqueline Wilson's preface rightly flags up the bizarre nature of the parental strand of the plot. Out of the country by page six, Bob attacking the cold cuts by page seven because 'men always carve' and the children not unduly concerned by their parents' disappearance when the flight seems to go missing. Something of a weak and feeble reunion occurs at the end of the book (sorry to spoil but yes the parents are found) but I would think that matters little to young readers. The best books as I recall seemed to remove the parents from the equation any which way to give the children a free run at life.
Eleanor Graham interestingly the founding editor at Puffin books prior to Kaye Webb reissuing The Children Who Lived in the Barn under the Puffin name in 1955 but also instrumental in establishing literature for children as a genre in its own right.

'Very little critical or scholarly attention was paid to children's books before the 1930s, much rubbish was sold for children, and the good that came their way did so unheralded and often by chance. Graham was one of the first to see that a critical apparatus was needed for the evaluation of children's books... During the late 1920s the first children's rooms in public libraries were established and Graham learned a great deal from watching children and librarians select books. She was convinced that children deserved books of the highest quality, and was ahead of her time in believing that any child was capable of responding to great writing, no matter how underprivileged his or her background.'

(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry)

It occurred to me that, with its original 1938 publication, I could easily be reading a book written as the portents of war loomed overhead and here was a fine example of resilience in adversity and children taking responsibility for their own welfare that may well be needed in the months and years to come.

So it's off to Cornflower for tea now and I can't wait to find out whether it's been prepared in a haybox cooker or not and just in case you feel the urge, here's a favourite website of mine and the instructions for one someone has very kindly made earlier.
Karen and I are clearing the book commitment decks and taking an extended tea break for the summer but will be back with our shared teas in September when we will be very appropriately reading and eating our way through A Fortnight in September by R.C.Sherriff.

So Much to Tell ~ Valerie Grove

This might look like any old ordinary railway platform and you'd be right, it is.

To be exact it's the very drafty platform at Exeter Station where we usually wait for the 7.52 am Penzance to London train when we go up to the smoke for the day which we will be doing later this week.
But in the history of publishing the platform at Exeter Station has its worthy place because it was here that Allen Lane, looking for something good to read on his journey back to London and failing (sadly plus ca change in that respect,) had the idea for Penguin Books, this year celebrating their 70th anniversary.
I was wondering what turns a biography into a book that engages and it may not necessarily have to be about the most famous of lives for that to happen. I'm pleased to find I'm in good company with this inquisitiveness about other lives, William Maxwell in fact

'I can never get enough of knowing about other people's lives. It is why, when I open the morning newspaper, I turn first to the obituary page, hoping for more than the end of the story.'

If there's sufficient of interest to ensure that I enjoy the company of the subject then I'll stay, and for all Kaye Webb's foibles I've had a very pleasurable week in her company thanks to So Much to Tell by Valerie Grove.
Kaye Webb?
Perhaps a name that all us children of the fifties and sixties know but can't quite think how...in that 'where on earth do I know that name from' sort of way.
Just open any Puffin book of that era and you'll know in an instant because Kaye Webb succeeded Eleanor Graham as the editor of Puffin Books and was the founder of the Puffin Club, of which I was not a member because it came along just a bit too late for me. Besides which I had enough on my plate keeping up with Big Chief I-Spy and the PDSA Busy Bees, for whom I collected enough milk bottle tops to build an Apollo spacecraft...or where we trying to build a Guide Dog? I forget.
You'll recognise all these titles I'm sure...even that hint of a one at the bottom of the pile...

Kaye Webb, the exuberant, persuasive, overwhelming, bombastic and opinionated editor with the cut glass accent...for 'carriage' say 'kerridge' ...one of those people of whom I found myself saying constantly as I read,  ' well, her heart was in the right place,' as she blazed a trail into the male-dominated world of publishing in the 1950s, firstly as editor of a children's magazine I have no recollection of whatsoever, The Elizabethan and then at the helm of Puffin Books which of course I had shelves of.

Just about every children's author worth their salt walked through Kaye's door and into publication so the names will be very familiar, Noel Streatfeild, Philippa Pearce, Joan Aiken, Roald Dahl just a few of them, but what may be less well-known is Kaye's rather less successful personal life and her marriage to the artist best remembered for his St Trinian's illustrations, Ronald Searle. This an artistic connection Ronald Searle (who recently celebrated his 90th birthday) would much prefer to forget, many's the time he's tried to put a bomb under St Trinian's only to find it lucratively rising again from the ashes to haunt him once again.
Ronald Searle, who at the age of twenty two found himself as a Japanese prisoner of war working on the Burma railway and imprisoned in Changi, and heaven alone knows how he survived. Indomitable spirit has to be the key because physically he was decimated. He returned from the war in a fragile state, fell into Kaye's all-embracing arms and eventually married her, but only after she had given birth to their twins Kate and John.
It was always going to be a juggling act for a working woman in the 1950s, enough to make you feel a complete slouch for putting your feet up even for five minutes to read this book, when you read of the frenetic nature of Kaye's days. Dedicated to building up the Puffin name and pouring all her energies into that, it is inevitable and small wonder that her children suffered, often left home alone at a young age (twins in a sixth floor flat...eeek !!!) or with the Nanny for weeks on end.
In the end Kaye's marriage suffered too, and Ronald who had survived sufficient trauma in Changi to know that life wasn't a rehearsal and that to follow his heart was a good enough reason to leave, did just that and walked out on Kaye and the children.
With surviving children and ex-husband, and evidence of ongoing family resentments still apparent, Valerie Grove may well have had to tread carefully through Kaye's life in order to write this book, but she does seem to have had the cooperation of the family and manages to provide what felt like an honest yet sensitive appraisal of a fascinating woman who deserves her place in the history of Children's Literature. With no university education to her name Kaye often felt inadequate at her lack of intellectual expertise and clearly compensated in other ways, her need to be needed constantly apparent and when she is finally and effectively phased out of the Penguin - Puffin empire her sense of loss and uselessness after a lifetime of service is profound. Despite illness and increasing physical infirmity, retirement was never going to beckon appealingly for someone who seemed to have barely sat still for most of her life. Kaye so desperate to be needed she even offered to go to Sussex and nurse the astronomer Patrick Moore's aged mother.
Kaye died a rather sad and lonely woman at the age of eighty-one in 1996 and I too felt quite sad to leave her company as I turned the final page of So Much to Tell, because for all her faults there really was never a dull moment with Kaye Webb, and if I cast my mind back to all that childhood reading it would seem much of it was down to her.

It's a beautiful moon.

Bookhound often calls it the parish lantern but I think the rest of us might know it as the moon and occasionally it does something quite special in our outdoor planetarium.
No light pollution but our own to contend with and so a while ago I took out the posh camera, the one I'm holding hostage, to see what it could do. My trusty little Olympus All-Weather 600 sees me through day to day pictures for here, and you all know by now that all I do is point and press, so what I see is what you see, blurry bits and all, but it has all made me a much more observant person than I ever was, for which I thank you.
I'm not sure I'd be quite such an assiduous snapper were it not for the scribbles.
So, it's midnight and I'm out on the verandah in the pitch dark clicking away at the parish lantern.
Rocky is indignant that I've disturbed his night time prowling and for a minute I wonder what it might be that's padding across the gravel and I'm quite relieved it's him.
Owls are hooting and there are all sorts of weird and wonderful noises in the front field.
The swallows were still snuggled up with their babies in the nest and just fluttering a fraction over my head and there were some very odd scratching and scuffling noises going on beneath the verandah decking which was all a bit distracting.
After about fifty rubbish shots, showing two moons and clouds that looked like an ante-natal ultra-sound scan, I went in and found the tripod and things improved considerably.
Then there was nothing for it but to get out one of our favourite children's books and read it.
I Want To See The Moon by Louis Baum and illustrated by Niki Daly was published in 1984 and our copy is held together by sellotape.
The pages are faintly sticky and very finger-worn because it has been read countless times to wakeful children, and in the intervening years I see the book has become an out of print rarity, which is sad because it's a thing of quiet and peaceful beauty that would still make lovely childhood reading.
This is the olden days, all long before the Baby Whisperer or Gina Ford, way before the invention of controlled crying or the disappearing chair methods of trying to get wakeful children back to sleep. There's an acceptance of occasional wakefulness and a lovely Dad involved in these pages.
Toby can't get to sleep so his Dad goes in to see him and by the time you see the first page Toby has dropped that teddy and is leaning over the side pointing at it and declaring 'I want to see the moon'.
He is then walked round the house in any number of diversionary tactics because surely he doesn't mean it.
He gets a clean nappy, a glass of water, a piggyback, a story, builds a castle, drinks some warm milk but each picture shows that recalcitrant body language of the thwarted toddler...
...until in the end he and his Dad go into the garden to look at the moon
The moon hides behind the clouds for a while, sneaks out a bit and back in again and then
'There's the moon!' said Toby
'It's a beautiful moon' said Daddy.
'Beautiful moon' said Toby.
'Good-night, moon,' said Toby.
And ever thereafter when we see the parish lantern one or other of us will recite these lines which have entered into family folklore.
Bookhound was away, so I had to make do.
'It's a beautiful moon, Rocky'....

If I Stay by Gayle Forman and prize draw copies

Trying to decide what to read in the run up to something that you're strangely looking forward to for the sorting out aspect yet simultaneously dreading, leaves a real dilemma of choices. I'd probably be best staying well away from anything traumatic or hospital-y, stick to nice comforting, happy, jolly reading that would bathe my sub-sub-conscious in warm soothing waters ready for that visit under anaesthesia.
So please don't ask me why I picked up If I Stay by Gayle Forman.
But how glad I am that I did.
I read some of the publicity blurb beforehand...children's book... sensational and hotly contested rights auction...sold in eighteen countries... feature film rights acquired by the company that have produced Twilight and same director already signed up. You and I both know we've been disappointed by such triumphant fanfares in the past so my hopes weren't that high.
I didn't read all the information that came in the press release and I am so delighted I didn't. If you feel up to the ride and can possibly just ignore any plot details you hear about this book and read it 'cold' you may well have a similar and untainted reading experience to mine. The cover details very cleverly don't give too much away either so I had no idea what was about to happen and this added hugely to the impact of a book that is being lauded as another...well I'm not going to tell you that either because that would also give everything away, but it is and I think actually better than...
I'll give you the merest hint of a plot. Mia is the seventeen-year old daughter of hippy rock dude parents who've had to shrug off the trappings of that life to settle down into parenthood; thankfully they only shrug off the outward visible signs because the inward signs suggest they are just the same free-spirited beings they ever were. It all comes as quite a surprise when Mia shuns the rock world for the classical, the cello and an application to study at the Juilliard in New York.
That's all I'm going to tell you and I can see I'm painting myself into a corner here, not leaving that much to say beyond the fact that the meeting I had with Mia, her parents and her younger brother Teddy and her bigger 'family' rates as one of those exceptional reading experiences of recent months and yet again I was shamelessly blinking away the tears by the end.
If I Stay should be sad but it's not, I went through the mill a bit as I read but closed the book filled with optimism and a sense of real old fashioned yet unsentimental comfort and joy. If you read elsewhere that it is a

' gripping, heartrending and ultimately life-affirming novel about the power of love and loss,'

then believe it, because it is indeed that and some.
Reading more about New York-based Gayle Forman (who I see from her blog is book touring in the UK this week, I don't usually plan things this well) I was interested to see that this book evolved from real-life events which struck close to home, allowing her to find a voice for her emotions, a chance to consider some of the choices that become available when life bowls you that great big googly. Building resilience can be a slow and difficult process but an essential one if you're going to be able to withstand the next knock and the one after that, writing it all down often such a useful way through the mire.
I've tried desperately hard to give nothing away when actually there is so much more I want to say about If I Stay, the writing, the voice, the events and just how astutely Gayle Forman constructs this book by... and how by using...and the characters who come to life when...and the whole wonderfully explored question of what makes a family and...but I've stopped myself because I'm desperate for anyone who reads this post and then decides to chance this book to be able to approach If I Stay just as I did, with no real clue about what was coming next.
If someone tries to tell you any more about it just do that la-la-la and stop up your ears thing.
I'd also then have to urge you not to Google it either because there are some reviews out there that sadly tell all down to every last plot detail. Just read this book before the hype machine cranks up if you possibly can, get it from the library, or nip out and meet Gayle Forman if she's coming to a bookshop near you, and please could you say hi and thank her for a great book from me.
I can at least help out three of you anyway, names in comments because there are three copies of If I Stay by Gayle Forman ready and waiting and no messing about dressing up, Rocky will choose the winners very quickly and get the books dispatched from the publishers in double quick time, hopefully before the beans are spilt and the magic is spoilt, then once you've read it you'll just have to pledge to keep the If I Stay secrets too.

Magnolia Buildings by Elizabeth Stucley

I'm finding this Inner Child reading so interesting and in so many ways and not just for the flood of memories, though plenty more nostalging today.
So far I discover that books which captured my heart as a child are now just refusing to be read with any degree of adult criticism, somehow it would feel like criticising my younger reading self. Thus Magnolia Buildings by Elizabeth Stucley, a memorable favourite, has been allowed fairly broad license in its depiction of a solid working class family living in a block of flats and first published in 1960. The illustrations are by Dick Hart and they add something quite special.
The Berners family, Mum and Dad and daughters Ally and Doreen and sons Val and Lenny plus Auntie Glad are all squeezed into their tiny high rise flat, number 49 Magnolia Buildings. The only water is in a scullery and the bath is under the kitchen table and if you want to dry your hair expect to do it leaning over the electric fire.
The relentlessly cheerful Mrs B is up at crack of dawn to do her cleaning jobs while the curmudgeonly Mr B is off to work on the railways lifting not much of a finger to help with anything, returning home for dinner and doing his pools coupon before a night out drinking at the The Cock. The invisible Auntie Glad looks after herself and silently glides off to her dressmaking job and the children seem to sort themselves out and struggle off to school. 
This is the children's world of gangs, the Eleven Plus, Saturday morning cinema and the ever-present threat of Approved School or Borstal for anyone who gets into trouble. Everyone dreams in their own way of escape but without money that seems nigh on impossible, but dreams have potential and there can be little doubt that the clever Doreen will educate her way out of Magnolia Buildings, whilst Alli will snip her way out as a 'glamour' hairdresser and Auntie Glad has a surprise or two up her sleeve too. As for Val and Lenny, well the future for the boys interestingly far less certain than that of the girls.
Mrs B keeps her ship afloat with vast amounts of humour and light-heartedness but have no doubt,when the going gets tough she stands no nonsense.
But yet again a flood of childhood memories, what about the excitement of the fair?
Mitcham Fair was the highlight of our year and this is actually it in 1963. We were there somewhere for sure.
Then the circus coming to town.
It's here somewhere, my programme from Billy Smart's Circus...yes, she who throws nothing away has found it.
Believe it or not and hate the thought as many may well do, that night we saw amongst others the Chimpanzees, oh good grief...trained Polar Bears (I ask myself trained in what?) , the Flying Leotaris from Germany, the Five Katyanas from Hungary on the high trapeze, the Digger Pugh Aerial Ballet from Australia, the 'mighty herd of Elephants' and a Wild West show with warnings of a considerable amount of gunfire.
Then there's the sunburn on the seaside holidays, the Berners children all burn to a frazzle, peel and then tan nicely, well I don't know about you but we all did that.
Did suntan lotion exist?
I'm sure I was about thirteen and on my umpteenth layer of skin before a bottle of Ambre Solaire oil was invented, and even then that just helped us burn more evenly.
The trip to the maze at Hampton Court...been lost (and scared) in there a few times.
Guy Fawkes and Penny-for-the-Guy. Whatever happened to that?
Legitimate begging on the streets by children.
Pressing the B buttons in the phone box in case some change fell out...go on own up...
It's all there in Magnolia Buildings.
On the forgiveness-over-criticism front, one or two racist undertones from Mr Berners not in the least unusual for 1960s Britain as we know all too well, but all thankfully rapidly dismissed by the wonderful Mrs Berners.
Little seems to be known about Elizabeth Stucley beyond her origins in North Devon and her descent from Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge, but by all accounts a varied career in teaching, wartime service as a driver in France and work as a children's occupational therapist. At one time, before eventually moving to Bath, her home on Clapham Common a mecca for local children where she started The Adventurer's Club and Magnolia Buildings apparently written for and about those children.
Imagine doing all that without a Criminal Records Bureau check and Ofsted inspections these days.

The Otterbury Incident by C.Day Lewis

"Inspector Brook gave one look into the crate which Toppy had forced open. He muttered something about 'right under my nose - and it took a gang of kids to find out'."

It took an absolutely iron will to set aside my Grown-Up reading last weekend.
To leave The Seamstress for a few days was agony because I am loving it, but I did and as quick as a flash there I was curled up with The Otterbury Incident, my original copy and gradually noticing that all the foxing of the pages was at little person's hand level, presumably mine.
The story recounted in The Otterbury Incident actually derived by Cecil Day Lewis from a French film of the 1940s A Nous Les Gosses, but relocated in post-war England where bomb sites provided an exciting part of the landscape for adventurous children, the black market was a fabulous source of intrigue for the child detectives and the post-war gung-ho battle re-enactments offered the staple of 1950s childhood play.
We were after all the generation of children exposed to a weekly Sunday afternoon dose of monochrome war glory as the films emerged that translated all the derring do into heroic and victorious encounters of courage and bravery, and with it came a steady stream of heros and heroines to emulate in play. That said I don't remember playing at being Violette Szabo very often but Bookhound was heavily into Spitfires and Lancaster Bombers.
To this day he and I are often heard to remark on a cold, grey Sunday afternoon,
'I could just fancy watching The Dambusters...Reach for the Sky...633 Squadron'.
There will be a fanciful attempt at the theme music, bit of thumb and forefinger reversed over eyes for goggles stuff, some 'chocks away'  and ' the Mohne Dam's gone Gibbo', then I'll say how I always cry when Guy throws the dog lead in the bin at the end and we'll be over it.
That's fifty years on so little wonder then that the boys (girls didn't really count) in The Otterbury Incident published in 1948 are taking it all so seriously as the rival gangs work out their ambushes, attacks and defensive tactics in the language of the war,

' When I give the word, this party will attack the tank with automatic weapon fire. Their objective will be to divert the attention of the tank-crew and the escorting troops from the main attack.'

And so power is again handed to the children as the boys regularly gather at The Incident, which now I remember was the name given to the bomb site but by the end of the book has also come to mean another Incident of far greater import as the boys track and corner whoever has stolen their hard-earned money. The money that was supposed to pay for the repair of the broken school window (football). The rallying signal is a whistled rendition of Lillibullero and when the two gangs merge to solve the crime and go into the final battle there is no messing about; airguns, dummy hand grenades and bows and arrows abound (is this where we got the idea?) and they beat each other black and blue for real.
The book was unputdownable again and this is still amazing me, Bookhound had read it as a child too and remembered far more than I did,  but there was even more amazement to come.
How can I know someone for thirty four years and only just discover that while I was sedately learning to skip in an infant's school playground south of the River Thames, somewhere north of the river the six-year old Bookhound was being marched to the headteacher by the playground ladies.
Once in the presence he was advised that his gang actually had to disband because it had got too big and they were frightening the girls.
'What in heaven's name were you doing' I asked with some trepidation.
Apparently it was what we might now term a health and safety issue, joining hands in a great sweeping line across the width of the playground and then running full pelt the entire length, probably shouting geronimo or something, but bodies went flying and it had to stop.
'What did you do then' I asked.
'Picked flowers' he said...
Lest his leadership skills and courage be called into doubt he quickly added that he made membership cards for his next gang in the juniors, and this did involve ambushes and treacle bombs. Thankfully no fatalities but it must have been a close run thing.
This all leads me to believe that perhaps l was much safer south of the river chairing my PDSA Busy Bees club and saving milk bottle tops to turn into Guide Dogs and that thankfully my eventual meeting with Bookhound was still some sixteen years off.
Final word to Marcus Crouch in The Nesbit Tradition for a grown-up's verdict on The Otterbury Incident

'In the telling the absurd plot is given the illusion of realism by a skilful selection of details, and its improbabilities are masked by pace and brilliant timing..'

I'd have to add yet again... and the boundless limits of a childhood imagination, it all seemed perfectly plausible to me.

Inner Child Weekend 2

Second weekend in the month, time to set aside my Outer Grown-Up reading and heed the Inner Child again and I have been looking forward to this at least since the last one ended. I'm wondering how easy it will be to set aside the grown-up reading this time because I have some brilliant books on the go, but as my last choices all worked their magic bar one I shall just have to be disciplined about it in that eight-year old way I used to be so good at.
Somehow Malcolm Saville did not survived this time round. Perhaps I'd topped up my Inner Child sufficiently and needed no more but sadly The Mystery at Witchend remains unfinished.
However a big part of the anticipation has been thinking exactly what I will pull off the shelves this time and I think I have another fine selection.
We used to spend family holidays in the early 1960s with one of those honorary aunts and uncles that your parents collect for you; their friends who you'd call Auntie and Uncle because to use first names would have been considered incredibly precocious and impolite. Uncle B. ran a market garden in Tintagel before Tintagel was ever commercialised and Auntie P. taught at the primary school in nearby Delabole. They had three boys and we would all head off (well one was still a baby so we sensibly left him behind) sans grown-ups, to explore Valency Valley, St Nectan's Glen and Merlin's Cove, all very adventurous and as the only girl I really had to fly the bravado flag and keep up.
Being a teacher Auntie P. knew all the right books for 1960's children and it was whilst staying in Tintagel that I first and most memorably read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis. But another Auntie P. book selection was The Otterbury Incident by C.Day Lewis and I remember being enthralled by both the story and the delightful Edward Ardizzone illustrations, so that has gone onto my pile for this weekend. I can't for the life of me remember quite what the Incident was (DON'T TELL ME) so I'm looking forward to this one and this is my original copy, even better.
Next, The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett.
This was a school Going Home Time read and I can see Miss Butteriss (Butterdish) reading it and see myself sitting on the floor in Blue Class listening intently and not wanting it to end. Before we knew it it was prayers and chairs on desks and we were out, but I'll bet I wandered down Sherwood Park Road in Mitcham towards the 118 bus stop, thinking deeply about the Ruggles family. This would have also meant my brother and I would not have been having our usual debate about whether to spend our bus money in the chewing gum machine instead (because the arrow was pointing forward and this meant a free packet next go) and then walking home across Mitcham Common and a quick explore of Seven Islands Pond ( OMG imagine that now... a Common and a pond) and having to explain why we were so late when we finally walked in the door. I suspect the state of our shoes gave the game away.
I can't keep my hands off Magnolia Buildings by Elizabeth Stucley a minute longer either. A book erased from my memory until I found it in Topsham a  few weeks ago and recognised the cover in an instant.
But how old was I?
Looking inside the book I'm now recalling the recent furore over age-banding children's books because interestingly each of these old Puffins gives an age-banding inside and this one is for 'ten years and over'.
Finally The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier and this one I know was one of the library holiday reading contest reads but my recollections are sketchy verging on non-existent, which all goes to prove I was reading like the blazes to get my card ticked, I'll slow down this time round.
Well, that's me sorted, how about you?
Anyone want to join my gang?
Password - sausages, but don't tell anyone else.

Inner Child reading : Five Children and It - E.Nesbit

What a great idea this has been for January, regressing to childhood, snuggled under a blanket with a book that just opens the flood gates of memory and what a wonderful time I've had with Five Children and It by E.Nesbit and a delight to be reunited with the gorgeously stroppy little Psammaed.

'Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything and grown-ups know this.'

How much time I may have spent as a child hoping to find a Psammead is another thing entirely because, yes I did believe just about everything I was told and so this book would have been no exception. But how amazing that I can read it again now and be so deeply embedded in the whole story all over again, because I truly was.
How easy it is then still to relate to the writing of Edith Nesbit when she says things like

'The best part of it all was that there were no rules about not going to places and not doing things. In London almost everything is labelled 'You mustn't touch', and though the label is invisible, it's just as bad, because you know it's there, or if you don't you jolly soon get told.'

And so I was on the train and travelling to the house in the country with Anthea, Cyril, Robert, Jane and the big nuisance baby known as the Lamb. Off we went to dig in the gravel pit because yet again the parents have been dispensed with, the servants are in charge and we are all free to roam. The bad-tempered little sand fairy, the Psammead appears out of the gravel to grant a daily wish and the fun begins.
My favourite was the day we all asked for wings because,

'...really there is nothing like wings for getting you into trouble. But on the other hand, if you are in trouble, there is nothing like wings for getting you out of it.'

There are lessons to be learned and as Edith herself suggests, morals will slip in come what may,

'morals are nasty forward  beings and will keep shoving their oars in where they are not wanted.'

It's all wonderfully controlled subversion but with consequences which the children have to consider each time they make a wish which then goes hopelessly off on a frolic of it's own.
Be warned, wishing a house into a castle is a risky business and do err on the side of caution when asking for your baby Lamb to be taken away by gypsies because this will also land you in terrible trouble that you might regret.
Quite interesting how I'm now noticing that it is essential to get the parents out of the way before the fun can begin and I know exactly how this translated when I was a child, Sunday Evensong that's how.
Once we'd shown willing at Sunday School and Church in the morning my brother and I were exempt from Evensong but at twelve (him) and ten (me) considered old enough and responsible enough to manage home alone for about an hour and a half.
I knew we'd get caught out and it was not my idea for the one in the back garden (my brother) to try and shoot arrows right over the house to the one waiting in the front garden (me).
Well I waited and I waited until breathless he suddenly appeared,
'Just come and take a look at this' he gushed and to this day I still marvel at the sight of that arrow stuck firmly to the parents' bedroom ceiling. It had somehow shot through the little open fanlight window (praise be the thing was open or this could have been much worse)  and there it was a-quivering. Of course pulling it off left a great big black blob on the ceiling which neither of us thought would be in the least incriminating but of course we hadn't reckoned on the Tinker's astute powers of observation.
I think the end result was a lot of laughter but the bow and arrow was certainly confiscated and we returned to being good children for a week or so, and that might have been either before or after my earliest illicit encounter with a sewing machine, which was also a Sunday Evensong moment, but one which I'll save for another day, that was the daring 1950s for you.
I defy anyone not to find their Inner Child and roll up laughing when they read Five Children and It, some moments of pure un-adult-erated childish joy emerged as I read, and the end result is of course that I must be happy with my lot in life and I must not wish for the wool shop to be moved to my spare room...though many would argue that's unnecessary, it's already there.
Next Friday I'll share my selection for my second Inner Child reading weekend of 2009 and I can't wait to read them, have you chosen yours?

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

I can't help it, it's not that funny but I'd better just get this thought out of the way before I start because I hear the word Willoughby and am instantly reminded of a lovely Australian secretary, Joanie, who worked in the clinic with us years ago. She was utterly hilarious, completely anarchic and brought a real touch of something subversively bold and different to a little working medical community here in Devon. We were her very own whingeing poms and she let us know it but she lived in a road called Willowby Park which she had renamed Wallaby Park to remind her of home. I can't hear the word without remembering Joanie wherever she is now.
But back to The Wolves of Wallaby Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken and a book I most definitely remember reading as a child and I think as part of one of those library reading contests that were supposed to last through the entire six weeks of the summer holidays. I being eager-beaver little dovegreyreader had usually whistled through it in a couple and I must have been a complete and utter pain dashing back into the library on a daily basis to harangue a librarian into asking me the questions on my books, get my card stamped and dash off with the next lot. I used to take these things very seriously.
Orphaned Sylvia must leave her beloved but ailing and impoverished guardian Aunt Jane in London and go and live with her wealthy cousin, only child Bonnie, at Willougby Chase, it's all agreed. Bonnie's parents are off on a long trip abroad and Bonnie needs a companion, there will be servants and unaccustomed luxury and comfort for Sylvia, possets and pipkins of nourishing soup, lemon-mint baths, all-enveloping fur capes and a governess has been engaged for the duration.
I knew exactly where I was from the very first sentence of the book,

'It was dusk - winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the  forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Wallaby Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger'.

Because this is Joan Aiken's England in 1832, there is a channel tunnel from Dover to Calais (that seemed just as amazing as the wolves in the early 1960s when I read this) and a great many wolves have migrated from Russia to Europe through the tunnel and are now an everyday threat in the English countryside. Trains rush into stations at full pelt and screech to a halt to confuse the wolves waiting for a quick human snack when the passengers alight, wolves readily crash in through train windows and doubtless none of this would have astonished my childhood imagination quite as much as it did my adult one.
It's also perhaps a lesser known fact that really I wanted to be an ice skater not a nurse, and so I know for a fact I would have been completely impressed with Sir Willoughby who, lovely Papa that he was, in readiness for the fact that Bonnie will immediately want to take her friend skating on the frozen rivers, has ordered six pairs of white kid skating boots, all different sizes.
Six pairs, imagine that and at this point I'd probably have drifted  off into my Sonja Henie - Noel Streatfeild - White Boots reverie because on many occasions I was Sonja of course, or failing that I'd settle for being Doreen Denny.
I was equally perturbed this time round when Sylvia's strange carriage companion on her long overnight journey alone to Willoughby Chase suddenly produces a shotgun and takes out rabbits from the train window for some target practice.To say nothing of the moment the wolf leapt in, is summarily dispatched (stabbed with glass from the broken window) and Sylvia and the strange man crawl along on the outside of the train carriage to the next compartment rather than sit paddling around in wolfish remains.
Heavens to betsy what's going on here, and we moan about Great Western. I certainly don't remember this book coming with any " Do not try this at home" caveats but it probably would now, nor was I disturbed by any of it.
No good can come from anyone called Miss Slighcarp, least of all if she's a governess and I remember loving all the subterfuge and especially the fact that these two girls, Bonnie and Sylvia hit it off right from the start. There was none of the usual social class division between the two of them as they pool resources to outwit the dastardly plan to strip Bonnie of her inheritance.
I've been dipping into Marcus Crouch's book The Nesbit Tradition : The Children's Novel 1945-1970 for my sins, just out of interest and to see what the received opinion is on some of these writers now being closely analysed, and I was quite surprised to read this written about about Joan Aiken in 1972,

'Gratitude for Joan Aiken's high spirits and the gusto of her story-telling may make the reader value her rather beyond her worth. These are precious qualities, but they are not enough. What Miss Aiken lacks most grievously is self-discipline. Her stories gallop recklessly in all directions at once with never a touch of rein from the author. Grand yarns, they are too casual, even perhaps too full of self-mockery to be taken entirely seriously."

Not by the nine-year old dovegreyreader they weren't, I loved this one and I have just loved it all over again.

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner

The Inner Child reading weekend was a huge success here chez dovegreyreader and I'm now going to schedule it in as a regular slot, first weekend each month if anyone wants to join me. So many books from my childhood that I've wanted to re-read but never quite manage to slip them in amongst everything else, so it's clear I need to create some dedicated time. Of course you don't have to read the books that I do so why not choose one of your own if you want to, and then I'll let you join my Inner Child Gang, there'll probably be a badge and a secret sign and a special password too.
I put aside all my seriously grown-up reading on the Friday, made my four-book selection as if standing in the library on a Saturday morning in the early 1960s and suddenly had that strange buzz of a excitement that I used to have looking at a pile of new unread library books. I was very strict about it and n'er a grown-up book did I open for the whole weekend.
I have no idea how old I was when I first read Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner but I suspect I read most of the books I'm revisiting at the moment between the ages of about six and eleven, so 1959 to 1965 or so.
When did I suddenly feel too old to read Malcolm Saville?
Reading again, with the eyes of an adult and trying to refract back to those eyes of a child, has been pure pleasure and I have gleaned a real sense of just why I loved these books so much.
In my mind's eye I could see the actual cover of the copy I'd read as a child and I'm sure it was this one.
Emil and his widowed hairdresser mother live in Neustadt and it is whilst travelling alone by train for a week's stay with his grandmother in Berlin that Emil's adventure begins, and I say no more about that beyond telling anyone who has never read it, or has and has forgotten, there is a thief to be brought to book and as Erich Kastner established for countless future writers of children's fiction, children make the very best detectives.
The book was first published in Germany in 1929 and here in the UK in 1931 and that makes a good deal of the action all the more surprising as Erich Kastner invests his children with untold freedoms to be everything that children are exceptionally good at given the opportunity. Given a sort of well-organised democracy of their own children thrive in the hands of Erich Kastner.
Immediately assimilated into his Berlin 'gang' with no questions asked beyond the prospect of a jolly good adventure and in the rough world of a busy city, Emil rapidly belongs as if he's known them all forever and every enviable childlike quality emerges. Spontaneity, self-organisation, sharing, pooling resources, making sacrifices for  the good of the others, complete loyalty and commitment to each other and the cause, self-discipline, a touch of well-placed rebellion. Worrisome parents are sidelined and just don't feature as this esprit de corps carries the boys along with the addition a token girl in the shape of Emil's cousin Pony Hutchen, (who at least has the advantage of the brand new bicycle) on the trail of the thief and wonderfully imaginative innovations abound.
All that would have passed me by as a child for sure and I'd have been reading this for the complete adventure that it is, but I couldn't put it down this time round either.

Sunday Salon - Inner child comfort reading

Did I predict that the washing machine would go on strike on Christmas Eve?
Wrong, it was the central heating in one half of the house, and we can now confirm that every boiler-repair man in the West jets off to the Caribbean for two weeks over Christmas.
Then when they come back they are not really happy to be back because they are inundated with cold people like us dressed as if auditioning for Nanook of the North. They are also prone to drawing in their breath sharply through tanned but pessimistically clenched jaws, there are no spare parts, the water in the outside pipes is frozen anyway and all in all we are only just warming up again and even that is involving some jiggery - pokery - bashery - bangery of the boiler while we await the bits.
Woodburners will only throw out heat so far and no further, so the Hudson's Bay blanket has been my best friend and I have mastered the three-way fold cocoon-like enwrapment which has all kept me warm enough to sink into the oblivion of a good book.
I seem to have been tackling some seriously grown-up reading of late, intense and emotional subject matter, but if I want to touch base, settle down a bit and comfort read there's really no better place to go than the shelves of children's books. I put together a little pile of books that I clearly remember reading years ago to suit a weekend that might connect to my inner child, preferably without that doll which the school photographer made me hold, but those are the very self-same reading eyes.
That is suddenly a very strange thought.
For several months I've been dipping into John Sutherland's very enjoyable memoir Magic Moments : Life-Changing Encounters with Books, Films, Music... published by Profile Books, in which he links childhood memories, mostly literary, to significant experiences which shaped his life. Though John Sutherland is fifteen years older than me I have related keenly to so much that he writes about. Books like this are the perfect prompt to memories of your own offering as they do a scaffolding on which to build up your own version.
Take the title for a start, Magic Moments.
That Perry Como song is etched in my memory because we were a radio home, it was always on ( a great big wooden wireless thing with glowing valves inside of course), and my mum was a great one for singing while she houseworked then stopping for coffee to listen to Mrs Dale's Diary, and so I used to sing along and listen too. Magic Moments and Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera were our absolute favourites. Incidentally my own version of a book like this would have a radio chapter which included the following equations,
Billy Cotton's Bandshow + Wakey Waaaakey = Sunday = roast dinner ,
Sparky's Magic Piano + Nelly the Elephant = Saturday morning = Children's Favourites
Sing Something Simple + Just you and I = Sunday evening = school next day.
Faure's Berceuse + Are you sitting comfortably = Listen With Mother
How about yours?
John and I were also kindred spirits over libraries and comics and I suspect his experiences mirror those of many of us. John could hardly sleep the night before his weekly comic would be arriving and this could have been me, expecially if there was a free gift involved. Then my Saturday trip to the library with the Tinker was a ritual only postponed for the most serious of reasons and I was as keen as mustard to get there. I can only apologise if you were the child elbowed out of the way in Mitcham library back in 1960 by a pint-sized thing in a smocked frock, ankle socks and sandals just as you were going to reach for that Malcolm Saville Lone Pine Mystery book off the shelf.
Sorry, you probably didn't realise those were meant for me.
So as I stood in front of the children's bookshelves this week I was catapulted back forty eight years or so and picked up four books that I suddenly really wanted to read again.
Five Children and It by E.Nesbit
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aitken
and finally, let's go Lone Pine,
Mystery at Witchend by Malcolm Saville
I could easily have brought these four home from the library one Saturday in the 1950s or early 1960s and so I decided to do what I always used to do and read one after another, and leave Irene et al to one side for a day or two. I might do this regularly through the coming year because I am enjoying it immensely.
 I haven't done all the other things I might have done as well, curled up in my bedroom for hours, gone out on my roller skates, dashed round to my friend Anne's house to swap my copy of Judy for her copy of Bunty and then gone out on her brother's go-kart or sneaked a quick go on the pogo stick. Nor have I gone off to spend my 3d pocket money on four shrimps, four fruit salads and some sherbet-filled flying saucers, but I am loving reading all these books again and getting that real sense of childish excitement as I turn the pages.
Emil and the Detectives kept me awake until 1.30am (no need for a torch under the blankets or anything) and it was all I could do to put Mystery at Witchend down to sort out the kitchen, get the fire lit, fling the hoover round and pay homage to the washing machine before I picked it up again. In fact I've got to dash now because Miss Slighcarp is up to no good at Willoughby Chase and Bonnie and Sylvia are on the case.
Who'd have thought it all those years ago.

At last...

Hallelujah!
At last a Top Fifty Books Ever list where I have read nearly all of them. At least I must have been well-read once upon a time, only about three or four that I've missed and funnily enough one of those is number six.
I bet plenty of you have read all fifty.

Bog Child

I had heard of Siobhan Dowd but sadly only via the news of her tragically early death from cancer last year. Beyond the usual detached sadness you feel when you hear of the death of a young writer I didn't think too much more until a copy of Bog Child published by David Fickling arrived.
I'm keeping children's literature high up my reading agenda again having lapsed in recent months and allowing the grown-up stuff to push it aside but it adds something special to the reading broth and I have quite a few in the queue.
Bog Child wasn't going to let me go after the first twenty sample pages and I just carried on, in fact couldn't and didn't want to stop.
Whilst out digging for peat eighteen-year old Fergus and his Uncle find a body in the peat bog. This is 1980's Ireland at the height of the troubles, the provos, the bombs and the prison hunger strikes and all this weaves in with the story of Mel, the bog child's life. To reveal any more would be to ruin the little revelations that make this story so good, so that's all you're getting of the this-happened-then-that-happened which I don't do a great deal of at the best of times.
So easy to give away something seemingly insignificant which then detracts wholesale from the enjoyment of a book.For goodness' sake tell me if I do.
With two narratives running side by side there's a great danger with a book like this that you end up with too much of the story you don't want too much of, and not enough of the one that has really grabbed your attention but I was completely satisfied with the balance that Siobhan Dowd achieved here. Mel's story gradually revealed but it doesn't smother that of Fergus and his family, just complements it perfectly.
Themes of struggle and sacrifice, love and conflict connect both and with it that little sense that in many ways plus ca change.
Exquisite writing with a very matter of fact Irish lilt to the vernacular which constantly reminded me where I was and a definitive fictional account of  recent history that still may not have made much of an appearance in children's literature, I'm not sure.
But now for the sadness because here's a writer I would strive to read all there is and ever will be, but we will only have what has already been written by Siobhan Dowd and just one more book after this one. Solace of the Road will be published in 2009 and already available A Swift Pure Cry and The London Eye Mystery.
But Bog Child is published today and I hope there's a launch going on somewhere with an accordion playing because for sure, having read about Siobhan's life, she will be dancing and singing to it wherever she is.
One of those books you feel very privileged to have read and if it doesn't win prizes then I'm a leprechaun.
There is also a newly established Siobhan Dowd Trust which will endeavour to help disadvantaged children improve their skills and experience the joys of reading, offering financial support to a wide range of children including I'm pleased to say those with special needs.I have applied successfully in the past to the excellent Roald Dahl Foundation for grants for children who fit their very strict criteria and it is trust funds like this which can make a huge difference. Sometimes all a family needs is a few hundred pounds for something that will vastly improve their lives and there are fewer and fewer places to find that now without jumping through more hoops than many of them have the energy to do.
The Siobhan Dowd Trust a lasting legacy to a very gifted writer and final words to David Fickling,

' Siobhan was a person of immense humanity warmth and ability, just coming into the full measure of her talent. She made words sing for her. She had been waiting all her life to write as she had now been writing. We are lucky to have four brilliant books, and we cannot help thinking that is not enough.'

The Battle for Gullywith

I'm in trouble with the Tinker that's for sure.
He's been desperate to read The Battle for Gullywith, looked all crestfallen when I called in without the book yesterday, and I said he couldn't have it until I'd written about it and I've been a week letting the whole experience simmer down enough to write sensibly, without going into useless over-gush, some hope.
My proof copy arrived weeks ago and I had to choose my moment carefully and plan accordingly because I wanted to try the impossible and read it like a child.
Do you remember those days when you'd get back from the library on a Saturday morning?
The Tinker used to take me to Mitcham Library every single week without fail. We'd walk miles from one side of town to the other to get there, through Fair Green and up past the swimming baths towards Tooting and if I could get double the books I would. Then,on Saturday afternoon. once I'd been out for a spin on my roller skates, swapped Judy and Bunty comics with my best  friend Ann and while Grandstand and then the wrestling was on the TV downstairs, I'd curl up on my bed and read the morning's spoils.
I knew that Family Pack at MeandMyBigMouth had read The Battle for Gullywith in instalments because they test-ran the book and were all biting their nails just hanging around the inbox waiting for each chapter to be written and arrive by e mail, so I didn't let myself gallop on too fast.
It was an effort but it paid off. I wish I'd been as clever as Martha Pack and had that tortoise idea because it's a cracker and Susan has done something very clever with it.
Most people will have read the early chapters on Susan's blog as the book was being written and so will be familiar with Oliver and his family moving to the strange and remote Gullywith Farm, but what follows is one great big adventure with all those wonderful twists and turns and magical things that can and should happen in a children's story. Great flights of the imagination are entirely possible as Oliver finds himself halfway between reality and something quite extraordinary as he meets the mysterious Nonny Dreever who lives in a house that I can't wait to see someone paint a picture of.
The battle must be fought and won and Oliver and friends don't shirk the challenge, I was quietly spellbound (for a 54yr.old) by the journey on the sleigh train to the Midwinter Revel, a trip to the strangest bookshop in the world, the maps and the game.It all added up to a very special read and as for the tortoises, well bless the wise clever little creatures.
Oliver is one of those normal children living the sort of childhood any child would wish for; freedom, adventure and impossible happenings all offer the happiest of escapes for young imaginations and I suspect The Battle For Gullywith will do for today's children what The Magic Faraway Tree did for all us children of the 1950's and I'm assured by my youthful work colleague, what The Owl Service by Alan Garner did for the children of the 1960's.
In the wake of The Battle for Gullywith I predict a huge upsurge in the popularity of the tortoise, the nation will adore them once more. We loved them when we were children, every home had one (except ours, we had a budgie called Sparky) and they were always going missing or dying in hibernation.
Signs on lamposts offering a 2/6d reward for the return of Slowcoach from number 28.
Tortoises now very expensive and come with certificates and all sorts these days, so much less common in the average garden than they used to be.
I also predict Gullywith Games, Nonney Dreever house make-overs, a welcome down-turn in the sale of flowery wellies and the person who invented them will be rightly turned to stone and look out for Torboats on a lake near you, it's all only a matter of time.
In the bookshops in April and now I'm off to get my badge, my club membership card and that signed, gold edged certificate and if it's a fake printed signature I take it all back.
Oh yes and I'd better drop the book into you know who.
PS Happy Birthday to the author...and she might just kill me for mentioning that.

Great Joy

Why does it still feel too early to start thinking about Christmas in earnest? Happens every year, when I get to the week before, completely unprepared as usual, I shall wish I'd done my shopping in August and put the sprouts on in June and of course I'm still beating myself to a pulp about not making a Christmas Cake in October.
But this book has come my way and it's too good to leave unannounced.
Great Joy by Kate DiCamillo and illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline and published by Walker Books.
We have our own favourite children's Christmas books, get them out every year and have a good nostalge (I've invented that verb, before the grammar police screech in and slap on a fine, it's lacking in the English language and I need it, use it and like it) about those wonderful years of Christmas with saucer-eyed children brought to the verge of sickness with excitement at the preparations. So much so that the tree still traditionally doesn't go up until very near the day because I can't be sure they are any better in their twenties once they all arrive home.
I haven't added any books to the selection for years until this one arrived and I have been transfixed by the illustrations. I think I can cope with oodles of sentimentality and nostalgia at Christmas so have overriden any hint of that in this book with ease. Set in New York, I think 1930's or thereabouts and Frances spots an organ grinder and his monkey from the window of the family apartment.The story unfolds around Frances's part in the school nativity play coupled with her childlike concern for the organ grinder sleeping out on the street and it is beautiful.
The illustrations are of such a high standard I could look at them for hours.
The colours are dusky and purplish hazed, muted sepia-like tones which capture the essence and the atmosphere to perfection and I suspect will do likewise with a child's imagination.Gentle on the eye, the glowing shop windows shine out on Fifth Avenue against this backdrop and the intensity of Frances's emotion all showcased to best effect.Frances is a little treasure, a perfect angel in boots.
I love it.

The Thousand Nights and One Night

Mention of Jan Pienkowski a while back and in the comments a reference to a favourite Christmas book which is one of our family favourites too. I'm not going to mention Christmas again for weeks and weeks because I can hardly believe that the adverts have started and the radio is revving up with sleigh bell music already. I'm really good at ignoring it all because we don't let Christmas begin here until about a week before and the tree is usually a Christmas Eve affair.
But I do love the Jan Pienkowski book Christmas with his trademark illustrations and the St James text so I expect that will feature on here a bit nearer the time.
But that's no reason to be deprived of the joy of Jan and thanks to Puffin books we have something to keep us going.
A copy of the newly published The Thousand Nights and One Night has arrived, the story retold by David Walser with illustrations by Jan Pienkowski.
Confession, I've never actually read these cover to cover and have only really gathered the whole Shahrazade (as it is spelt in this version) thing via osmosis and snippets of stories here and there. Acted in the occasional pantomime version of Aladdin, bit of Ali Baba now and again but beyond that not a lot.
There's a great introduction to this version, so now I learn they are unconnected stories woven into a whole by the familiar overarching tale of Shahrazade, staving off  execution with her nightly telling of a tale to the vengeful King Shahryar.
Collected over a period of five hundred years it is thought they took their final form in the 14th century but many date back to the 7th or 8th century. Finally translated in 1704 by a Frenchman and then again by Sir Richard Burton. There's confusing for you because it's not THAT one of course but the Victorian explorer one.
Jan Pienkowski describes the allure of the tales from his childhood in Poland and the joy of travelling around the fabled cities of the stories as he gathered his sketches together for this book,
"the dappled, latticed light and shade, the brilliant splendour of the colurs of the East, these are imprinted on my mind. I hope I have conveyed hints of them to you"
What can I say?
Feast your eyes on this because the colours far surpass anything you could wish for, rich jewel-like backdrops for Jan's perfect silhouette illustrations, always so expressive and telling a story of their own. There is so much to see in each one, I loved them and think children will be equally impressed.Look at that little spider dangling outside the frame of the picture; that's what children notice and I almost missed as I scanned and cropped this picture.
Children have far more vivid imaginations than grown-ups, little fingers pointing out all those tiny details that we miss, and there is so much to see in each picture.
As if that wasn't enough there's a red silk ribbon marker and the page edges are gold blocked which gives it all a very special book feel indeed.
There is also quilting inspiration a-plenty here and I was reminded of Dilys Fronks a favourite quilter who, now I think about it, has perfected the art of Jan Pienkowski in fabric. I think Dilys deserves a blog post of her own because her work is truly inspirational and you can then have a good laugh at all the Dilys's I've started and then never quite managed to finish.
The back drop is a joy to create but the black bits are fiendishly tricky.

My Dad's a Birdman

No he's not, this is just the title of David Almond's latest book, and his first for younger children, with illustrations by Polly Dunbar.
My last David Almond read was Skellig which came upon me by chance, hit me like a thunderbolt out of the blue and quickly whizzed up my list of favoured children's reads.
I'd been meaning to read it for years and when I finally managed it I was left almost bereft of words.
Not quite completely speechless though so here were my early thoughts posted here almost a year ago.

It's hard to know where to start with Skellig and to dissect out any part just does the book a huge disservice, so suffice to say,amongst other things, it's about a young boy's love for his baby sister who has been born prematurely.You just have to read it to benefit from the full embrace of some of the gentlest most moving writing around today in children's literature. It's a powerful book for all its measured and unusual events and I was on the brink of tears at one point in the book, but then young Michael's love for his sister can't fail to move you.Nor is it sentimental, far from it.
How I would love to have read this one as a child. I think great flights of imagination would have been the order of the day and it is a book that will stay with me now, but I feel sure it would have entered my canon of memorable childhood reads had it been around in the 1950's.

Having now read My Dad's a Birdman published by Walker Books, I'd be completely won over to David Almond's writing if I wasn't already. He has the happy knack of creating children who you can believe in utterly and Lizzie must join the ranks.
Lizzie lives with her dad and you sense that something sad has happened to her mum though this is never clearly defined beyond the fact that she's not around.Lizzie clearly has her hands full with her unusual dad and his dreams and the book is full of the improbabilities that defy adult understanding but seem perfectly logical to small children.
It's the adults who are unusual but aren't they all through the eyes of a child? Auntie Doreen whose answer to all life's problems is a home-made dumpling, Mr Mint the anxious school teacher and Lizzie's dad who is quite certain that, with a little thought and application, he can win The Great Human Bird Competition. By the end of the book you are convinced he can too but beyond that I won't breath a word.Polly Dunbar's illustrations convey the story simply and effectively and with a beautifully light-footed energy of their own.
This is a book about having dreams and living them, about the magic of imagination and about the power of love and I suspect children will adore it. It all just makes you yearn to be able to read as a child again and then to realise how vital it is to ensure that children do read as children as much as they possibly can. Books like this give children permission to be children and to dream, and grown-ups the chance to touch base and do a bit of that too.

The Snow Goose and Angela Barrett

A beautiful new edition of a favourite book arrived last week from Random House, The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico and with illustrations by an even more favourite artist Angela Barrett.
If I'm honest it's an artist's style I will recognise often at the expense of knowing their name, which won't cheer any of them up I suppose, but I remember Angela Barrett because of two books that take me back to way back when.
But firstly Paul Gallico.
I didn't know much about Paul Gallico until I did a bit of searching around about The Snow Goose so I had no idea he was an American, born in New York City in 1897. I'm not sure where I thought he was from but perhaps the US connection surprises me as he has written a seemingly very English book and one of those stories that seem to have been with me for years.First published in 1941, the story of Philip Rhayader and Fritha one of those gently familiar ones with a little bit of Richard Harris and Jenny Agutter flitting in and out so I must have seen the film at some time.
My only other copy a very 1970's 20p Penguin film tie-in edition also containing that other famous little story The Small Miracle.
Certainly The Snow Goose one of those haunting and classically understated, less is more tales of the mysterious stranger, the magical bird and the inquisitive child and all set against  Rhayader's sudden departure to help with the evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk.
From the Penguin edition I read that in 1936 Paul Gallico settled for a time in a hilltop house at Salcombe in Devon which would have given him plenty of  material for the writing of The Snow Goose except that he hardly needed any material.It's a simple story and by his own admission that was Paul Gallico's exact intention. He saw himself as a storyteller and this one certainly seems like a fusion of fairytale, myth and legend all held together by the threads of realism.
Angela Barrett's illustrations are nonpareil, par excellence monochromes that perfectly reflect the setting of the desolate Essex marshes and when colour is used it is subtle and muted. The faces are utterly exquisite, perfect degrees of chiaroscuro delicately used as the story leads us to expect more detail.
"Frith stared at Rhayader. He had changed so. For the first time she saw that he was no longer ugly or mis-shapen or grotesque, but very beautiful"

And the other two books illustrated by Angela Barrett that take me back to way back when?
These two of course and was there ever a more evocative scene than this? This the book that strangely always makes me want to do odd things like put fresh paper on the shelves in the larder ,and if I ever become a domestic goddess I just might, because I think the last lot has been there since the first time I read this book.

Pippi Longstocking

Some books are just an intrinsic part of the warp and weft of our family life, woven in with the years of raising children.Books and films completely embedded in our consciousness forever.
One little character who was responsible for more than the average amount of anarchy and mayhem here was Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and probably one of the reasons we have three free spirits who still keep us completely on our toes.Life is never predictable.
In need of a light moment before my final assault on the Booker longlist reviews over the next few days and before shortlist day on Thursday, I was in raptures to find a copy of the latest edition of Pippi Longstocking in the post from Oxford University Press with illustrations by Lauren Child.
Lauren Child's Charlie and Lola series a very firm favourite in my office with all the little people who come in to see me.I have to keep constantly up to date with whatever language the pre-school children are speaking. It was Balamory for ages and Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam and Postman Pat seem to be eternal. It's good because I can still say our favourite Fireman Sam line in that Welsh accent, "Don't dither in the doorway Norman", and be understood.
So as Pippi arrived in the post so did the Kayaker (not in the post, with his washing) and seize it he did because Pippi appealed to the boys as much as the girls here. I doubt he's the target audience for this book but we had a good laugh over his namesake Tommy, and Annika and all those wonderful adventures.The film added to the joy and we can all still sing the theme tune and often do.
I'm sure other families do the same.
On those rare occasions when we are all together it only takes one word to start the whole thing off and we are all singing like crazy, it's good not to have neighbours at moments like this.
Pippi deserves to be re-presented to every new generation of children, she is timeless and still as funny today as the day I first met her as a child and since my children met her.This edition works so well with Lauren Child's illustrations and I particularly love the fact that Pippi's stockings are actually knitted.It all cleverly bridges any divide there may be between a book first published as Pippi Langstrump in 1945 and the world of children's literature today.
The text has magical variations of size and shape and plenty of nicely unusual moments

"Pippi set off up the street. She walked with one foot on the pavement and the other in the gutter. Tommy and Annika fixed their eyes on her for as long as they could see her. After a while she came back Now she was walking sdrawkcab That was so she didn't have to turn around when she came home."

The word backwards is also mirror-imaged, which typepad wouldn't let me do, but it all adds to the allure of the book, as does the lime gree ribbon bookmark, and offers plenty to talk about with children.I'm also completely in agreement with Pippi that pluttification tables are torture and that I too would have shortened my name to Pippi if I'd been called Pippilotta Comestibles Windowshade Curlymint Ephraimsdaughter Longstocking.
Now I'm not sure this is a particularly good PR pic and the Kayaker can but hope that all his mates don't see it, (I won't tell if you don't) but I love that grin because all our children had grins like this and twenty years on this was exactly the one that would be on his face as you yelled "Thomaaaas come here".
Then as sternly as you could manage you'd try to berate him for cutting his sister's hair "because it looked a mess" or burying her Barbie doll "because it had died" or pulling up a neighbour's onions "because I wanted to see what they looked like" or climbing on the shed roof "because it was there" or...or...and it was all hopeless.
Why don't they brush their hair anymore? It used to look so lovely with a nice side parting.

Vote now.

I'm always grateful to blog readers who alert me to anything interesting happening out there in the big wide book world so many thanks to Paul for tipping me the wink about this

"My professional body CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) is celebrating the 70^th anniversary of the Carnegie medal awarded to the best older children's novels each year and the Kate Greenaway medal for the best picture book. The public are able to vote for their favourites from a selection from previous medal winners until 14 June. There are some great books here in both categories"

I've just been over to vote here and had to dig out a book I'd forgotten about from years ago, our very dog-eared copy of Dogger by Shirley Hughes which has seen much active service.That one's had my vote for the Best of the Kate Greenaway's and for the Carnegie it was The Borrowers by Mary Norton so that was my childhood remembered in a flash.
I've talked about it before but another of the going-home stories that stayed with me was the ultra-serious and scary Miss Butteriss (Miss Butterdish to us of course) reading The Borrowers to Blue Class at Sherwood County Primary in that moment before prayers, chairs up on the table, dash to the pegs to grab coats and fly like a rocket all the way down Sherwood Park Road in Mitcham to catch the 118 bus home.
Just to prove what a stickler Miss Butterdish was, here's my 1961 Blue Class school report citing that I had "conquered my tendency to carelessness" and my work was "neatly performed".
I'm also pleased to see that in my Attitude to School Life I was "quite reliable" leading to an overall plaudit of "most satisfied".
Clearly Miss B felt there was a glimmer of hope for me at the age of seven.

The Seeing Stone

So here's my first foray into Arthurian anything for a very long time indeed.
The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland and its sequels have had me transported right back to childhood holidays in Tintagel in Cornwall before it had gift shops.If you've been there in recent times you'll find it hard to believe it was ever like that but the place used to be empty back in the early 1960's.
A ruined castle, one shop called Camelot Crafts, a pseudo round table exhibition and a stony beach called Merlin's Cove reached by Land Rover and that was it.But myth and legend have a huge impact when you are 10 years old and it was all memorable.
I wasn't prepared to be quite as "spellbound" as Philip Pullman with The Seeing Stone because blurb hyperbole is starting to draw my attention lately and the book also had the pre-requisite word "Guardian" on the front cover.
The Seeing Stone is actually set in the Welsh Marches in 1199 so you are instantly aware that we're not really talking about that Arthur because everyone knows he was supposed to have been born in the 5th century (thanks Wikipedia) I was completely clueless beyond the stock knowledge of myth and legend about Merlin, swords in stones, ladies in lakes, Camelot, Guinevere and Avalon.
Young Arthur de Caldicot discovers his namesake the boy King Arthur in his obsidian seeing stone given to him by Merlin.
Merlin? I learn so much writing this blog because I do try and check facts so now I know all there is to know about Wizard Number One.
Thus the stage is set for Kevin (sorry first name terms...getting fed up typing all that) to weave in the old legends with life in a community in the Middle Ages and like Philip I was spellbound.
Young Arthur's life mirrors the life of Arthur-in-the Stone's in a bit of a doppelganger sort of way and he finds himself living in two worlds.The end result is an intricately woven seamless whole of 100 chapters creating an atmosphere and a world you can't bear to leave.
Pure evocative escapism.
So involved was I that had we been having roast swan for tea instead of pizza I would have been briefly delighted. I'm already well into the next in the trilogy, have the third lined up and also the recent sequel Gatty's Tale.
Meanwhile, as you might predict, the family holiday photo albums yield treasures galore and on the back of this picture of parents of dgr at Tintagel, the Tinker (father of dgr) has written,
"King Arthur's Castle Tintagel 1963, King Arthur and Guinevere in foreground".

A Day with Kevin and Arthur

It's been a gloriously warm sunny day, not too hot and the swiftswallowhousemartins have yet to return to their summer quarters so I had the verandah to myself. Once they move back into their nests in the eaves forget all hope of a lazy read, they get very protective and will just dive-bomb anyone who dares to come close.
Add in the comfort of a very large bean bag and I have spent the day quietly but completely entranced by the first title in Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthurian trilogy, The Seeing Stone.
Philip Pullman was "spellbound", Anne Fine was "so so jealous" and I was just mesmerised, start to finish. I would normally rest a book after 50 pages or so and pick up something else, then come back to it (sorry it's odd I know but it's the way I often read) but I could not be prised away from this one.
I can barely drag myself away long enough to come and tell you all, and then nip over to Ann at Patternings and give her the good news.Ann did a great review of Gatty's Tale, the latest in the sequence, and thus the flood gates have opened.
I'll post my thoughts on The Seeing Stone once they've floated to the surface, but looking at me right now At the Crossing Places, second in the trilogy, so forgive me, must dash.

Fly-By-Night

Lunchtime reading last week was pure escapism as I took Fidra Books' latest offering Fly-By-Night by K.M.Peyton to work with me. Sitting up on Dartmoor eating my lunch surrounded by the moor ponies so a book like this made perfect reading.
I'm not a lover of horses. I tried over and again to adore Jill of the Pony Club and all the Pullein-Thompson books but the damage was done by that wretched horse on Whitehall standing nicely to attention while I endeavoured to stroke it at which point it sneezed all over my sock.
That was me and horses done for at the age of six.
So I pride myself on my complete lack of equine knowledge which I've cultivated to an art form amongst some of my very horsey friends.Occasionally we meet for lunch, one is an accomplished rider, the other a show judge and the other has pony club daughters, then there's me.They know well that I know hoof-all about horse anything so I butt in on their conversations sounding really knowledgeable and everyone ends up in hysterics.
But now I actually know a little bit (that goes in the horse's mouth) more.
One of the delights of these books from Fidra are the author's introductions. I really enjoyed Victoria Walker's in The Winter of Enchantment and Kathleen Peyton's is another excellent one.I hadn't realised she wrote the Flambards series which I half remember on television.
Ruth realises every little pony-mad girl's dream by buying one to keep in her back garden in the middle of a new housing estate.Fly-By-Night is of course a free-spirited pony with a mind of his own and a frequent need to break off into a wild canter when he feels so inclined, but he comes good as we know he will.There are rosettes and things,lots of Pony Club antics and a bit of dressage, in which I am now a complete expert.
If I had to enter a competition I'd certainly be wanting my horse to complete an extended trot followed by a collected trot then probably a slow, collected canter.We'd complete a circle on the correct leg (one of those on the corner of the horse) and for sure we'd change direction and go off  in a circle on the other leg (one on the opposite corner of the horse) and hopefully the other three legs would look after themselves.Then we'd stand, collected and square on all four legs.Gosh aren't horses clever to go in a circle on one leg? I'm going to wow the horsey friends with all this, they'll be stunned.
When I talk about doing a levade they'll all likely faint.
As always a beautifully produced and illustrated (by the author) book from Fidra and we should be grateful to them for republishing these delightful books which don't date...apart from the £5 a week mortgage payments that the Hollis family have to find.
Pony-mads will adore it and how strange that books like this are just never but never reviewed in the mainstream press.They deserve a much wider audience, let's hope Fidra have found an outlet at the Horse of the Year Show, Badminton and all other events in between.

Witch Child by Celia Rees

I've been a lucky lucky blogger this last week or so with all manner of books from all manner of people arriving in the post and I've been diligent over my thank you letters too.
I'm not sure publishers really appreciate their inboxes cluttered up with "thank you so much for the..." type messages when all they've done is kindly sent me a proof copy but it's an ancient inbuilt habit so I can only apologise.
Blogfriend Adele Geras sent me a copy of one of the Bloomsbury 21 series for which she has written the new introduction, Witch Child by Celia Rees.I have Pirates unread on the shelf but that's as far as things have gone with me and Celia Rees (or is it Celia and I?)
Sometimes a book arrives, you open it right out of the package, make a start and just carry on. It's hollering and blowing a hooley outside, you're warm and snug in bed, someone's delivered a nice cup of tea with the post and there seems no point in shifting.
A book for older children set in the 1600's amidst witch hunts, hangings and sailing off to the New World with the pilgrims, this is the diary of young Mary as she fights to survive in the climate of fear and suspicion that faces her when she arrives in Salem.There's some quilting too which fits well around ideas of fragmented extracts from Mary's diary piecing together into a whole.
I was transfixed by Witch Child and just sat (reclined) until I'd finished it.There's a sequel, Sorceress, which I shall be onto in a flash and much more of Celia Rees to come.
The book reminded me of two things,not only Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, an entirely different book but another that uses patchwork as a foundation for its structure, but also Form 5C's triumph at the Nonsuch Girl's School drama festival 1970.
We had some hugely talented and serious actors in our class (not me, I always ended up laughing so was dispatched to the costume department and a sewing machine) and we entered the festival with Act 3 of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. I'm shivering now at the mere thought of the girl who played Abigail, meek, quiet and unassuming until you put her on a stage.The moment she let rip with that scream was never to be forgotten, made it all so easy for the others to follow and we just about had a real life hysteria moment of our very own going on.It all went on a bit longer than it should have done.
Well it brought the house down at the end and I think the judges were so relieved that Abigail & Co had all eventually managed to stop screaming the Drama Cup was ours.

Heidi, a heroine I almost forgot

Bookhound said he got fed up with all these feisty women a while back but I didn't and there's one more heroine I completely forgot in my Heroine-orama and yet another memory triggered by finding the book in the Great Children's Book Shift.
I clearly remember the day I got this book because the Tinker had bought it for me on his way home from work and suddenly, in the middle of tea, told me to go and look in his coat pocket and there it was.I must have been about 6.
It's a pop-up book that has been popped up so many times it is falling apart and you can be sure I would have taken this book everywhere with me.
Originally written in 1880 by Johanna Spyri and published in England in 1884, it was top of the bestsellers that year alongside Treasure Island. With no seperate children's lists the assumption must be that it was read by adults too.I was unware that the sequels to Heidi were in fact written by the book's English translator, Charles Tritten.

This book was a visual treat and I spent hours looking at these pictures.Aunt Dete, Peter and grandfather, the blind grandmother with the spinning wheel and Clara in Frankfurt were all engraved forever in my memory as looking like this.Shirley Temple starred in a film version but to no avail, for me Heidi was the little blonde girl with plaits not curls and grandfather wore blue overalls.

But it was the wonderful ending that I couldn't wait to get to every time, Heidi returns home,and gruff  grandfather, overjoyed at being reunited with her, gives up his reclusive life and takes Heidi to Church.
Little is known of Johanna Spyri, she refused to write an autobiography and demanded the return of most of her letters which she then destroyed.This on the basis that they had been meant for the recipient and not the public at large.
As Lisa Ohm elaborates in this fascinating article Johanna Spyri was "reclusive, serious-minded, socially reserved, intelligent, and acutely observant. She was particularly tormented by the misfortunes of children and families caught in the ever-widening zone of conflict between growing urbanization and rural isolation, which was prominent in late nineteenth-century Switzerland."
Then of course we're back in the realms of not only orphans like Heidi, but sick children like Clara.
Lois Keith in her book Take Up Thy Bed and Walk : Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls makes excellent comparisons with the plight of Colin in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Books that "celebrate life, the freedom of the spirit and the restorative powers of the open air" But Lois Keith makes another interesting point about the messages transmitted by the inclusion of "the miraculously walking child" to create a happy ending.These children may be pitied and cared for but final recovery is essential if they are to be accepted and move into adulthood.Being reconciled to the impairment was never a possibility.
Then there are a whole raft of messages about the goodness of the mountain air and new insights into links between mind and body in the healthy child, faith in God as a means to cure and redemption and so it goes on until you realize the book is laden with the attitudes and mores of the time making it all the more fascinating as an adult read 120 years later.
But of course I was blissfully unaware of any of that when I read as a child and that's the joy of it all.

Heroines Part Five:Pixie O'Shaughnessy

One heroine has led to another this week and it has been my trawl through the children's books that has revealed so many of mine.
When Jessica was asking for suggestions for her book I couldn't think of anything to offer except "What's the betting someone suggests Fanny Price?" at the exact moment that Julie was posting her message saying "What about Fanny Price?", one of those telepathic blogendipity moments.
Then looking at my childhood reading you see just how many strong and fiesty girls there were in there.Katy, Anne(with an 'e')  and Pippi for a start.
But I'm wondering how many of you have even heard of Pixie O'Shaughnessy  by Mrs George De Horne Vaizey?
I'd be delighted because I've yet to meet ANYONE who has.
Another Going Home Time book, this time Miss Bradbrook's class and I clearly recall her telling us that her father had been involved in the publication of some of the first ever paperback books and Pixie O'Shaugnessy had been one of them.Now Miss Bradbrook, with her hair piled up in a bun at least a foot high seemed as old as Methuselah so heaven knows how old her father must have been, or when the edition she read from had been published.
But Pixie made a deep and very lasting impression.I never forgot the name and spent years and years knowing that one day I'd stumble across the book somewhere. Eventually I did find this hardback edition and there she was the "ugliest child in Galway" and all the more adored for it.There is a true Irish lilt to Pixie's spoken language that Miss Bradbrook did to perfection.
Sent to boarding school in Surbiton where she quickly became "the joy and terror of the school" Pixie was never short of mischief or in want of a good invention.Memorable to read again of her lassooing demonstration on the staircase which of course went wrong many times over before it finally went right, but unfortunately half garrotting an unsuspecting Mademoiselle in the process,
"What you mean playing your treeks on me? I will not 'ave it...How dare you throw your strings about to catch me as I come upstairs! Impertinent! Disobedient!...you 'ang me by the neck and you call it a joke!"
such things must have appealed endlessly to my childhood sensibilities.
Now of course the internet has revealed that I'm not alone,there is someone else who knew and loved the book too, and recounted this lovely story for the BBC People's War site.
Then it's but a hop and a skip to the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ,accessible to anyone with a library ticket number, and there I discover all I want to know about Jessie Vaizey (1856-1917) and that she wrote Pixie O'Shaughnessy in 1902. Good to know that girls had some books like this to read as well as the stirringly strident Empire building stuff.
Make my day, please someone say "oh yes I loved Pixie too".

Going Home Time books and another heroine

Sometimes a death and the ensuing obituary just pass you by unnoticed and then just this week I had cause to check out Ursula Moray Williams only to find that she had died at the age of 95 back in October.I knew nothing about her, just one of those names recalled from long ago, but her output was prodigious, a book a year for about 70 years.Her uncle was Sir Stanley Unwin the publisher, not to be confused with the other Stanley Unwin of goodlilode and remarkibold fame.
Last week I had started one of those tasks that you fly at with great enthusiasm because it seems like a really good idea at the time.
First make your declaration,
"All those children's books need sorting and would be better moved from there to here,and those that are here can go there."
At this point Bookhound would clearly have to find an urgent task of his own, and of sufficient merit to avoid assisting, "I'll just go and scrape the paint off the bathroom ceiling", and off he went.
I wheeled a trolley back and forth virtually all day to jokes about taking books around to hospital beds/prisoners on D wing etc.
About an hour in and too far past go to change my mind, this was seeming like bad idea of the year and I could have done with a happy child to help me, whole house in complete turmoil. I'd developed an alphabetical system of heaps around every inch of the sitting room floor that would have given any passing librarian a fit of the vapours.
Then understandably the  process ground to a halt every few minutes with the discovery of so many forgotten treasures that needed my immediate and undivided attention.
Ursula Moray Williams' books were amongst them and with them the memory that The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse had been one of those favourite stories read aloud at Going Home Time in Miss Butteriss' (Miss Butterdish) class at Sherwood County Primary School, Mitcham.That moment before we all said The Lord's Prayer (state primary school) and put our chairs up on the tables.Probably now against health and safety of all kinds as must be the task of scrubbing our desks with Ajax at the end of every term, that's probably been outlawed too.
Gobbolino the Witch's Cat was in there too. Another book that will stay with me for life from this Going Home Time genre was Little Old Mrs Pepperpot by Alf Proysen.Then there were all the Milly, Molly Mandy books by Joyce Lankester Brisley (who had been the artist on Ursula Moray William's earlier books) and of course My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards.
Too anarchic for Going Home Time but surely one the greatest heroines of them all, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.I had no idea Pippi had been so controversial until I read this No wonder I loved her.
Anyway by this time things had cheered up considerably and order was finally restored about 6 hours later.
I now need to think up something equally dire to get the bathroom ceiling painted, "shall we write our Christmas cards early?"

Charlie and Lola very really absolutely do rule OK?

Very occasionally I write about work but rest assured, you can be sure it'll involve a book eventually.
I now find myself rather worryingly in my 30th year as a trained Health Visitor having entered the profession precociously early at the age of 8 you understand.
It's even longer since we were The Ladies Sanitary Inspectors and in fact I've had cause to fail in recognizing a picture of a head louse this week because it's so long since I've met one.
30 years is a long time to be doing developmental checks on children and this week was no different with battalions of two year olds. I love two year olds especially other people's.
It will come as no surprise either to know that I use books extensively.
I hand out the free Bookstart packs which the children love and which are about encouraging parents and children to share books, join the library and generally be at ease with books pre-school.They have also proved very succesful in getting stroppy toddlers out of the office without a tantrum about leaving the toys behind, little faces light up with glee as they proudly carry out their book bags.
Incidentally, great to see that Wendy Cooling has just won The Eleanor Farjeon award for establishing Bookstart, amongst her other excellent contributions to the world of children's literature.
I also keep a ready heap of children's books on my desk. Apart from the fact that they cheer me up on a dismal day, these are good  to flick through when an inquisitive child finally sidles up and starts to interact with me on their own terms, I am a stranger to them after all.
Books give us something to talk to and I quickly get a good idea about language and comprehension from a child who would invariably have stayed mute had I actually asked them to talk to me.
Also, is this a child who is familiar with books? They will need to be when they go into school and many families need a lot of gentle, tactful and careful help accessing books per se. For some people this is not confident territory at all but you can be sure that most children will have watched TV.
Every so often I have to up my game and replenish my stock with more up to the minute childen's fare. I don't get to watch children's TV much but I do follow the crazes and Offspringette (until now)has always kept me in touch with the latest series she is editing or tech reviewing or dubbing into Gaelic.Dotted around my room is old evidence of Teletubbies, Bob The Builder, Balamory,The Tweenies et al but it's an ever-changing world and now I have new friends, Charlie and Lola really very absolutely do rule.
Most of the fads I go along with out of the necessity of finding common and familiar ground but I can't say I actually adored Bob the Builder .But I do love Charlie and Lola, there is something adorable and endearing about patient Charlie and fiesty Lola who knows her own mind and has no problem saying so. How can you not love a little person who lives in the realms of the superlative and declares "I will never not ever eat a tomato" or who insists "I absolutely must do colouring-in now" and with an imaginary friend called Soren Lorenson?

An afternoon of Enchantment

Just last week my eagerly-awaited copy of the latest from Fidra Books arrived, The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker.
Garth Nix (Sabriel, brilliant snow-laden fantasy read) and Neil Gaiman (we love Neil here at DGR , his blog makes for wonderful  reading) both heart this one so that's a great starter for ten.
Casually glancing through I started to read the new introduction written by Victoria (now Victoria Clayton) and knew instantly that this was to be my very next read.
The book was originally published in 1969 and Victoria's account of her amazingly bohemian life and the circumstances in which she came to write the book are worth the price of the book alone. You can read an interview and details of that here.
The Winter of Enchantment was eventually made into a TV series but by 1969, when the book came out, I was 16 and deeply into my very grown up Daphne Du Maurier-Anya Seton-Gone With the Wind phase and so wouldn't have cast a second, seemingly backward, glance at anything for children, which is how I must have missed this book first time round.
Thank heavens it's doing the rounds again.Dark winter Sunday afternoons and the fire crackling away make reading books like this easy.I can disappear off into a world of fantasy effortlessly and having already accessed my inner child with that Brownie Worst Sixer post it was even easier than usual.I might have been curled up on my bed back in Russell Road,Mitcham.
I can give you advance warning that this is going to be a DGR perfectly lovely gorgeous book, there is a precious innocence and unaffected-ness about this writing that really does make for magical reading.You have no choice but to "be" a child as you read it and what an ideal Christmas gift for a child or a grown-up near you.
There's a sequel too, The House Called Hadlows which is by all accounts even better.
As usual I had company, Rocky No Cushion Quite Big Enough enjoyed an afternoon of enchantment too.He's too big to do that nice compact cat thing of curling up into a tight ball, it's painful (and very funny) to watch him try and in any case he wouldn't be able to breath, so he goes for the yard-long stretch.Please don't anyone tell Jamie Oliver the vet, it's us who get it in the neck for letting him out in the fields to seize those calorie-laden-take-away rabbit twizzlers.

Bookplates galore

I had this great link from Lewis Jaffe to his Bookplate blog and spent far longer than I should have done browsing them but he has amassed the most amazing and unusual collection and with true blogging generosity he has put them all on his blog for us to see.I had no idea that the rich and famous all indulged in their own personalised bookplates to this extent but here are a few I've snaffled with kind permission of Lewis to whet your appetite.

Lewis also reminded me about a site I have used before with a wonderful selection of bookplates for children (but just as nice for grown-ups I think) all by well known artists which you can download and print off for free.
Fire up the printer and head for My Home Library  and here's a selection from there.

You'd recognise the work of Shirley Hughes anywhere and also this one by Jan Pienkowski

Here's one who may be less familiar to many but one of my most favourite of children's illustrators. I'll buy any book with Caroline Binch's illustrations for the sheer joy of them and her website (I've even linked it again in case you missed it 9 words back)is a complete indulgence.I must do a blog post on her books, they are a real treat. Am I the only grown-up still buying picture books for herself? I hope not. On this subject and more head for the newest blog on the block and a warm welcome to the blogworld for Adele Geras.

 

And I'm afraid I just couldn't resist this last illustration by Caroline for a book by Kathy Henderson called Newborn. I've seen and held quite a few of these this week, what a perfect job I would have if not for politics and managers.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I'm feeling quite speechless about The Book Thief by Markus Zusak but realise that won't make much of a blog post so I'd better think of something to say...
So I've gone for rapturous approval on here about quite a few books recently I know, especially some of the young adult ones of which there is a plethora of brilliance out there right now. To eulogise about yet another one would be a bit daft, I must be more measured and critical or you won't believe me and it can all be a bit off-putting, so really perhaps I should just pan one every so often.Besides, I often think too much praise can set a book up to fail with all and sundry.
Well not this one, sorry. In fact I think this one could be better than all the others put together so I don't quite know how to go into superlative mode without going right over the top.
First thing you need to know is that this is a book infused with sadness and hope in equal measure and it is narrated most unusually by Death.Death tells us the story of a young foster girl, Liesel Meminger living in Munich in the midst of Nazi Germany.Life is harsh but Liesel soon learns that words and more importantly books are her life and she starts to steal them firstly from the mass bonfires and then from the library of the local Mayor and his wife.Slowly she learns to read and shares the books with neighbours during bombing raids but also very movingly with the Jewish man they are hiding in their basement.In turn he writes a book for Liesel which you get to read within the pages of this book, be prepared for it to do you up like a kipper.
It's all a complete emotional roller-coaster of a book and must join the canon of excellent books that depict the war through the eyes of children.More about those in another post but meanwhile somehow there's no way round it, I can't recommend The Book Thief, highly enough, no bracing or gritting of teeth required, it's a book that takes very good care of you.
Uplifting, life affirming and memorable.

Red Sky in the Morning by Elizabeth Laird

I've had A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird unread but on my shelves since the day I heard her speak.I'm a soft touch, writers take note, I always buy the book I can't resist it.Unfortunately it's still unread but not for much longer.
Elizabeth Laird spoke passionately about her decision to try and represent the Middle East conflict and specifically life in Palestine through the eyes of a 12 year old boy.This one is set in present day Ramallah and at the time Laird had indentified that the book seemed to have been read by more adults than children.She had taken a great deal of criticism on political grounds for only presenting one point of view.
Her response was calm and  sensible
"Ignorance leads to fear and fear leads to hatred.Creating empathy and understanding, even if it is only from one side of the conflict, seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do"
Then The Red House Books catalogue arrived recently and Red Sky in the Morning, also by Elizabeth Laird,caught my attention.Frankly the Red House catalogue is opened long before anything from Postscript/Bibliophile/The Book People or any of the other mail order book outfits these days.I'm still on an endless roll with Children's Literature and I'm blaming Ann over on Patternings, she knows!
Red Sky in the Morning duly arrived and I decided it needed immediate attention to make up for my neglect of this excellent writer.Elizabeth Laird is of the "issues" genre to my mind.Books with an underlying theme to be explored and not just a story so I should imagine these are the stuff of great classroom discussions.I know plenty of people who dislike this aspect of children's literature but I see no harm in it and this one is chock full of debate starters that I should imagine any teacher would swoop on.
12 year old Anna's brother Benedict is born with hydrocephalus and apart from his unusual physical appearance, as he grows it becomes apparent that he also has marked developmental delay. Having been so excited about the event it is two years before Anna can face telling her school friends about Ben's problems but she adores him.I can feel myself almost back with Skellig.
Anna is the narrator so we get a perfect adolescent's view of this strange world, but a completely accurate one and that's enough information to give you a clear idea of how much solid emotional territory this books covers so competently.Time and again even I identified so closely with Anna in the little things not least the Saturday job.More about mine another day, I was desperate for a job in WH Smith's but to no avail,even if I did tidy the shelves for free whenever I was in there; after a stint in Woolworth's in Wallington it was a tea room on Carshalton High street called Honeybun's and waitressing for me.
Written in 1988 it's good to see Red Sky in the Morning in print again, it's perfectly timeless in its themes and writing and well worth a read.

Amanda Craig and Turkey Twizzlers

The Literary Review has been a weakness here for as long as I can recall and probably started as a frantic attempt to get in touch with the book world long before the internet arrived. Incidentally I can hardly remember those days, how strange they must have been and how did we manage? But then I wonder that about all sorts of things, how did we manage without black bin liners? We just did,so it's possibly irrelevant.
This month's edition has just arrived and as always I head straight for the editiorial as,since the death of the esteemed Auberon Waugh, it is always a guest writer .They still adhere to the heading "From the Pulpit" so it's often a chance for a bit of flame throwing and shooting off a bit of literary hellfire and brimstone.
This month it is Amanda Craig, Children's critic of The Times, writing on my hot reading topic of the moment, books for children, or as she calls it Turkey Twizzlers for the Mind.
For anyone not in the know there has been a hue and cry here over the fact that these fat laden delicacies, of uncertain origin in terms of turkey anatomy, were regularly offered on the school dinner menu for UK children.
Amanda Craig would appear to be in the very fortunate position of having her postman struggle to the door with 100 books a week, there'd be Royal Mail mutiny here if that happened but I'd cope.But she is not bemoaning the quantity as much as the quality and in there the plethora of celebs, grown ups in touch with their inner child or just those who think writing for children must be easy who add a vast amount of dross to her weekly intake.
There are a multitude of really valid points in this piece, not least the fact that so few writers of good adult fiction actually make that leap into writing good children's fiction.Her roll call of past success is quite short and she reckons on there only being about twelve living authors who
"produce new picture books or novels that give the greats a run for their money"
In fact she suggests that apart from these, children would be better off reading the same books their parents and grandparents loved.
Amanda (by this time feeling like a kindred spirit so we are on first name terms now, I hate the way we are supposed to be all literary and use surnames) also makes another very valid point, "too many people overlook the fact that all great children's literature is about death".
My last six reads have all been, to my adult mind, great children's books and every one has had death as its central theme, fascinating.

Hide-and-Seek with Angels: The Life of J.M. Barrie by Lisa Chaney

As I ease gradually into post B****r Prize resumption of normal and varied reading projects I'm really looking forward to getting back to some non-fiction and more especially some biographies.
I have a massive queue of lives waiting to be revealed and first up is one recommended in comments here (thanks Walter) Hide-and-Seek With Angels : A Life of J.M.Barrie by Lisa Chaney.
My recent read of Peter Pan in Scarlet, Geraldine McCaughrean's perfect sequel, actually made me realise that, to my chagrin,I had read bits of the original Peter Pan in all sorts of versions to the point where, like most people, I know the story, but I'm not sure I've ever read the actual, unabridged original and much darker version.I have a feeling I even went to see it on ice but I don't think I've really truly read it properly.
Peter Pan in Scarlet was a fantastic read in every sense and you just have to marvel at the imagination of Geraldine McCaughrean.She had used the original as a springboard and the ideas for this sequel are crammed full of originality and humour.I loved it all, every word.
J.M.Barrie was by all accounts a morose yet fascinating man and last week's excellent TV programme narrated by Alan Yentob offered some illuminating insights into JMB's life and the possible origins of his fear of growing up expressed so clearly in Peter Pan. A man it would be far too easy to judge by present day standards but they did allow a psychologist in on the act during the course of the programme.He did some fairly disturbing analysis and I have to admit that what he had to say made perfect sense.The received opinion is that Barry was certainly indulging in some unrequited erotic imaginings here and there but Professor Jacqueline Rose viewed that more as our problem than JMB's.He was a man living in very different times.
That said, I've made a start on Hide-and-Seek With Angels  and it's certainly living up to Walter's high praise.

Skellig by David Almond

Skellig by David Almond has been sitting on my shelves since I deserted my MA in Children's Literature and I've just read it for the first time. Isn't it strange how these wondrous reads can have been sitting neglected and unloved for so long and my thanks to Ann over on Patternings who is flagging up so many fantastic children's books to be savoured.
It's hard to know where to start with Skellig and I'm in agreement with Ann, to dissect out any part just does the book a huge disservice so suffice to say,amongst other things, it's about a young boy's love for his baby sister who has been born prematurely.You just have to read it to benefit from the full embrace of some of the gentlest most moving writing around today in children's literature. It's a powerful book for all its measured and unusual events and I was on the brink of tears at one point in the book, but then young Michael's love for his sister can't fail to move you.Nor is it sentimental, far from it.
How I would love to have read this one as a child. I think great flights of imagination would have been the order of the day and it is a book that will stay with me now, but I feel sure it would have entered my canon of memorable childhood reads had it been around in the 1950's.
I have a good condition spare copy free to a good bloghome anywhere in the world if anyone would like it, just shout.It's a book that should be travelling around and far too greedy of me to have two copies sitting here.Perhaps it's time for BlogBookCrossing to be born, read it, write about it and send it onto another blogger.

Blazing Shelves:What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge

In my mind I'm having to redefine which books I'd rescue from blazing bookshelves and I will need to assign a hunky firefighter to gather up the sentimental armful, whilst I dash round for the essential armful.Bookhound will be far too busy with his own hoard to worry about mine.Here's one for the firefighter, a very treasured book, What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge.
This was my mum's copy and look at that,surely a thwarted librarian resides within? All my books were given tickets and numbers.
I loved Katy and Clover,Cousin Helen and Aunt Izzie but the most memorable has turned out to be Imogen.
You know how as a child you read and pronounce and assume you have it right? Well I decided on the very first of many readings that this was pronounced Imogen with a hard "g" (Imowgen) and that was that.I said it that way for years and no one put me right until I was about 18.
I think Katy's appeal to me, the roller skating 7 year old, was  definitely this
"shoes and trousers and clothes generally, were Aunt Izzie's affair; theirs was to slide and enjoy themselves"
and Katy and I were kindred spirits from the off
"there were always so many delightful schemes rioting in her brains, that all she wished for was ten pairs of hands to carry them out".Plus ca change.
Sitting on my shelves I have a recent book What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of 'Classic' Stories for Girls by Foster and Simons. Brillant to read I'm sure when the mood or the dissertation takes you, but right now no thank you.I just want to remember the Katy I know and love and Imogen of course.

Saving from the blaze

It's my own fault really.
Susan Hill started to talking about monks rescuing books from burning monasteries, I then wondered which would we all save and so we are busy choosing.I'd opted for six on the basis that six constituted an armful and I would still be able to run like the blazes.Susan has other ideas and clearly all that shifting of books around her barn has built up the stamina and she's suggested ten with the Bible and Shakespeare already safely stashed.
Of course thankfully without the panic of the real thing you wander around your shelves and thereby discover books you had ignored for ages.I'm nowhere near my final ten but look what I've found along the way.
I'm really enjoying children's literature again after all the B*****r stuff, I can't even say the word now and if you want to read those *** as something else please do.
So there on my shelves are plenty of my originals and a few that had got lost by the wayside that I have replaced with newer versions.
I wish I wish I wish I'd kept a record of everything I read as a child but I didn't, but just seeing these covers reminds me of so much, so I'll share a few treasures here and there over the next few weeks or for as long as my current dalliance with the world of the 1950's & 60's reading child lasts.
Then eventually I will have to share the first book I read that made me realise I would never read as a child again, do you have one of those?