Apocalypse and Labyrinth by Paul May

The 2023 Carnegie winner was The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros. This novel was originally written in Welsh and then 'adapted from the Welsh' by its author. When it won the Carnegie I saw it described as the first 'novel in translation' to have won the award, but that's not really accurate because, when she came to create an English language version of her story, Manon Steffan Ros found herself compelled to change important parts of the book. In an interview with Gary Raymond for Wales Art Review she describes why she had to do this. 

In the original, a mother and her son are isolated survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. Each of them records their thoughts on the blank pages of a book they find in an abandoned house, a book Dylan calls The Blue Book of Nebo. In the book Dylan, the son, records what he remembers of their life together since 'The End' and his mother, Rowenna, talks about the time before 'The End' and about her own experience since. They agree not to read each other's accounts.

Through these accounts we gradually piece together what has happened, how the bombs fell and how these two, and Rowenna's baby daughter Mona have survived, and in Mona's case how she came to be at all. I really wish I could read a direct translation from the Welsh, or indeed that I could read Welsh, and I'm a bit puzzled by the need for such radical changes, because if a different person had translated the work this wouldn't have happened. It's certainly a curious thing, but it's clearly the case that The Blue Book of Nebo, 'adapted from the Welsh' is not the same book as Llyfr Glas Nebo.

This is not a translation, then, and it's also not, as it has often been called, a dystopian novel. Post-apocalyptic, yes, but Rowenna and Dylan learn how to survive in their isolation. Dystopia implies a malfunctioning or unjust society, but here there is no society to be dystopian, just these two people and the baby Mona. It's a novel about survival and growth, about the things we really need and the things we can do without, and in this English version very much a book about language and identity. Here's Manon Steffan Ros:

 'I felt, okay, naturally, these characters would be writing in Welsh, they will be communicating in Welsh. But now they're not I need to come up with the reason they're writing in English. And that sort of became a theme that they're doing that because if anyone was to find it down the line this testimony will be more useful to people who would understand it if it was written in English. And why was that? Taking that theme of finding the Welsh language and trying to make these characters own their own mother tongue, that's a completely different theme in the English translation that simply isn't there in the original.'

That wide-ranging and very interesting interview is here. Remarkably Ros says she feels more free when writing for Young Adults than she does when writing adult fiction, which is in complete contrast to the things I've seen both Elizabeth Acevedo and Jason Reynolds say, both of them suggesting they were more careful of their younger readers. For a much more in-depth review of this book I refer you to Berlie Doherty's website.

And so to the most recent Carnegie winner, The Boy Lost in the Maze by Joseph Coelho. Way back in 1967 Alan Garner won the Carnegie with The Owl Service, a book in which a series of events from a story in The Mabinogion is lived out by successive generations in a remote Welsh valley. The Mabinogion makes its appearance in The Blue Book of Nebo, too, and Alan Garner felt the need to learn Welsh in order to write The Owl Service, but that's not why I mention him here. I think Joseph Coelho is probably the first winner since Garner to use myth in this way to structure and amplify a modern-day story, though Coelho's technique is very different from Garner's. As time went by Garner buried the mythic basis of his stories ever deeper, so that it would take a very switched-on reader indeed to  notice that the story of Tam Lin is the basis to Red Shift, the novel that eventually followed The Owl Service. 

In The Boy Lost in the Maze we have a modern-day teenager searching for his absent father through the mazes of the Internet and the streets of London, while at the same time creating a series of poems for a school project exploring the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. So the book is about how Theo relates to the myth, how the myth acts as a metaphor for his own search and how it helps him to understand himself.

I remember reading how, on being asked to illustrate The God Beneath the Sea, the 1970 Carnegie winner, Charles Keeping, was initially reluctant because he found the myths 'completely disgusting at first. Completely devoid of any love. This is all lust, rape, revenge and violence . . .' Keeping came around to the idea that there were some 'basic human passions' he could work with, and the illustrations he came up with were truly terrifying, but I've always felt the same way as he did about those Greek myths.

But Joseph Coelho changes the story of Theseus. Instead of simply slaying the bandits who are in his way Theseus, as Coelho says in his afterword, 'goes on a journey and changes and is changed by it. The bandits are not just targets to be mown down, they are flawed humans with their own histories and their own labyrinths to weave.'

There are other changes, too, that address that deficit which Keeping observed in the myths—the lack of love. But even so this novel is fairly dark in tone. Theo has a hard time, and though he is persistent in his search for his father and he is a terrific and totally believable character, I never quite felt for him the same buzz I felt with Elizabeth Acevedo's poet, Xiomara. Also, I found that I did need to refer to Robert Graves's The Greek Myths a few times, just to keep track of what was going on.

 Carnegie winners with mythic structure are rare, but Carnegie winning novels written in verse seem to be becoming common. This is the third verse novel in recent years to win the Carnegie and I've enjoyed all of them. 

I notice that the covers of these two most recent winners are very quiet. I was in Foyles bookshop the other day and I felt I needed dark glasses on when I walked into the children's book section. On the display tables every book cover seemed to be a dazzling confusion of primary colours. I couldn't help wondering, looking at these two latest Carnegie winners, whether their downbeat, low-key covers are meant to mark them out as 'serious' fiction for young people. 

And that's it. I've read them all now. Have I learnt anything? Well, maybe. I’ll let you know next time.

October, October in October by Paul May

It might say something about Katya Balen's 2022 Carnegie winner October, October that I've spent more time thinking about the parents in the story than about October herself, the protagonist and narrator. Or, more likely, it says something about me. But it occurs to me that the way parents are depicted in the procession of Carnegie winners over more than 80 years is interesting in itself.

Great cover by Angela Harding

Before I get to that though I should say that I did enjoy October, October. The book is written in an intense and often poetic style, especially at the beginning. A kind of stream-of-conciousness pours out of October, and you have to give the author a bit of leeway here, as she's trying to convey the heightened emotional state of the young narrator in language that it's hard to believe an eleven-year-old, even a precocious one, would have at her command. 

Eleven-year-old October lives off-grid in the woods with her father. Her mother wasn't able to handle life in the woods and left when October was about four years old. Here's October talking about her:

"In my head I think I remember the day she left but the memory is like trying to hold water in my cupped hands and it trickles away before my eyes. There are wisps of a woman holding on to my hand and I feel my whole body being pulled along by the tide of another person running and my legs can't keep up. There's crying and I know that I let out a shriek so loud it pierced the sky and the birds scattered."

This is great, but the voice is not like that of any eleven-year-old I've ever met. And the thing is, you do get carried along by it. There's no time to stop and think and, somehow, even though it ought not to, it does work.

October's mother writes to her, but October refuses to read her letters and she visits on October's birthdays, but when she does October runs away and climbs a tree. October always refers to her mother as 'the woman who is my mother.' Then, on her eleventh birthday she does as she always does and climbs a tree to get away from her mother but for some reason her dad climbs after her, falls, and is badly injured.

Now October has to go and live with her mother in London and has to go to school for the first time. There is also a baby barn owl which October is looking after (against her father's better judgement) and which she is forced to take to an owl rescue centre because they won't allow it in the hospital. I particularly liked the sections about school and wasn't surprised to learn that Katya Balen had worked in special schools. Yusuf, who befriends October, is a great character. I've met a few kids like Yusuf, but none quite like October. As for what happens, well, you'll have to read the book. 

But what about the parents? In the early days of the Carnegie parents were just parents. They might be dead, as in The Circus is Coming, or away from home on active service like Captain Walker in the Swallows and Amazons series, or they might just be there, pretty much in the background. They organised the children's lives, told them what to do or not do, cooked their meals and in general kept out of the way of the story. But until 1967 they didn't get divorced, and the relationships between the siblings and parents in merged families were never part of the plots or subject matter of the books. The Owl Service was the book that changed all that, but it was just an outlier, and in 1973 we could still read, in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe:

'Has anyone seen my pipe?' said Mr Harrison.

'On the dresser,' said Mrs Harrison, without looking up from the sink.'

We were still in the world of The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Daddy might come home from work and take us to the cafe. But as we moved into the 1980s families became less happy and settled and the books became more frequently about the relationships between the adults in the stories and the children. I'm thinking here of  books like The Scarecrows, The Changeover and Whispers in the Graveyard. I wouldn't want to suggest that parents and their problems never appeared in earlier Carnegie winners. Indeed the second winner, Constance Garnett's The Family at One End Street is almost as much about the adults as it is about the children, but there was definitely a change in the 1980s, so that when I started writing books for children in the 1990s it seemed completely natural to write about situations where parents were divorcing and finding new partners. I worked in primary schools and there were many, many single parents and many complicated families. Children's fiction, especially realistic children's fiction, does reflect changes in society, even if it does so with a little bit of a time-lag, which I suspect may be to do with the ages of the children's authors.

But in October, October I think we see something different—a book which reflects changing styles of parenting. When I read the book I was at first unable to believe that any parents would allow a five-year-old to dictate their lives in quite the way that October does. Surely if she's four, or five, or six and you think she should spend time with her mother you don't let her climb a tree and scream. No, in my world you would strap her in the car and take her to your house and wait for the tantrum to be over. 

Then I remembered those parent-teacher interviews where parents would tell me they could do nothing with their five-year-old at home. The child would trash the whole house in a fury. They had to lock their most precious possessions away to save them. The parents described their children as if they were a force of nature over which they had absolutely no control. And yet, mysteriously, those same children were often perfectly well-behaved at school. I even sometimes had parents bring their children to me and ask me to tell them off, as their own tellings-off were like water off a duck's back. (I didn't do it!)

It never occurred to me that parents could be so dominated by their children until I got my first teaching job. A five-year-old in my class wasn't eating his school dinners and I asked his mum if there was a problem. 'Oh, he never eats in front of other people,' she told me. 'He takes all his meals into another room to eat them.' That was kind of extreme, but most people of my generation are horrified when parents ask their children what they'd like to eat for tea. When I was a child I ate what was put on the table in front of me or I didn't eat. We didn't have choices. I had to eat things like cod roes on toast and liver and tongue (yuk!). 

And there's another old piece of grandma-style advice: Never ask a child a question to which the answer can be 'no', as in :'Would you like to go to the park?' 'Would you like to put your coat on now?' Mind you, it's the same with dogs. Not one dog in a hundred on the streets of London is properly trained these days. They almost never walk obediently to heel. The other day I saw a miniature dachshund dragging its owner along the pavement . . . grumble . . . grumble . . .

I felt for October's somewhat ineffectual parents, and I was glad (spoiler alert) that they managed to sort things out in the end, but I'm not the only reader to have felt that they had created something of a monster in their daughter. There's a curious parallel here with my own novel, Rain (2003). It's about a girl, about 13 years old, who has spent her whole life living on the road with her mum, Max, in an old bus. Max hates schools, authority, rules etc etc. Max is an artist, a painter. She believes that she and Rain are just fine together, travelling together, meeting up with friends at fairs and festivals. But Rain has started to want a different life. She wants to go to school, and she wants to find out about her father.

I never really liked this cover.
I'd rather have seen Rain working
 on a car engine
or punching someone.

I knew people like Max and I had a lot of sympathy with them, but I'd seen how idealism can get worn away by the realities of life and I'd met what used to be called New Age Travellers who'd given in and sent their children to school. But what I was most interested in was what it was like for those children, and for Rain, when they moved from one kind of life into another, and that's exactly what October, October is concerned with. It's about October, and the changes she goes through. But then I gave my book to a friend who was a therapist and she hated Max. She thought Max was selfish and really not a great parent. But I thought that Max was Max. At least I'd made her seem real enough for my friend to dislike her, so that was good. And the story was about Rain. Without Max being Max there was no story.

And that's how I feel in the end about the parents in October, October. If they're not the way they are, there's no story, and the story is a great one. In any case, I doubt very much if children are at all bothered about whether October's parents are doing a good job or not.

You can still buy Rain on Amazon as a paperback or a Kindle edition. I'm not sure the publishers really knew how to market it, but I think it stands up pretty well. If only it had been given a cover like October, October's by Angela Harding, a cover which was able, on its own, to persuade many Amazon reviewers to buy it. And while I'm on the self-promotion I also wrote a book about a boy looking after an injured bird, a bit like October does with her owl. It's called Cat Patrol is still available here.

The publishers spent months
getting this cover right. Peter Bailey did the 
black and white illustrations but they 
didn't like his cover. Guy Parker-Rees did this one.
I have the reject covers somewhere but I can't find them!

If you like stories about fathers and daughters living off-grid in the woods I recommend Debra Granik's 2018 movie Leave No Trace. It's very different from October, October but makes an interesting comparison.

My blog/web pages

Mary K Harris -- an underrated writer by Sheena Wilkinson

Previous posts on this blog -- particularly Paul May's wonderful series about past Carnegie Medal winners, have reminded me of many old favourites, which is possibly why recently, at the Bristol Conference (essential for anyone who’s interested in vintage children’s books), I did a talk on the English writer Mary K. Harris (1905-1966). I’ve noticed that people either say, Never heard of her, or Oh gosh, I love her! I’ve so far met nobody who’s read Harris’s books without them having left a positive impression. 

Mary K Harris is, I would argue, one of the most undervalued children’s writers of the mid-20^th century. She was not without recognition in her day, nominated twice for the Carnegie Medal. She published 16 books for both adults and children, between 1941 and 1968, of which several, as far as I could discover, seem only to have been published in America. Certainly I couldn’t find any copies. Her British-published books are long out of print, but can be found online. 

However, not much else can, which makes me doubly grateful to the Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories, edited by Sue Sims and Hilary Clare, for supplying more information. Born in Harrow, Middlesex, in 1905, Harris was educated at Harrow County School for Girls though she is not listed in the school’s list of distinguished alumnae. Her parents separated, and she lived with her semi-invalid and demanding mother. They weren’t well off, Mary did all the housework, and even after her mother’s death, she looked after an elderly aunt until she herself died, of throat cancer, at the young age of 60. 

It doesn’t sound very cheery, does it? And though her books are delightful, they definitely reflect a life of compromise and maybe sadness – their world view is not an especially jolly one.

Harris’s novels are a mixture of home and school stories. Gretel at St Bride’s (1941) and Henrietta at St Hilary’s (1953) are set in traditional girls’ boarding schools, with the first being most notable for its heroine being an Austrian refugee. 

In Emily and the Headmistress (1958) Emily is left at her boarding school over the holidays. Harris likes writing about empty schools, evoking vividly the atmosphere of a building left without people. Given how mean some of her own characters are, and her comments about the horrible children she was at school with herself, perhaps she preferred them that way! Emily is interesting as it foreshadows her interest in older characters as more than just necessary background – like Noel Streatfeild, she’s very good at adults generally. 

Seraphina (1960), Penny’s Way (1963) and The Bus Girls (1965) are set in girls’ grammars, with none of the heroines quite fitting in – Seraphina, an orphan, is more or less dumped in the school’s boarding house.Penny, living above a fish and chop shop, struggles in the bottom form of her grammar school, while Bus Girl Hetty is delicate, and has a single, seamstress mother, struggling to make ends meet and almost afraid of the clever daughter who has grown far beyond her. 

In Jessica on her Own, Jessica, the middle and difficult daughter, goes to the secondary modern where, though it’s never stated – a great deal is unsaid in Harris’s books – it’s clear she is posher than the average pupil. This is Harris’s most modern book. There is talk of drunken orgies and Freedom from Hunger marches. A far cry from the Chalet School or Malory Towers.

When I chose to talk about Harris, my own memories of reading her were rather vague. I remembered well-written, thoughtful books, where the main action was interior rather than exterior. I always linked her in my mind with Antonia Forest, with whom she shared a publisher, Faber, and whose books were actually advertised on the back of several of Harris’s novels. 

And certainly I, a Forest lover, was influenced by that subliminal ‘if you like this, you’ll like that’ messaging.

The two writers are very different – Forest’s milieu is much posher, but they share a deep exploration of character and a refusal to romanticise either school life or human nature. 

There’s also a kind of sadness in her books which reminds me of Nicola Marlow’s inarticulate grasp of the complexities of the human condition when she learns the Latin phrase sunt lacrimae rerum.  In Mary K. Harris’s books, there are always tears of things. But strictly of the unshed variety – a kind of quiet desperation rather than an old-fashioned stiff-upper-lip. Her heroines suffer. Not exactly the torments of the damned, and they don’t have to save the world or anything tiresome and high concept like that, but they all suffer loneliness, inadequacy, unpopularity – learning early the lesson that life can be difficult. 

Which I hope is in no way to suggest her books are miserable – far from it! She’s a prose stylist of wit and charm. She can be very funny – in the sharpness of her observations, the pithiness of her dialogue, or in some of the pickles her luckless heroines stumble into. For example, when the ever-helpful Penny agrees to go to the dentist in place of her ghastly friend Mavis, believing he will find one mouthful of teeth to be much the same as another, and then finds herself with a new filling and a bill for a pound – a lot of money in 1963, when you’re only 13 and you live in the flat above the chip shop. 

Her settings are both vividly evoked and varied, both geographically and socially: though we have no great extremes: nobody is either very rich or very poor. Seraphina is set in a small midlands town, The Bus Girls in a windswept East Anglia. In Penny’s Way the family move, for financial reasons which are never really spelt out – possibly because neither Penny nor the child reader would understand – to a flat in a busy high street, whose sights, smells and sounds are vividly rendered as Penny hurries through the lighted dusky streets. Jessica’s home is professional middle-class suburban. 

Harris has a particular ability to evoke atmosphere, should that be around the family tea table, in the dormitory of a girls’ boarding house, the bustling lamplit high street where Penny’s family live; the baking hot suburban summer of Jessica on her Own; the Suffolk marshes in The Bus Girls: It was a little seaside town of clean colours and salty smells.

I find some of her heroines slightly reminiscent of some of Streatfeild’s more awkward characters – especially Jessica, the prickly middle child and Penny the hapless youngest in a clever family. Hetty is rather sharp and dismissive of the nervous mother who’s seeing her daughter grow far beyond her – which must have been the case for many grammar school children at that time. As so often happened, Mrs Grey never knew how to reply to Hetty’s remarks.

Harris renders with at times painful realism the lonely helplessness of being a young teenager. All three girls have families – in Hetty’s case only a mother, who love and appreciate them, though Hetty’s mother is clearly rather frightened of her. Yet they struggle with self-esteem or to find their place in their society. Their eventual triumphs are quiet ones too – the realisation that one is not quite as dim and unlikeable as one believed is about the most a Harris character can hope for. 

Seraphina, the only one to tell her story in the first person has more to grumble about than most Harris heroines, though she is blessed with a high intellect, a methodical mind and – something I was always envious of as a child – long red plaits. She’s also the only one with a romantic, children’s-bookish background – abandoned as a baby, she’s been brought up by a kind granny, whose death takes place just before the start of the book. She’s taken in by nice neighbours, but their house is as full of people and mess as it of love and welcome, and off she has to go to hairdresser Aunt Edna, who clearly doesn’t want her. 

So far, so standard classical kidlit, but Seraphina doesn't get a happy ending. She doesn’t discover a secret talent and the wonderful friend Stephanie is taken away from her by her fairytale ending. Rereading the book as an adult, I was struck by its sadness in a way I wasn’t as a child. It’s one of the loneliestbooks I’ve ever read. Seraphina tells us that her habitual neatness and competence – which don’t endear her to her new schoolmates – are in case her parents should return and claim her – she wants to be found worthy. But – sorry for the spoiler – they never do come back.

And Aunt Edna, disgusted by Seraphina’s efforts to weave a fantasy life for her mother, tells her a few home truths:

The facts are these: your mother dumped you on Gran from the day you were born, and she’s never lifted a finger for you since… Rosalie … was as hard and selfish as they make them… I’m sorry to be so blunt, but you’re fourteen now and should know the truth…

If it’s not much fun being a child in a MKH book, there’s little to look forward to when you grow up. Aunt Edna is a monster, but she probably didn’t want to take charge of her pretty sister’s sulky, bereaved teenager. Hetty’s harassed widowed mother is terrified of the telephone and often of her clever, sharp daughter; Penny’s mother is trying to adjust to living in the flat over the Fish and Chips, dealing with a demanding family; Jessica’s mother Lydia is a Cambridge graduate and former geography teacher who is clearly finding life as a wife and mother rather less exciting than she’d like – until her twin sister is killed in a car crash which probably is quite exciting though not what she’d have hoped for, leaving a traumatised orphan, Isabel, for her to bring into her own family – which she does with a great deal more alacrity than Aunt Edna, but with rather unfortunate consequences.

There are no obliging maids or nannies to help with anything; and the men aren’t up to much either. Edna is single; Hetty’s mother is widowed; Penny’s father is mostly silent, disappearing from meals when his children’s squabbling makes his ulcer play up. Jessica’s father, rather dashingly for 1968 a physiotherapist, is about the best of them but even he doesn’t do very much. 

As you’d expect, the teachers are nuanced and human too. There are kind headmistresses and fierce, sarcastic form mistresses, often bringing a sense that they might actually, for all their idiosyncrasies, be human beings. The aptly named Miss Wolff in Penny’s Way surely owes something to Antonia Forest’s Miss Cromwell. ‘There is no need to consult your watch, Sylvia. I am quite capable of being your time-keeper.’

I’m particularly fond of Jessica’s form-master Mr Berryman: He was a heavily-built man, with small beady eyes. He did not look particularly nice, but he was nice. Unfailingly kind and always cheerful, he would throw himself down on one of the ordinary school chairs without ever a thought that it might crack beneath his fourteen stone. 

As for friendship among the girls, that too is complicated. Friendships ebb and flow much as they do in real life. Seraphina makes an engaging, if chaotic friend in Stephanie, but Stephanie’s own good fortune takes her away. Well-meaning Jenny is desperate to be Seraphina’s friend, but Seraphina treats her badly, though her guilt about that, and her efforts to make up for it, are a crucial part of her self-development. 

Penny’s former friend dumped her when she was moved down to the bottom stream. Her so-called friend Mavis is jealous of Penny and always eager to take her down (‘Do I smell a fried-fishy smell somewhere?’) But the narrative voice invites sympathy for Mavis: Poor Mavis; if she went only where she was welcome, she might never go anywhere.  And Penny grows close to the much nicer Nicola instead. 

Jessica’s friend Nance is sharp and chippy, though loyal and brave – and they spend as much of the book fallen out as they do together. There are also boys to complicate the dynamics of Jessica’s class.

Davina in The Bus Girls blows hot and cold, and behaves badly not only to Hetty but to the rest of her form. When she shows Hetty at the end of the book that she does want to be her friend, I for one wondered how long it would last. 

Some of the virtues for which girls would be rewarded in more conventional stories aren’t always appreciated. I don’t like Ann particularly but she is quite the nicest person I know. 

So, how would I sum up Mary K. Harris’s books? Quiet. Thoughtful. Realistic. 

Life is tough. People are hard to read or inconsistent. Friendship is complicated. Schools – and she wrote about all sorts of schools – are difficult communities to negotiate. And being a grown-up will bring its own compromises and challenges.

There are days, Penny reflects, when home can seem quite depressingly ordinary

In their very ordinariness and their pain, Harris’s novels seem to form a bridge between the traditional school story and the grittier teen novels which would follow in their wake. 

And they express that ordinariness with wit, charm and a deep understanding of what it is to be human, and especially what it is to be female. I hope you’ll discover – or rediscover them – for yourselves. 

 

 

Death and the Carnegie Medal by Paul May

Death has always been a presence in Carnegie Medal winning books. The third winner, Noel Streatfeild's The Circus is Coming begins like this: "Peter and Sarah were orphans. When they were babies their father and mother were killed in a railway accident, so they came to live with their aunt." This is an extreme example of how children's authors get rid of the parents to allow the children some agency. Roald Dahl did a very similar thing in James and the Giant Peach although he waited until the second paragraph to dispatch James's parents by means of an angry rhinoceros.

Both Streatfeild and Dahl are just clearing the ground before they start their stories, cutting the protagonists free from those pesky parents. Books like The Lantern Bearers and Tulku do the same thing in a more organic way, but although people die in both these books, death is not central to the stories. There are other winners with high body-counts, like Ronald Welch's Knight Crusader or Garfield and Blishen's The God Beneath the Sea, and there are books like Philip Pullman's Northern Lights or Susan Price's The Ghost Drum (now available in a shiny new edition by the way!) where visits are made to the worlds of the dead, but in none of these does death take centre stage the way it does in Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child or in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, the winners of the Carnegie in 2009 and 2010. Both these books are about living and dying and although they are very different they are both outstanding examples of what is possible in a children's book.

(Spoilers!) Bog Child starts with the discovery of the body of a young woman buried in the peat on a mountainside. She is small, and at first those who examine her think she's a child, perhaps recently killed and buried. It turns out she was buried nearly 2000 years before and has been preserved by the bog.

This is a story about death as sacrifice. We hear the story of the girl in the bog (the protagonist, Fergus, names her Mel) through the dreams of Fergus. If indeed  they are dreams. The device is very effective. It is essentially a parallel story to the one told in the present but a kind of supernatural empathy across 2000 years enables Fergus to experience it. This kind of thing is hard to pull off, because if you think about it for two seconds you know it's nonsense, but Siobhan Dowd makes it work, partly because the modern-day story is so strong that it carries you along, and partly because archaeologists always speculate about what might have happened—make up stories in other words.

This is Northern Ireland in the 1980s and Republican prisoners in Long Kesh are on hunger strike. The IRA bombing campaign is at its height. Fergus's dad is an IRA sympathiser though not, as far as we know, an active member. Sacrifice is very much in Fergus's mind because his brother has joined the hunger strike, willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of . . .  well, here's how Joe explains it to Fergus and his mum:

"See, Mam, it's like this. I'm not a common criminal. What I did was fight for freedom. (I don't think we ever know why Joe has been sentenced to 10 years in prison) I'd rather die free in my own head than live like the dregs of the earth. And that's how they treat us in here, I swear to God.'

Earlier, before they've learned that Joe has joined the hunger strike,  we've seen the McCann family around the kitchen table, eating a 'fry' and discussing the body Fergus has found, and the hunger strikers:

'Thank God Joe's not part of it,' Mam said.

Da nodded. 'It's an odd thing when you thank God for your son not having to make a sacrifice like that.'

Mam grunted. 'Sacrifice? Some sacrifice.' She reached over to Cath and forked a grilled tomato from the plate's edge towards the centre. 'Eat up, Cath.'

And then: 'Sacrifice is what Jesus did. He saved us all. Who did Bobby Sands save?'

Back in AD80 food is scarce and Mel's father, it later turns out, is starving himself to save his family. You could have called this book Hunger and it would have made perfect sense. Fergus agrees with his mam about sacrifice, but none of Fergus's arguments have any effect on Joe when Fergus and Mam visit him in prison. 2000 years earlier Mel also sacrifices herself, but she sacrifices herself to save her family. 

We also see that Joe is the protegé of Uncle Tully, and Uncle Tully is revealed to be a bomb-maker. His bombs kill innocent people, including the young British soldier who has become Fergus's friend, though Tully would regard the soldier as a 'legitimate target.' So is that what Joe is sacrificing himself for? There is a lot to think about here.

Even the short extracts I've quoted demonstrate that this is a rich and complex text, this despite being written in plain, economical language. There's not room to do it justice here but it's a remarkable book that I'd urge anyone to read, adult or child. There's also plenty of in-depth academic style discussion of the book that you can find on the internet. I was very curious to know how the book is perceived in Northern Ireland so I resorted to Google and discovered that the then Ulster Unionist leader, James Nesbitt, had called for it to be banned in schools. You may remember that Melvin Burgess was amazed that many of the critics of Junk hadn't bothered to read the book, so I was amused to find this:

"Let me be clear, this is not an attack on the book,” said Mr Nesbitt. “I have not read Bog Child, so have no opinion on its value as a piece of literature. But I have read the teaching notes, as endorsed by the Department of Education and I am stunned by what I  read,” he added.

The Graveyard Book begins with a brutal murder. The killer murders a mother, a father, and a child, but an eighteen-month-old toddler escapes. The toddler enters a graveyard where he's taken under the protection of its inhabitants, dead and undead. 

I'm a fan of toddler bids for freedom and I've witnessed quite a few in real life. I was cycling along a busy country road in Norfolk on a summer's day in 1977 when I saw a two-year-old on one of those tricycles you propel with your feet approaching me on the other side of the road. I could see the entrance to a small housing estate a couple of hundred metres ahead so I turned the toddler around and ushered him back along the road (there was no pavement). Moments later a distraught-looking dad emerged from between the houses and swept his son away. He'd only turned his back for a few moments, he said, and the boy was gone.

Anyway, Neil Gaiman's toddler is named Bod, short for Nobody. The mysterious Silas agrees to be his guardian. Silas is neither dead nor alive and doesn't venture out in daylight, so the informed adult and no doubt many children know what Silas is (though it turns out he is reformed). And Bod is fostered by a Mistress and Mr Owens, who have been dead for several hundred years. One of the joys of this book, and there are several, is Neil Gaiman's knack of creating fully rounded and engaging characters with a few well-chosen words. I nearly said he brings them alive, but most of them are dead.

There is a proper plot in this story, that involves a secret organisation of killers rather like the historical Order of Assassins, or like the mysterious underworld organisation in the John Wick movies. They call themselves the Jacks of all Trades. The existence of Bod is a threat to the very existence of this organisation, and that's why his family have been targeted. Bod survives a number of dangers, including a trip to the underworld of the ghouls, but he is remarkably brave and resourceful, even while making very human mistakes. The book is dark and funny, and even has a bit of romance thrown in, and at the end, and this isn't really a spoiler, a teenage Bod walks off into the rest of his life in much the same way as Fergus does in Bog Child.

Both books have great endings, and I do love a great ending. 

Siobhan Dowd died far too young in 2007, before Bog Child was published. The Siobhan Dowd Trust was set up in her memory and there's a link below to its website, but I see that the site hasn't been updated since about 2017.

Siobhan Dowd Trust

Paul May's blog/website. I repost all these Carnegie posts on my blog so that anyone who's interested can find them easily and in chronological order.

 

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Realism and Magical Realism by Paul May

Junk by Melvin Burgess is a realistic novel that actually feels real and truthful. The book was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 1996 and it's hard to imagine anything more different from its predecessor, Northern Lights. It deals with addiction, teenage prostitution, and domestic violence, which is why it was controversial, but it presents a far more developed, rounded and convincing  picture of the lives it describes than did Stone Cold, Robert Swindells' earlier winning novel about teen homelessness. It is above all a novel of character, but like all the best books it's about many other things too, and most importantly about love.

I'd read Junk before, many years ago, and it was its grim realism that I chiefly remembered. I think perhaps I didn't read it properly, because Junk offers hope as well as grimness, and even the grimness is done with subtlety and understanding. And it's crucial that along with the pin-sharp depiction of the addict's endless self-delusion about getting clean, we meet people who actually have got themselves out of the grip of addiction. It clearly won't be easy, but it may be possible.

At the start of the book two fourteen-year-olds leave home, for very different reasons. Gemma comes across as a bit of a brat (at least she does to an adult reader). Her desire to live wild and free conflicts with the desire of her parents to keep her safe. To Gemma her parents are monsters. To the adult reader they look maybe more reasonable than their daughter. It'd be interesting to know how a fourteen-year old sees Gemma. 

The other protagonist is Tar, the child of two alcoholic parents who cares for his mother and whose father beats him up. It seems altogether reasonable for Tar to run away from home, and in the book it seems reasonable to many of the people Tar meets along the way. People want to help him. The same people can see where Gemma is heading. There's a bit of an Adam and Eve situation going on here, with Gemma wanting to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She'll try anything, and she sucks Tar along with her.

I said this was a book about love: Tar loves his mother but he can't help her, and he loves Gemma but she doesn't love him, not really; Gemma loves herself, that's for sure, and her parents love her, but somehow mess up in the way they deal with her. Tar's dad talks about love in a monologue at the end of the book. 'It wasn't a love story,' he says, contrasting Tar and Gemma with his own relationship with his wife - 'That was a love story' but one that went badly wrong.

This is a book which is challenging and thoughtful and which really cares about its characters. My copy has an appendix - 'The Story of Junk' - with a lot of fascinating information about the book's development and its reception. Here we find out why it feels so real: 

My brother was right in it up to his elbows and while the people and situations are not completely real, they are all borrowed quite clearly from real life. There's nothing here that might shock you that hasn't really happened.  Melvin Burgess, Birmingham Post, 24th July 1997

We also learn some extraordinary things about the book's critics: " . . .what did astonish me, and it astonishes me still, is that nearly all of the book's enemies came to the studios without having read it. What sort of idiot goes on TV, in front of an audience of millions, to complain about a book they haven't even read?' Melvin Burgess.

Some of those critics made disparaging comparisons with Arthur Ransome, the first winner of the Carnegie medal. It is extraordinary to think that John and Nancy would have been much the same age as Tar and Gemma, but it's worth remembering that Arthur Ransome himself knew plenty about the hard realities of life after experiencing the Russian revolution of 1917, and the subsequent civil war, at first hand. The childhood holidays which he imagined or reinvented have an eerie parallel in Gemma's and Tar's escape into heroin:

"All that crap - about Gemma leaving me, about Mum and Dad, about leaving home. All that negative stuff. All the pain . . .

It just floated away from me.  I just floated away from it . . . up and away."

Arthur Ransome was also looking for escape, but he had a very different way of finding it.

Tim Bowler's River Boy is a book which I bought when it came out and never read beyond the first chapter because it seemed too close to something I was trying to write myself. Well, I've made up for it now. I enjoyed it very much and I was wrong - I could never have written something like this. I think you'd have to call it magical realism, given that it's a realistic story about an old and dying artist who wants to return with his family to the place he grew up in order to paint one last picture, and which has a brilliantly handled supernatural element.

I would never have had the boldness to do what Tim Bowler has done with this idea. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the river boy of the title is a mysterious spirit or incarnation or avatar of the dying grandfather's young self. It makes absolutely no sense, at exactly the same time as it makes complete sense! I was reminded strongly of Walter de la Mare as I read this book. Its mastery of atmosphere and its ability to evoke strangeness and mystery are very similar to what you find in de la Mare. It's a book that manages also to exist slightly outside time, even though it has a contemporary setting and features, a Carnegie winners' first, a mobile phone. But no TV. It's astonishing how seldom a TV makes an appearance in these Carnegie winners.

Tim Bowler's website has an excellent section of advice for writers which I really recommend you take a look at. Here's a sample (they're all bite-sized): 

‘Your work is special, however bad you may think it is in its current state. It’s special because no one but you can write it. It may not feel fledged or fully formed or even close to the version of itself that you would love to see, but that doesn’t mean you should stop believing in its potential. Whatever stage your work is at, it carries the seeds of possibility. So don’t knock what you’re trying to achieve or what you have achieved thus far, and, above all, don’t stop writing. The words you haven’t written yet are waiting for you.’

The theme of realism mixed with a supernatural element continued in the next winner, David Almond's Skellig. I think there's a good chance that this book will end up in my top three, if and when I come to compile a top ten of Carnegie winners. I cannot think of a better depiction anywhere of what it feels like when someone you love is in hospital and might easily die at any moment, and I am full of admiration for David Almond's spare, poetic style and his wonderful handling of dialogue. And as for the creation of Skellig himself, I've come across nothing better in the sixty-odd Carnegie winners I've read so far, or indeed in all of the children's books I've ever read. This is, in fact, one of my favourite children's books. 

It has suffered a terrible fate though. They use it in schools, which is ironic given the discussion about schooling/home-schooling that runs through the book. And quite a few reviewers on Amazon say it's boring, which I just don't understand. There seems to be a fairly even mix though among young reviewers, between those who love the book and those who hate it.

Reading books that were published after I'd left my teens has been a different experience from reading the Carnegie winners published before the 1970s and I'm wondering if it's because those earlier books, whether I'd read them as a child or not, formed part of a background to my growing up. Reading those books was a bit like investigating my own past. 

In the 1980s and 1990s there were books that I read to my children, so I could see how they reacted to them but then, when I started writing myself, I became much more reluctant to read the latest publications, as with River Boy, because I was very aware how easy it was to pick up ideas, and even a writing style from other people. And there was always the worry, of course, that I would discover that someone else had already done what I was hoping to do.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, I actually did unconsciously steal things from Jan Mark, and I guess that's because she showed me a way to write what I wanted to write - made me feel that I wanted to do the kind of thing she'd done. And when I think about that I realise that there have been very few moments, as I've been reading through all these Carnegie winners, when I've had that feeling that  this is wonderful, I want to do something like this. Skellig is one of those books, and Tim Bowler's advice makes me think I really should spend a bit less time on the allotment and a bit more time writing.

Everyday Magic by Paul May

This Carnegie Medal reading project is starting to make me feel old. In 1982 Margaret Mahy won with The Haunting. I'd been thinking that now we were in the 1980s I'd be starting to read more books by authors who are still very familiar to readers today, and then I realised that this book was published 40 years ago. 

When I was a primary school teacher back in the 1980s Margaret Mahy's picture books, like The Lion in the Meadow and The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate were much-read fixtures in our classrooms, but I never read her books for older children and young adults at the time. I probably would have read them, but for my aversion to ghost stories, and that's a shame because Mahy writes about the supernatural like nobody else I know. Actually, Mahy writes like nobody else I know. I am an inveterate skipper and skimmer of text but I promise you I read every single word of this book because every single word is so brilliant. Look at how she describes what's going on inside the haunted Barney's head:

'Sometimes he thought that there was a mountain inside his head with many roads winding up and down around it. His thoughts were like different coloured cars zigzagging backwards and forwards, often unseen and then sometimes showing up on some clear corner. There went his worry about the ghost—there went his happy feeling about home. Sometimes a thought would suddenly appear from a gully or out of a forest and surprise him, because he hadn't known it was there.'

With Mahy you simply accept the magic and the magicians (who live ordinary lives in ordinary houses) as part of normal life and although magic is seamlessly integrated into the book's structure it is essentially about children coping with bereavement (their mother is dead) and learning to live with a new stepmother and the birth of a new sibling. Two years later Mahy won the Carnegie again with The Changeover, a novel for slightly older readers with a similar blend of magic and family life which is also a terrific read.

Foolishly I got carried away a few months back and read both of Margaret Mahy's winners, only to discover when I came to write about them this week that I could remember almost nothing about them beyond the fact that I loved them. I had to do a quick bit of rereading, and luckily they were just as good the second time around.

In between these two winners Jan Mark also won for a second time with Handles, a wonderful book about which I wrote in a post on this blog a few years back. It was a good few years for the Carnegie. Then, in 1985, the prize went to Storm by Kevin Crossley-Holland. This very short text is a ghost story about a little girl who has to go out in a storm and fetch the doctor when her mum is about to give birth. I have absolutely no idea why the committee considered Storm worthy of the Carnegie Medal. I know I've gone on before about the importance of these books for the very youngest independent readers, but it seems weird to me that this book should be the one to have won. 

For a start, the plot is very similar to that of Jane Gardam's Bridget and William. It just has an added and not very convincing ghost rider to take the little girl to the doctor. It also contains this simile on the second page which I challenge anyone to explain: 'And since his stroke, her father was only able to walk with the help of two sticks. He had become quite mild and milky, like grain softened by mist.' What does that mean? Every time I read it I try to figure it out, but I can't. What a seven-year-old would make of it, I can't imagine.

The only review of this book on Amazon says it's good to 'use' with Y2/3 children. I dare say that's true. It's full of the kind of writing some teachers long for their pupils to produce, and reviewers on Goodreads single out for praise things that make me shudder (and not in the intended way). eg 'Empty it looked and silent it seemed.' Anyway, you'll gather that I didn't like it. It feels slight, incomplete and over-written. More than that, I greatly regret that it was preferred to Janni Howker's The Nature of the Beast. Janni Howker was a perpetual runner-up for the Carnegie, about whom I have written elsewhere. I should also say that I admire much of Kevin Crossley-Holland's other work, especially his version of The Norse Myths.

Finally this month I have to say something about a guide to the Carnegie winners that I found a reference to on a blog somewhere. The book is called Outstanding books for children and young people: The LA guide to Carnegie/Greenaway winners 1937-1997 and it was published in 1998 by the Library Association. 'That looks useful,' I thought, so I had a look for it online only to discover that it was rare and very expensive—about £90. So I went into the British Library where I had learned that it was on open access on the shelves. I set about looking for what I assumed would be an enormous hardback and couldn't find it until I noticed a very slim, small paperback sandwiched between other books. 

I sat down to read. There are some glaring inaccuracies in the book which I was going to write about until I realised that its author, Keith Barker, died suddenly just a year after the book was published. He was only 51. I don't know if he was ill at the time, but someone really should have noticed important errors in the descriptions of both The Scarecrows and The Haunting. I'd recommend that you don't splash out £90 on this.

And that's it for another month. Four Carnegie winners in one post! I might actually get to the end as long as I don't have to read all of them twice.

Paul May's website

Can a City be the Central Character in a Novel? by Paul May

Several times now I've read that the real central character in the 1978 Carnegie winner, The Exeter Blitz by David Rees, is the city of Exeter. The novel describes the experiences of the fictional Lockwood family on the night of the 3rd-4th of May 1942 when a massive German bombing raid destroyed much of the city. This bombing raid was part of a German retaliation for the Allied fire-bombing of Lubeck earlier that year. The Baedeker Raids, as they were called, targeted English cities of particular cultural importance and took place  mainly in April and May 1942.  David Rees's book reminded me of a TV drama-documentary where, to give a bit more focus to the recycled archive footage and add human interest some invented scenes are recreated by actors in the studio. The book also slightly alters history. David Rees says in his introduction: 'The story is not intended to be an exact reconstruction of the events in Exeter of the night of May 3rd-4th . . . The magnitude of the disaster, is, however, meant to be historically accurate.'

I had problems with this book, a book which has its strong advocates, especially in Exeter, where David Rees lived and worked for most of his life. I think the reason that people say that Exeter itself is the central character is that the documentary parts of the book feel real, while the fictional characters are unconvincing. The central (human) character is Colin Lockwood. He's trouble at school and trouble at home and he stands improbably on the cathedral tower watching the bombers come in and the bombs fall. Colin, like the city and the rest of his family, survives the night but is much changed. During the course of the night he discovers that the teacher he hates is an ordinary, decent person and the evacuee boy who is his mortal enemy is also an ordinary, decent person. The teacher is killed, along with his wife, but the evacuee survives and the boys become friends. These might be thought to be spoilers, but you can guess what's going to happen from the beginning. This is not a story which is full of surprises, though there are one or two.

Taken on its own the coming-of-age story about Colin didn't really engage me, though I did have some sympathy for his long-suffering family,  But the description of the bombing raid and its aftermath is powerful and gripping. The device of using this fictional family and placing the various family members in different locations in the city works well, in the same way that a movie like  Saving Private Ryan, for example, makes sense of large events by focussing on a few individuals. But I couldn't help comparing this book to that earlier Carnegie winner, The Machine Gunners and it seems to me that while Robert Westall took real-life experience and used it as the inspiration for a work of fiction, David Rees created what feels like a piece of journalism disguised as fiction. I could be wrong, but I don't think David Rees was actually in Exeter when the bombs fell, and even if he was, much of this account would have had to be stitched together from accounts in newspapers and elsewhere. That's not necessarily a bad thing but, for me, when the research starts to show through, a novel becomes less effective. And novels are about people, not about cities. Even Ulysses, that most famous example of a book where a city is sometimes held to be a character, is essentially about Dublin's people, and the city's people and places are realised through one of fiction's most minutely described and inhabited characters.

The final lines of The Exeter Blitz are the most ill-judged of any of the Carnegie winners I've read so far. Any sensible editor would have just said 'NO!'

My grandmother in the back garden
of the house that was bombed in the early 1950s

As it happens, my mother, now 95 years old, experienced one of the Baedeker raids first-hand. She had just turned 15 and was living in a council house on Colman Road in Norwich (now part of the city's ring-road) when her dad burst into the house and yelled at the family to get into the Anderson shelter because the Germans were 'machine-gunning all along Colman Road'. Some people's shelters, my mum told me yesterday, were 'like little palaces inside', but theirs was just bare earth and possibly something to sit on. While they were in the shelter an incendiary bomb came through the roof of the house, went through the bed in my grandparents' bedroom and through the floor to the room below. The bomb didn't explode properly but the ARP wardens threw the feather mattress out onto the tiny lawn in the back garden where it exploded in a cloud of feathers which my mum says she can still picture as if it was yesterday. Although yesterday is not something my mum remembers too well these days - or indeed what happened ten minutes ago.  But on the events of eighty years ago she's still pretty good!

The family were able to stay in the house despite the holes in roof, ceiling and floor but many Norwich residents, like those in Exeter and York and Coventry, were not so lucky. The Baedeker raids received this nickname because it was said that the German commanders used the famous guides to select targets with cultural significance - and they had useful maps too! The two raids on Norwich in April and May 1942 killed 229 people and a further 1000 were injured. And apart from the major damage inflicted on the city centre more than 2000 domestic properties were destroyed and an incredible 27,000 suffered some damage - that's out of a total of 35,000. It's hard to believe that my mother lived through being machine-gunned and bombed in a quiet provincial city.

In fact, my mother's recollections of the war are more about excitement than fear. War ultimately represented an opportunity for her to escape from Norwich by joining up as soon as she was old enough. She was able to travel, meet my father, and learn to drive. The army gave her freedom.

The Exeter Blitz feels like a very old-fashioned kind of a book, and if someone had told me it had been written in the 1950s I'd have happily believed them. There is something slightly teachery about it and I hadn't really noticed that kind of thing in a Carnegie winner since reading Edward Osmond's A Valley Grows Up back in 1953. If you want information about the Exeter blitz it's a good resource. If you want novels that say something powerful about the experience of living through WW2 then I'd go for Susan Cooper's Dawn of Fear, or The Machine Gunners. 

It is astonishing to me that Susan Cooper has never won the Carnegie, and good to know that her adopted home, the USA, rewarded her with the Newbery Medal in 1976 for The Grey King.

Paul May's website

The Stronghold - Mollie Hunter and the Walls of Charles Keeping by Paul May

One of Charles Keeping's many fine walls graces the cover of the 1974 winner of the Carnegie Medal, Mollie Hunter's The Stronghold. The wall in question is the wall of a broch, and the invention and purpose of these still somewhat mysterious structures, which are found only in the highlands and islands of Scotland, is the subject of Mollie Hunter's novel. 

A broch is a tall, tapering tower, built using drystone walling techniques with galleries and staircases built into the massive walls. Any account you read of the opinions and suppositions of archaeologists about brochs is peppered with the words perhaps and possibly. Possibly there were hundreds of these structures and probably they were all built between 100BCE and 100CE. Anything Mollie Hunter could imagine could possibly be true, but in order to write her book she had to create a complete, complex society with its religion, its power-struggles and its vividly realized setting. I found The Stronghold completely compelling, both gripping and moving. 

I'm ashamed to say that I had never read any of Mollie Hunter's books before I read this one, which is the first by a Scottish author to win the Carnegie, and I suspect that she remains better known in both Scotland and in the USA than she does in England. For almost the last time in this series about Carnegie winners I'm able to turn to Chosen for Children, the Library Association's review of winners from the beginning until 1975. This book has been especially invaluable for the insights it often gives into the creative processes of the authors. So, here is Mollie Hunter on The Stronghold:

"Everyone has some capacity for atavism; and to stand alone in a deserted place where once was centred all the superstitions belief and custom of an early people can bring fearful awareness of this. The dead heart of that place may revive suddenly loud in one's own pulses, and to startle to those pulse-beats is momentarily to have acute perception of the force created by the intersection of superstition with all the other features of that people's life. This, one lonely night at the centre of the island's huge ring of standing stones, was the experience which finally gave me the insight needed to present my characters credibly in written form; but even so, in the year of writing that followed, there was many a time when I almost gave up on the task."

The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney, 2015

The book's central character is Coll, a young man who was lamed as a child during an attack by the Roman slave traders he has grown to hate and fear. Hunter says: 

"For him I had evoked the dream of building the defence tower he called the stronghold. This was his obsession; and to realise the dream would be his victory over all the odds stacked against him. We built together, keeping faith with that first impulse of imagination through stone stubbornly set on stone, word as stubbornly set on word until a book was made, and for both of us at last, the dream became reality."

The action never lets up in this book, the suspense is constant, right to the end, and it's all supported by the brilliant realisation of everyday Iron Age life in Orkney. This is yet another Carnegie winner that should really never have been allowed to go out of print. What's more it is a beautifully produced book with that very fine cover by Charles Keeping.

And speaking of beautifully produced books, I can't help envying Mollie Hunter for the way that her very first novel was handled by her publisher. Patrick Kentigern Keenan was published by Blackie in 1963 with a cover in five colours and 20 line illustrations by Charles Keeping. I could hardly believe my eyes when my copy arrived in the post the other day, the edges of the pages only very slightly browning and the cover as bright and clean as the day it was placed on the shelves of Manchester High School for Girls. 

But Mollie Hunter deserved these great illustrations because she was a writer of genius. Patrick Kentigern Keenan claims to be 'the smartest man in Ireland' and despite a series of reverses in his adventures with the leprechauns his good heart and irrepressible nature bring him through. It's a very different book to The Stronghold but in one respect at least it's the same: it's beautifully written and is without a doubt a tribute to her Irish father.

Illustration by Charles Keeping

I'm not sure Mollie Hunter is much read nowadays, south of the border at least. Certainly almost all her work is out of print and that's a great shame. Also published in 1963 was the first of her many historical novels, The Spanish Letters. Although the plot of this early work might be criticised for being slightly over-complicated, and despite the fact that the reader sometimes longs to be allowed to pause for breath for a moment, there are many really tremendous action sequences amid a vivid recreation of Edinburgh at the end of the sixteenth century. It is always clear that we are in the hands of a very fine writer, who went on to produce, the year before The Stronghold won the Carnegie, another truly remarkable book. 

Mollie Hunter's semi-autobiographical novel A Sound of Chariots was published in 1973, but it wasn't until 1992 that it won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association. This award is given to a book published twenty years earlier which didn't win any of the major prizes for an English language children's book. Set in a village near Edinburgh in the 1920s A Sound of Chariots contains some of the most harrowing, moving and realistic descriptions of the effects of war that I've ever read. The depiction of the grief of a child at the death of her father, and of a mother losing her husband, is detailed, truthful and poetic. I really can't praise it highly enough. 

The book is also a wonderful evocation of working-class life in Scotland in the period, and a portrait of the writer as a young girl. At one point the young Bridie has her carefully and passionately written essay about the sea defaced by her teacher with a forest of red ink. The teacher has the effrontery to correct the order of the words in her sentences, but Bridie isn't putting up with that, and after a violent confrontation with the teacher she's called upon by the headteacher to explain herself:

"And the waves like green broken glass fell jaggedly down." (the headteacher says)

She looked up. "That is what you wrote, Bridie," she said quietly. "I see the phrase "green broken glass" has been changed to read "Broken green glass." Is there any difference? And if so can you tell me where it lies?"

She could see it all right, but it was hard to explain. She tried, haltingly. "Broken green glass, it's just ordinary, just what it says. "Broken green glass. A bottle, a dish, anything ordinary.

"Go on." . . .

"Well, the other way," she tried again, "It's not ordinary any more because the sound has a sort of pattern to it. You know, like the words of a song, rising and falling."

This reminded me very much of something James Joyce said in conversation with Frank Budgen as reported in Budgen's book James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses:

I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?

"I have been working hard on it all day," said Joyce.

"Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.

"Two sentences," said Joyce.

I looked sideways, but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert.

"You have been seeking the mot juste?" I said.

"No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it."

Who knows if Mollie Hunter knew this story? Maybe the events happened to her just as she described them. Either way, A Sound of Chariots is yet another book that should never be out of print. 

Mollie Hunter wrote a great many books, largely historical and fantasy, and also wrote about writing for children in Talent is Not Enough. According to her obituary in The Scotsman she 'spent a great deal of her time touring schools and libraries and was made particularly welcome in the United States.' I have a 1995 publication from the USA called Children's Books and their Creators, edited by Anita Silvey which devotes most of a double page spread to Mollie Hunter. In the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, Hunter merits only one short paragraph. It seems odd to me. 

Oxford Companion 15 lines

Children's Books and their Creators 2 pages

And so, back to Charles Keeping. He was the perfect choice to draw the broch in The Stronghold and I have a few more of his walls to show you. First there is this unpublished lithograph which forms the endpapers of Charles Keeping, An Illustrator's Life by Douglas Martin. 

Unpublished and undated lithograph used as 
endpapers in Charles Keeping, an Illustrator's Life

This lithograph was also featured in the Keeping exhibition a couple of years ago at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner and it reminded me of a story a friend of mine used to tell about his uncle, a bricklayer. Whenever this uncle walked past a truly vast wall of bricks he sank into gloom at the though of 'the poor b**** who had to lay them all.' Well, Keeping drew them all, but he seems to have enjoyed it because he drew a lot of walls. 

The next one comes from a book called Reflections - an English Course for students aged 14-18. This was published in 1963 by OUP and is a great example of the cutting-edge curriculum materials produced during this period - I'm thinking of the Voices and Young Voices anthologies, the Penguin English Project and the Jackdaw folders of facsimile historical documents. Reflections was produced by teachers from Walworth Comprehensive School and as well as the Keeping illustrations it featured many photographs by Roger Mayne who had become well known for his photographs of Southam Street in London in the early 1960s. Both Keeping and Mayne were adventurous choices which worked perfectly with the extracts from a wide range of written material.

From Reflections

Keeping was also the perfect illustrator for Dickens. Between 1978 and 1986 he re-illustrated 16 volumes of Dickens' novels for the Folio Society. Here are some walls from Nicholas Nickleby.

From Nicholas Nickleby (Folio Society)

And here, just because I can, is one of the earliest Keeping illustrations I have. It's from a publication called 'The Commonwealth and Empire Annual' and this 1955 edition contains three stories illustrated by Keeping at a time when he was doing a wide variety of commercial work and had yet to begin his long association with Oxford University Press. The stories are not memorable, but the illustrations are.

From the Commonwealth and Empire Annual 1955

Paul May's website