SHOULD CHILDREN'S BOOKS LOSETHEIR MAGIC? by Penny Dolan

It's the first of October today, and the start of a month that ends in spookiness, grinning pumpkins and skellingtons. Lots of fun, but I am still thinking on a twitter thread* about children's publishing I read mid-September.

An established UK bookseller was commenting on Middle Grade fiction. They were not ranting but using a calm and resigned voice of sensible concern and. although - they said - publishers were putting out plenty of new titles, there was a difficulty. 

 Too many titles and too many almost the same.

Publshers were creating a problem for children's booksellers and, eventually,  the disappointment for many once-hopeful authors.

The reason was simple, the thread suggested. Far, far too many of the MG titles were the same genre: fantasy. The children are offered stories about magical powers, enchantments, curses and quests. They meet imaginary characters: a host of dragons, witches, wizards, talking animals. fairies & other beings and more. All very interesting and exciting, if you are a young reader who loves the adventure of being inside those imaginary worlds.

However, the thread suggested, not all children are as deeply into fantasy. Some would rather have books about real, everyday life than the escapism of magical worlds. Some , they suggested, might even be turning away from books altogether.

"Real life" fiction must surely be a problem for publishers. The big companies work with a global market view, assessing world rights sales and other economic factors. They want stories that have huge universal appeal, A child's rea life experiences, however, are often specific to a time, place and culture.

Does a book's real life culture  need to be "translatable" for publication? Or even transportable? For example, Jacqueline Wilson was once seen as the queen of "real life fiction" her in the UK, but how popular were her books in the States? 

Right now, there are highly praised "real life" MG titles by authors like Cath Howe, Catherine Bruton. Jo Cotterill and others. How hard a fight did those real-life stories - and others - have before being accepted for publication? And does something important about "ordinary" lives - no matter who or where - get lost or diminished in a drive for fantasies, especially those with future screen & CGI potential?  

Yesterday, as I looked across the MG tables in a large booksellers, fantasy titles dominated - but maybe not all children fall under that genre's spell. What do you think? What kinds of books do the children you know choose to read? Do children's books need a little less magic?

Penny Dolan 

*If I was better tech-taught, perhaps I could have saved or tracked down the thread. Apologies. Meanwhile, I'm on twitter @pennydolan1

'The end of all things' - finishing a trilogy, by Holly Race

It's been a week since I typed the words 'The End' for the first time on a story that has been tumbling through my head for over a decade. The first draft of the third book of my urban fantasy trilogy, A Midnight Dark and Golden, has been sent to my editor. While I will be working through several further drafts over the next six months or so, it feels very much like the beginning of the end. I cried for a full hour after hitting 'send' on the manuscript (admittedly this may have had something to do with it being 5am at the time and the fact that I had only slept for three hours in the previous two days, but still...).

There have been so many lessons learned in the process of writing these three books, but in many ways I've taken the most interesting ones from writing the final book. Here are a few of the things I wish I'd known before embarking on the trilogy journey:

The fatigue is real

About a third of the way through the draft of the third book, I vowed to never, ever write a trilogy again. You know that point during the drafting process, around 30,000 words in, where you've got past the flush of the 'shiny new story' but haven't yet reached the 'home stretch' and the middle acts feel like the steepest mountain ever? That point felt triply worse for me on this third novel, because it was really 230,000 words in, and I couldn't see my way to get those final 70,000 down on paper. As the final chapters drew closer, the inner editor screamed louder and louder - 'This is your last chance to get it perfect! Only perfection will suffice!' The temptation to watch Love Island instead was very strong indeed.

By the end, though, it's addictive

I may have spent a large portion of writing A Midnight Dark and Golden pledging that this would be my one and only trilogy, but by the end I did a 180 degree turn. There's something intensely satisfying about drawing out multiple character arcs over three books, or 1000 pages. You get the chance to expand smaller characters in ways you hadn't anticipated; you can forge unlikely connections in a way you would be hard pressed to do in a single, 400 page novel. At a certain point, the cast begins to generate their own stories, which is a delightful frustration when you've spent many years attempting to map their journeys in detail across multiple volumes.

You can retcon more than you think

I'm sure there are fantasy authors out there who have the ability to work out every single detail of their world, character arcs and magic system before writing a single word. I'm sure there are fantasy authors out there who not only work these things out, but stick to them as well. I am not one of them. 90 per cent of the best parts of my books came from a sudden realisation that the story would actually be much more exciting if I used a throwaway detail from an earlier novel or chapter and turned it into a world-building or magic-y twist. That, of course, meant throwing away or revising a lot of what I had planned in future chapters, but it was absolutely worth it. And making it fit with previous books is much easier than I thought it would be - who knew that when you're the one making the magic system, you get to invent new rules?

Which leads me on to...

Now you know your characters, trust them

That bit I wrote earlier, about characters generating story? It's absolutely true. After two novels and ten years, you end up knowing your characters pretty well. Would it be weird to say that they know their author pretty well too? By the early chapters of A Midnight Dark and Golden, I could almost hear some of my characters telling me, 'Oi, that trajectory you planned for me eight years ago? That doesn't really fit with the story you're now telling, does it?' Thus two crucial characters who had been on separate, tragic journeys, told me that they would quite like to team up, please and thank you, and one of them would like a happier ending if it wasn't too much bother. It was quite a bother, to be honest, because I'd been writing the conclusions to their arcs in my head for years. However, I heard them out and emailed my editor. She came back to me, as I knew she would, to confirm that the new ending was much more emotional and powerful than my original plan. 'Fine,' I said to my characters, 'You win.' But they were right, and the new ending to their arcs is one of the scenes I am most proud of in the whole trilogy.

Beware nostalgia

Like a back-to-back binge-watch of Ever After, Clueless and Ten Things I Hate About You for a Millennial, my third book was a full-on nostalgia fest. I found myself adding callback after callback to moments in the first two books. I know already that there are too many. I couldn't help myself, and have already briefed my editor to tell me where and when to reign it in. But in the moment, while writing that first draft of the last book, those callbacks were a necessary for me. A way to say goodbye to the characters who have lived in my head for so long, and who are so soon - too soon - going to be flying the nest.

---

Holly Race worked for many years as a script editor in film and television, before becoming a writer.

Her YA urban fantasies, Midnight's Twins and A Gathering Midnight, are published by Hot Key Books.

www.hollyrace.com

What's In A World by Steve Gladwin?

I really feel sorry for people when they say that they either don’t enjoy reading, or find it painful. As someone who has loved reading like the very blood or breath of life for as long as I can remember, the idea of not having it would be a torment. I have been thinking recently about which of three loves – TV and film, music and reading – I could least give up and the answer is obvious. Yes I’d miss music, but I’d always have it in my head, whereas without reading I’d have to create the stories for myself. So OK, as both a writer and a storyteller I should be able to do this, but despite my own recent attempts within the fantasy genre, I could never be Tolkien or Lewis, Susan Cooper or Catherine Fisher, Guy Gavriel Kay or William Horwood. Nor could I write like Philip Pullman, and it is my recent decision to re-read the His Dark Materials books that has led to this blog.

Like most books, a good fantasy can be experienced either through discovering it retrospectively – responding to a recommendation or just not wanting to be left out - or as a brand new sparkling entity. The two feelings you get are similarly thrilling, even if they are at one remove from each other. In the first you can barely contain your enthusiasm at being party to all the secrets and thrills that everyone else has told you about. You might almost call this the ‘it’s all true’ factor. In the second it’s more likely to be a ‘oh this is so wonderful and I have to tell everyone about it.’ I’ve met a number of those in fantasy in my life, of which more in a minute.

Back to the Gladwin household in the early seventies, and much to everyone’s surprise, my father took himself into our front room for three weeks running, stuck on the gas fire and meticulously ploughed through all 1076 pages of The Lord of the Rings. I remember him saying how much he enjoyed it too.

The book  club edition my dad read

What was maybe more unusual was that I decided to read it straight after him, and I was only maybe thirteen. OK, I had read the Hobbit, but apart from that my only experience of fantasy must have been the Narnia books and Alan Garner. I too enjoyed it, and also remember meticulously copying out the entire map of middle earth which was in the above edition. It would however be many years before I repeated the experience.

A couple of years later I tried to write my own fantasy novel which I called ‘The Chronicles of Action’ (pronounced ac-tee-on). It wasn’t a bad premise, the discovery after a dust storm that a desert race had once been a great civilisation. I wrote quite a bit of it, but is was usual with these things soon gave it up as hard work. What I did realise years later was that it was partly a rip-off of an absolutely wonderful series called The Trigan Empire which my sister and I used to read in a children’s magazine called ‘Look and Learn’. My sister Chris and I were riveted by this intergalactic story of men in loin cloths fighting over an empire and couldn’t wait for the next installment. I’ve just checked and apparently you can get the whole thing now as a free download, which is a good job as you should see the prices of the originals on Amazon!

But the LOTR experience must have triggered something, because it was in  my teens that I completely embraced fantasy writing and what was then called Sword and Sorcery in particular. For a good few years my bookshelf was crammed with Corum and Conan, Dorian Hawkmoon and Fafhyd and the Gray Mouser, The Witch World and The Worm Ouroborus, Thongor and Elric. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Just recently I re-read Michael Moorcock’s second series about Corum, his Celtic myth inspired hero. It must have been a series I had at the time, but didn’t read, but boy had I missed out! With twenty odd years of Celtic myth loving behind me I now positively reveled in this particular world.

My fantasy reading after that splurge was patchy at best, but I’ll always remember the series of books which reignited it and has remained my favourite set of books of any genre. It was in my early twenties that I discovered Guy Gavriel Kay’s magisterial and haunting trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry.

I’ve talked about it in previous blogs of course, but for me the series had all the things which no other fantasy novel I have read before or since has quite had. Not the least of these is that it has the sort of depth that less empathetic writers like Robert E. Howard - who created Conan the Barbarian, but who was after all paid to write magazine pulp fiction in the same way Conan Doyle was - or Michael Moorcock, who dreams so well ,but doesn’t always seem to care very much about his characters, can only aspire to. After a rather clunky beginning involving our five heroes and heroines actually getting to Fionavar, the world building itself, its geography, myths and customs, is both carefully and lovingly done.

Guy Gavriel Kay had spent a year helping Christopher Tolkien to prepare The Silmarillion, so it’s hardly surprising that some of this rubbed off so beautifully. In the series Celtic and Norse mix effortlessly, but unlike say CS Lewis, who seemed to take shiny bits of myth from here and there like some out of control literary magpie, (and much to the frustration of his more meticulous friend Tolkien), the mix works and adds to the depth of the whole.

Flash forward a good few years and a friend tells me about this set of children’s books which really aren’t like children’s books at all. I order The Dark Is Rising sequence on his recommendation alone and halfway through Over Sea, Under Stone I am roundly cursing him for getting me to read something which seems so juvenile and with such irritating kids in it. Still I’m nearly forty and maybe they’re not meant for me.

Then I read the second book, The Dark is Rising itself and the whole world changes. It changes so much that I wonder if some other writer hasn’t elbowed the writer of the first book out of the way, and is showing her what she really wanted to write.

In The Dark is Rising in particular there is a sense of the ancient and often uncompromising that seems to permeate the whole book with an ominous foreshadowing which just gets darker and darker as the forces of the Dark themselves close in. In the chapter on children’s writing in his recent wonderful book ‘Landscapes’, Robert Macfarlane calls The Dark is Rising the most eerie book he has ever read and I have to agree, for never before had I felt such a sense of what I can only call book claustrophobia. It seems to be not just the walls that are closing in around the reader, but the whole world.

The sequence which Robert Macfarlane regards as the most memorable is Will’s awakening to his inheritance as an Old One on solstice morning. Here he realises that he has been transported deep into the past where everything is older and more intense and the snowbound landscape far more threatening.. Susan Cooper is expert at taking us in and out of Will’s familiar world and almost dipping us into another one, so that, like a wandering pen nib, we pick up some of the story’s mythic ink and add it to our knowledge. Unlike Lewis, where the story passes back to our own many narnian years later, or Tolkien, where there is no passing into other worlds or tricks with time, Susan Cooper renders time fluid, which has the result of making it all the more unsettling.

Again I could spend a whole blog talking just about that series of books, but I have to move on. My most recent discovery is the Hyddenworld books of William Horwood and like The Dark Is Rising, His Dark Materials and The Fionavar Tapestry, they have had an effect on me as a writer as well as an intermittent reader of fantasy.

In Hyddenworld the smaller race called the Hydden live alongside - and for the most part unnoticed - our own, in much the same way as the Muggles co-exist with the magic folk in Harry Potter. The centre of their version of Englalond is Birmingham which is re-christened Brum and it is that area where the myth that underpins the four books, the smith Beornamund and his making of the gems for his lost love, takes place. But like Middle Earth and Fionavar, the southern counties and Wales of Will Stanton in The Dark is Rising series and the adjusted version of our world in His Dark Materials, William Horwood’s books are about landscape and traveling, as much as anyone else. And as in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, the journey to get there and the reason for going is everything.

Robert E Howard’s great warrior barbarian Conan too bestrode the glittering and always deadly world of the Hyborian age, fighting and wenching and rescuing, overturning plots by a combination of brute force and native cunning and by making the right alliances. Conan is no milk sop of a hero folks. When in the story A Witch Shall be Born, he is crucified by his enemies, he bites the head off the first vulture to dare to go for his eyes, before he is rescued by a former ally. One of the many great disservices done to fantasy by modern cinema was that Big Arnie’s versions made him into little more than a one dimensional pile of muscles. The real Conan has a great deal more to him over and above the muscles and head lopping. He gets to be King of Aquilonia after all, and despite all the usual plots, a good and successful one who holds his throne.

I set out in this blog to try and understand what makes a great fantasy novel for both adults and children. I soon became aware however that all I could write about was the fantasy I myself had loved and experienced.

Then something clicked, and for the first time I was able to see why I have loved most of the fantasy books and series I have read in my life and what they had in common. For there is something that unites Will Stanton, Will Parry and Lyra Belaqua, Conan and Corum, Jack, Catherine and Bedwyn Stort in Hyddenworld, The Fellowship of the Ring on their long road to Mordor, the four Pevensea children in the Narnia Books and the five travelers in the Fionavar Tapestry. I will try to pace out what it is.

Clearly all of them have a destiny, which they are both at first unaware of. and later refuse to accept. Having finally given into that destiny, they gather companions for their quest and they set out through various trials and disappointments, taking and rejecting advice and friendship as they go, until they enter the belly of the beast, fight their battles, suffer their dreadful losses, win - but often at a cost both personal and spiritual - until in the time to come they must decide whether they can live with those memories or not. Having made that decision they may then either symbolically die, or leave the world in which they have journeyed for somewhere calmer.

In other words they are all of them undergoing the Hero’s Journey, as related by Joseph Campbell in his seminal book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. So far so predictable I suppose, because one presumes we authors had that in our DNA long before it became someone’s life's work.

But in my case one of the things my favourites have in common is landscape. Now I love landscape, but I can't pretend to have walked a great deal of it, with the exception of a 49 mile pilgrimage walk on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. However it does seem that what the fantasy books I have read and loved - from Conan to Corum, Will Stanton to Will Parry, and Bedwyn Stort to the little hobbitses and never forgetting Kim, Jennifer, Dave, Paul and Kevin - have in common is not just the journey, (or more often journeys) themselves, but the lands in which they travel. Whether it be Middle Earth or Brum, the Hyborian Age or Citigazze, the lands and spaces always have thrills and experiences to offer in their own right independent of the characters themselves.

As I was finishing this blog, my partner and I were reflecting on the last, for the most part, very difficult year when an idea lit up like a flame in my mind. 
It is the tradition in a fairy or folk tale to end a story with the phrase 'and they all lived happily ever after'. It's a nice, neat, sealing off device isn't it and we come to expect it. For the most part and even after such horrendous events in something like say The Juniper Tree, with all its child abuse, dismemberment and cannibalism, all can become well just like that.

Of course it can't, because how on earth could a family live with the legacy of those circumstances outside of a fairy tale? There are far too many other examples to mention, but to take just one how, in the story of Tam Lin, after Janet has rescued her husband to be from the Queen of Elf Land, do they then go about living together - the man who has been under enchantment in an enchanted land for seven years and a day and this spoiled if now wiser daughter of an earl who is pregnant with his child. One is after all recovering from years of potential trauma and the other from third degree burns!

Of course the easy answer may be just to say that these are all just fairy stories and therefore make-believe, so how can we expect them to make sense? But equally that isn't good enough.

Surely the people who told these tales - which were after all traditional tales, handed down from mouth to mouth before they were ever collected, published or filmed - were canny enough to understand that some things can never be got over and - as a late friend of mine so wisely said - can only be come to terms with, Perhaps then that neat little ending is in many cases little better than a ' coming to terms'.

'So the little boy, (who had been killed, eaten, resurrected as a magical avenging bird and then brought back to life as himself again), and their father, went back into the their sweet little cottage under the Juniper Tree leaving the smashed corpse of their awful stepmother under the giant mill wheel and they all --- somehow learned to come to terms with it.   

It doesn't quite have the same neat little bow ring to it, does it?

And so in conclusion it's no surprise for me to find that apart from the hero's journey, the landscape and the quest element and the rest of it, the vast majority of the books I've mentioned have a sense of profound loss at the end of them and little choice but for the characters to have to come to terms with all they have endured. Friends, innocence and sometimes a whole way of life have gone, and Jack and Catherine, Will and Lyra, Frodo and Sam, and Kim and Dave now have to adjust to a different kind of life, where memory will always be bitter sweet and the pain of those things they have lost a mere heartbeat away.

Is this why we read these books then, knowing that they will offer us something more mature and searching than fairy stories, knowing as we do that life very rarely is all 'happy ever after'?   

​

Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in Mind'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

www.stevegladwin.co.uk

        

The power of shared stories - Lari Don

I received an email from a teacher at the end of last week which took my breath away. The email itself was a fairly mundane reply to queries about the school timetable and class sizes - we’re organising an author visit – but the PS was astounding. Here it is:

 PS - We've just had a very interesting class discussion on the morality of Yann's possession spell in First Aid for Fairies. One of the children made a connection with Trump's new torture agenda (our news article of the week) - who knew a book written almost a decade ago could be so topical?

To clarify, this is a class of primary age children, reading one of my adventure novels (First Aid For Fairies And Other Fabled Beasts, published in 2008), then the pupils, and their clearly superb teacher, bounced off it to discuss morality, ethics and world affairs.

I didn’t write that scene with any huge political goal in mind. Actually, this was my first novel, so I wrote it with no idea of whether anyone would ever read it, let alone discuss it. Honestly, I wrote it to discover how dark I could go with a children’s story, how flawed I could make a character and still care about him, how far I could stretch the magic that I was just learning to play with.

I didn’t write it to prompt discussions about right wing conservatism, abuse of power and the ethics of information gathering.

I am astounded, amazed, impressed and humbled that these primary age children were prompted by my words to think, to discuss, to make connections, and to discover their own opinions…

But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. This is after all what books and stories are for. This is what shared reading, and discussing stories together, should be for. Not specifically for dissecting the flaws of Donald Trump’s presidency (though, please go ahead and do that…) but for giving us shared vocabulary, and shared experiences within the safe environment of a story, so we can explore other issues together.

Stories help us think. Shared stories help us think together.

At this point I should probably explain: Yann is a centaur. In the relevant scene, this half-horse half-human from Greek myth (who is also a fairly grumpy Scottish pre-teen) uses dark magic to compel a weasel to spy for him, causing the weasel obvious pain and distress. The scene is set in tunnels under Edinburgh, which are being used by a minotaur as his temporary Scottish labyrinth, and the centaur’s use of dark magic is witnessed by his own friends – a selkie, a fairy, a phoenix and a token human girl - causing them to question his use and abuse of power.

As you can probably tell, First Aid For Fairies is a fantasy. It’s not set in contemporary real-life America, or the Middle East, or Guantanamo Bay. It’s a fantasy. And the fact that this wonderful teacher used this scene to encourage her pupils to talk about ethics and link them to current global concerns, proves something that I’ve always believed. Fantasy and fairy tales – stories set in magical worlds safely distant from our day-to-day lives – are very strong tools to allow us to examine our real world.

So, the power of class novels to prompt discussion, the power of fantasy to give us a new way to look at reality - this PS gave me pause to think about both of those issues. But the main reason this PS took my breath away was because it reminded me of the awesome responsibility of writing for children.

I don’t write stories with messages, I write stories with ambushes, chases and magic spells. But I also choose to write about characters and situations that allow me to explore questions which fascinate and concern me. I write because I want readers to enjoy the stories I imagine, I don’t write with the intention of teaching moral lessons (never, ever!) But I am incredibly moved and impressed if my books prompt young readers to explore their own questions.

It’s a privilege, an honour and a huge responsibility writing for kids, and it’s important to be reminded of that regularly. It’s also a very heavy weight to carry. But I suspect if we didn’t recognise the size of the responsibility, and occasionally stagger under its weight, we shouldn’t be doing it…

So, having almost recovered from this email, I’m now very much looking forward to meeting this thoughtful and wonderful class, and their amazing teacher, in a few weeks’ time.

But first, I’m off to explore questions of identity and choice, lightly disguised as a trilogy about shapeshifters… 

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

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So Few Lives Divide Us - Catherine Butler

Here’s a harebrained theory for you. It applies only to the southern half of the country (the North needs a theory of its own), so please draw a line across your imaginary map of Britain, running from the Mersey to the Humber.

The truncated realm before you is a fantasy landscape. Oxford is its symbolic centre, and marks the place where two great tectonic plates meet and clash. (This seismic activity explains why, from Lewis Carroll, through Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and Frances Hardinge, Oxford has produced so much seminal fantasy.)

Beyond, the country is divided on East-West lines. To the West, fantasy is about myth and the land. Its locus is the standing stone, the ancient well, the cave; its magic is nature magic; its past is the deep past. This is the fantasy I've always felt closest to, and most wished to write.

But I also love the fantasy of the East. Here is the fantasy of time slips and family ghosts. Its locus is the grand house; its magic is memory and dream magic; its past is the historical past. If the West has Alan Garner, Catherine Fisher, Jenny Nimmo and Susan Cooper (albeit she has a foot in both camps, geographically), the East has Lucy M. Boston, Philippa Pearce, Joan G. Robinson, and Rudyard Kipling (although he, too, is an ambiguous case).

In the East, Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden and Lucy Boston’s Green Knowe series are not only based around houses and their gardens, but around real houses. Being pilgrim-minded, I’ve long wanted to visit both. Sadly, the mill house at Great Shelford in Cambridgeshire (where Pearce lived as a young child, and which she used as the setting for her famous book) has never as far as I know been open to the public. The closest I ever got to viewing it was when it came up for sale last year, and the estate agent published some nice pictures. Here’s the garden where Tom and Hatty played (can you spot Tricksy?):

I didn’t have the £3,500,000 asking price at the time, or I’d have bought it like a shot.

Hemingford Grey Manor, the model for Green Knowe, is also very much a real place, also in Cambridgeshire. When Lucy Boston was alive she often showed visitors around, but although I lived in Cambridge in the late 1980s I never made the trip. I didn’t have a car then, after all, and there wasn’t a convenient bus service, but I’m not sure whether I’d have had the chutzpah anyway. Boston was in her ‘90s, after all. Who was I to dare disturb her universe?

Since Boston’s death her daughter-in-law Diana has carried on her hospitable tradition.* Even so, I never visited what seemed by now (travelling from my new home in Bristol) an inconveniently distant village, requiring the crossing of London to reach by train and a taxi at the far end to do the last five miles from Huntingdon. The spur to correct this shocking omission actually came when I was in Tokyo last April (a location even further removed from Bristol, critics might complain, but such is human nature), and received an invitation from Diana’s friend (now also mine), Mihoko Tanaka, who mentioned that she’d be staying at Green Knowe – sorry, I mean Hemingford Grey – this summer, and would I like to visit her there?

And so it was that a week or so ago I found myself being picked up at Huntingdon station by Mihoko and Diana, and driven in style to the Manor, where we sat down to tea and cakes in the sunlit garden.

After that I got the tour, much as hundreds before me have done. Even if the Green Knowe books had never been written, this would still be an immensely fascinating building – indeed, it’s said to be the oldest continuously-occupied house in the country to have been built as a private residence (rather than as a castle or a church). Much of it dates from around 1130. In that context one begins to scoff at the new-fangled Tudor additions, let alone the impertinence of an eighteenth-century facade.

Let us walk from the river, past the topiary, towards the house...

... and then inside, with cherubs and birds' nests, as arranged by Lucy Boston:

And room after room of wonders:

And here is Tolly’s room – complete with rocking horse, chest, Tolly's view to the river and, of course, Toby’s mouse. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, then go and read The Children of Green Knowe this instant!)

All this time the sun shone, almost too brightly: my camera was incapable of dealing with the contrast in some of these shots between the bright light and the natural gloom cast by the yard-thick walls' 900-year-old shadows.

I made it back to Bristol before midnight – having enjoyed a pretty much perfect day. East and West touch, as surely as Past and Present: Hemingford Grey really wasn’t so distant after all. But that was always the burden of the Green Knowe books. As a poet once put it:

So few lives divide us; a hundred years

Carry three lives, and when the party's over,

The century drained dry, it yet appears

For patient spade suddenly to uncover,

Frail, and a little chipped, the perfume gone

Of the dead wine. [...]

                                Thirty men at most

Fill out a thousand years, each with his glass,

Laughing at table, no unbodied ghost

But a friend speaking, though the hours pass

So swiftly from the bottle to the tomb;

Their faces shine within my shadowed room.

* If you wish to make an appointment to see Hemingford Grey, follow this link. You won't regret it.