Eleanor Doorly and Mary Treadgold, Carnegie Medal winners by Paul May

I'm trying to read all the winners of the Carnegie Medal in the order in which they were published, but even this harmless activity has fallen victim to the lockdown and I've had to skip the 1940 winner for now. I've also realised that there are quite a lot of books to read, and I may struggle to finish this project before my 100th birthday, so I'd better get on with it!

The first thing to say about The Radium Woman, the 1939 winner of the Carnegie Medal, is that I enjoyed it very much. The book is unusual in several ways. Firstly, it's not completely original, but is an abridgement and retelling for children by Eleanor Doorly of Eve Curie’s biography of her mother. As far as I can tell, with the current limited access to libraries, it is also an abridgement of a translation, although, given Doorly’s lifelong love of all things French and her ability to speak seven languages, it is possible that she made the translation herself. Finally, it is one of just four works of non-fiction to have won the prize—all of them before 1960.

It is not easy to make a biography like this readily accessible ‘to boys and girls of eleven and older’ as the Puffin blurb has it. As Eleanor Doorly says in her introduction 'complete biographies are necessarily lengthy and are often written in words familiar only to those of much experience and many years.' 

Wherever possible Doorly dramatises. She paints a series of vivid scenes with Marie at the centre of them. She adds dialogue, and uses extracts from letters to give Marie a voice, and she also has the beautiful, atmospheric woodcuts by Robert Gibbings to add a timeless quality to the story. The writing is very clear.  Here is Marie in the laboratory, and here, too, is the headmistress of a girls’ school making sure her readers get the message!

“Work! . . . Work! . . . Marie was feeling her own brain growing. Her hands were getting cleverer. Soon Professor Lippman trusted her with a piece of original research and she had won her opportunity to show her skill and the originality of her mind. Any day of six she could be seen, in her coarse science overall, standing before an oak table in the lofty science laboratory of the Sorbonne watching some delicate piece of apparatus or gazing at the steady boiling of some fascinating substance. Other similar workers were around her, men for the most part, utterly silent, doing a thing that was more absorbing than talk.”

Marcus Crouch says, in his survey of Carnegie winners, ‘There is in this a worthwhile lesson for children which is the more telling because it is implied in every action of Marie’s life but never stated in Miss Doorly’s book.’ I don’t think this is quite right, for I do hear the headmistress, Miss Doorly, quite frequently, not making explicit statements, it’s true, but possibly telling me an improving story in assembly. I think it is this, and perhaps a fondness for telling the reader a little too often how merry Marie's smile is, how lovely the view from her window and so on, that give the book its dated feel and explain why it is no longer in print.

Eleanor Doorly was a headmistress for many years, but she was many other things too. In WW2 she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive because of her fluency in Norwegian, and maybe it was to this that her lifelong friend, Winfred Fayerman cryptically alluded when she wrote in 1957 that ‘she did much known good in the world, and there is no doubt that she did more that is unknown.’ Miss Fayerman also says, ‘Eleanor Dooley was a strange character; she was warmly valued both by many people of distinction, and by the less gifted; but some folks disliked her as much as others liked her.’ An unusual tribute.

Eleanor Doorly

The Radium Woman was published in October 1939, the last Carnegie winner to be written before the war. The next winner, Visitors from London by Kitty Barne is, like its successor We Couldn’t Leave Dinah, a book both written and set during wartime. Sadly, I can’t read it at the moment as the British Library is closed for the duration (or should it be Duration?) and I can’t afford to buy one (it’s rare). So I’ll leave Kitty Barne’s book for another time.

The action in Mary Treadgold’s We Couldn’t Leave Dinah takes place on an invented Channel Island during the German occupation and is a book I first read, and remember liking, some years ago. Mary Treadgold was Heinemann’s first Children’s Editor and was forced to read a huge number of ‘pony book’ submissions, ‘the majority quite frightful – technically incompetent, at best derivative, at worst basely imitative.’ She decided she could do better herself and wrote We Couldn’t Leave Dinah in an air-raid shelter during the London blitz.

It’s only fair to say in advance that I was never especially interested in ‘pony books’ as a child, and that wasn't because I didn’t read ‘girls’ books'.  I was a big fan of the Mallory Towers series, and I used to like reading my sister’s Bunty comic, but ponies passed me by. On re-reading Dinah I found it curiously uneven and at times rather odd. The evocation of an island idyll in summer is terrific, but I didn’t find it easy to sympathise with these privileged, pony-obsessed middle-class children who return to the island from their boarding schools each summer, and are appalled by the idea that they might be forced to return to London and live with frightful relations in Belgravia and only be able ride in ‘the Row’.  

I just didn’t believe in the two central characters either, and maybe this is because Mary Treadgold is trying, and not quite succeeding, to imagine herself into the heads of children quite unlike herself. As she says: ‘The children themselves – Mick and Caroline – were quite simply the kind that at fourteen I would like to have been myself: extrovert, with clear-cut and developed values, plenty of courage, and good at games – I having been the kind of child who had and was none of these things.’

I find this interesting because when I came to Arthur Ransome’s books as a child I had no interest in sailing, and I didn’t attend a boarding school or have a cook and a maid, but I really believed in his characters, and cared about them. But then, Ransome’s children were based upon real children whom he knew well, and there’s not much doubt that John Walker is Ransome himself.

The plot of We Couldn’t Leave Dinah is slightly bonkers and relies like many other great stories on some remarkable coincidences. Some of the action sequences are genuinely gripping, but at other times the writing is very curious and overdone, as though the writer is determined to demonstrate superior tone. For example: ‘Caroline heard an unintelligible noise proceeding from her own throat and opened one eyelid with an effort. Even in this semi-comatose state the hazily-perceived rapture upon her brother’s usually phlegmatic countenance silenced upon her lips the righteous fury of the thus rudely awakened.’

This is a first novel, written in an air-raid shelter, and that probably helps to explain its uneven quality. Passages like the one quoted above slow the action just when you want to be getting on with it. At a first reading, reading for the story and keen to know what happened next, I was happy to skip this kind of stuff in my usual way. Reading it again, perhaps with too critical an eye, it is hard to ignore. 

Mary Treadgold, looking back nearly 17 years later, says: ‘As I remember it now it looks as if the whole of We Couldn’t Leave Dinah was a mixture of escape and wish-fulfillment, motivated by a robust and scornful competitive sense – and indeed I think there are worse reasons for writing a book, though many better.’ She says that she was ‘shaken at the book being awarded the Carnegie Medal,’ and goes on to say that if she were an editor reading it now she would  ‘find it an example of the way in which a popular book can be confused with one of a high level of achievement – and I would not feel hurt if it were remembered as such among all the other books that have been awarded the Medal. I used to wonder at the time, I remember, what quiet book, what book with a less obvious popular appeal was overlooked that year . . .’

Mary Treadgold went on to write many more books, many of them about ponies and many of them by all accounts better than We Couldn’t Leave Dinah. She worked at the BBC for twenty years, and her final book was published in 1981. Her remarks about We Couldn’t Leave Dinah are remarkably clear-sighted and generous, and you can’t help but warm to her.

Both The Radium Woman and We Couldn’t Leave Dinah are out of print, and have been for some time. Next month we have two books which remain in print, one of which I think is a timeless classic, and the other—well—for the first time in this exercise I struggled to finish it.

Paul May’s website. 

My main source for information about these Carnegie winners is Chosen for Children edited by Marcus Crouch and Alec Ellis and published by the Library Association in 1977. It makes an excellent companion to reading the books. The page from the prospectus of the King's High School Warwick comes from the school's Twitter feed which also contains the information about Eleanor Doorly's languages and war work.