AS IN THE LONG AGO

  In 1947 the Carnegie Medal was awarded to Walter de la Mare for his Collected Stories for Children. This marked the start of the second decade of the Carnegie and was the first winning book since 1940 to have nothing to do with the Second World War. It has nothing to do with the war because all the stories were written during the 1920s and 1930s and this is another of those awards which were made, not for the book itself, but in recognition of the author’s contribution to children’s literature. Walter de la Mare c.1924   However, even had Walter de la Mare composed all of these stories in wartime it is doubtful whether the war would have had any influence on their content. Current affairs do not find their way into de la Mare’s work. What interests him is the boundary between this world and the various alternate realities of his imagination. Or, to put it another way, de la Mare believes there is something more than this material world; something just glimpsed on the edges o...

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge won the Carnegie Medal in 1946, the year of its publication, and it is just as much of a wartime book as We Couldn’t Leave Dinah and Visitors from London. It was written in the heart of the Devon countryside that forms its setting and Elizabeth Goudge wrote that ‘those were the war years and it was good to escape sometimes from the fearful realities of that time into a world where a unicorn cantered behind the trees.’   This is a pastoral novel. The action takes place in the bucolic semi-paradise of Moonacre, a country estate hemmed in by hills and the sea, entirely separate from the rest of the world, in the year 1842. As I read it, I was reminded of many other stories. The unicorn theme suggested Alan Garner's Elidor, a book that didn't win the Carnegie, apparently because the judges, astonishingly, didn't like the Charles Keeping illustrations. Then that pastoral quality made me think both of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tal...

I’m not sure whether ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’ is a proverb or a metaphor or a piece of advice. If it’s a piece of advice, I’ve always ignored it. And if it’s true than I wonder why publishers spend so much time trying to get the cover right and why it caused such a kerfuffle when Waterstone’s recently turned all the books round to show the blurb on the back. My kind of cover. This was published in 1944, not long after Visitors from London. Last month I wrote about the book which won the Carnegie in 1940, and Penny Dolan wondered ‘how the book worked with the readership rather than the library judging panel’. That’s a question that’s hard to answer after all this time, but it made me think about how I chose books when I was a child, and about the books I read and enjoyed myself.  It's a book with children in it. I expect they're visiting  from London. I would not have taken this off the  library shelf, which is a shame because I might have ...

Here are a couple of quotes from Kitty Barne’s 1940 Carnegie Medal winning book  Visitors from London.   The four Farrar children have arrived in the Sussex countryside to spend their school holidays on a farm with a youthful aunt named Myra. 'Steadings' is a nearby farmhouse, rented by a writer friend of theirs, that has been empty for a couple of years. This writer friend has lent it to be used by evacuees.   “. . . it was to be used for the overflow of London children if there was a war . . . They were all to be moved out of London, the children, millions of them, in three days . . . How many did they think they could take? ‘What aged children?’ inquired Myra . . . ‘What age and what sex?’ But that, it seemed, was more than Miss Williams or anyone else could tell her. The idea was that the children came to the London stations, and if a train was there, drawn up at a platform, they got in it and went. Any children, any platform, any train, to any place. As ...

My voyage of discovery through the winners of the Carnegie Medal has already taken me to some unexpected places. For example, after reading Eve Garnett’s The Family at One End Street I learned of her love of the north and her many journeys north of the Arctic Circle.  A few years ago I cycled around the North Sea, and I’d recently read an excellent book by Peter Davidson called The Idea of North , which the Telegraph review sums up nicely: ‘A deeply researched and beautifully written survey of the concept of north in legend, history and the arts, and in the psyche of “northern” people’.  So when I learned that Eve Garnett had written a biography of Hans Egede, the Norwegian missionary and explorer of Greenland, I naturally had to read it. To Greenland's Icy Mountains  is a lovely book, illustrated with Garnett’s characteristic line drawings and with many of her own photographs, and full of vivid, beautifully written descriptions of landscape and nature in nor...