AS IN THE LONG AGO

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...

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 fou...

I’ve just started on a project that’s been in my mind ever since a friend in the Schools Library Service showed me a shelf in their offices containing all of the Carnegie medal winning books. I’ve started reading them all, from the beginning.  I thought I ought to do this partly because there are quite a few names on the list that I had never heard of, to my shame. I'm not sure if this will be an occasional series or a monthly one, but this month I’ve read the first three winners. PIGEON POST (1936) by Arthur Ransome is the book of which his wife, Evgenia, said ‘it’s not very much worse than the worst of the others.’ She also told him, later that year, that WE DIDN’T MEAN TO GO TO SEA was ‘flat, not interesting, not amusing.’ Luckily for Ransome, hers was not the only opinion he listened to. However, it’s probably fair to say that PIGEON POST is not Ransome’s most successful book, and it was said that it won the inaugural Carnegie partly in recognition of the achievements ...