AS IN THE LONG AGO

When I bought my copy of  The God Beneath The Sea  many years ago I did so because I loved the Charles Keeping illustrations and not because I was desperate to read this new interpretation of the Greek myths by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen. I first read it thirty years ago and neither loved nor hated the text, but I was very glad that it had given Charles Keeping the opportunity to make those haunting images. I bought and read the sequel,  The Golden Shadow , too, and the illustrations in that book are, for me, even more haunting. As the late, great, John Prine put it in his song  Lake Marie — 'You know what blood looks like in a black and white video? Shadows, shadows. That's what it looks like.' There are a LOT of shadows in Keeping's illustrations. I was astonished, when I came to write this blog, to discover that this book, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1970, divided critical opinion more starkly than any previous winner had done.  I thought I'd better...

The Edge of the Cloud  won the Carnegie in 1969 and was the first of the  Flambards  books that I read, though it's the second in the series. I'm glad I did it that way because  The Edge of the Cloud  is easily my favourite, although I quite see that if I had first read them as a twelve-year-old girl I might have felt differently. The Edge of the Cloud  is chiefly concerned with the early days of flying, and brilliantly brings to life the struggles of early aviators to design, build and fly those flimsy aircraft. There is very little talk of love between Will Russell and Christina. She is more likely to be passing Will a screwdriver or sitting in the back of an aircraft a few feet above the waves in the English Channel with engine oil plastering her face than she is to be exchanging sweet nothings with her fiancé, and that suited me just fine, although at times Christina might have preferred a slightly more attentive lover. I also enjoyed the portrait of Ch...

Why is this 1968 Carnegie Medal winner so little known? Or is it just me that doesn't know it? And why is it out of print?  Author photos from  Chosen for Children The Moon in the Cloud  is one of those winners that I had never encountered before I set out to read them all, and I'd never read anything by Rosemary Harris either.  How did I miss out? All the authors who surround Rosemary Harris on the list of winners are authors I know well—Alan Garner, K M Peyton, Ivan Southall, Leon Garfield, Edward Blishen . . . So I do wonder why I didn't know this writer because, of all the winning books I've read that are now out of print,  this  is the one I would most like to see back on the shelves of bookshops. Faber cover 1968 Harris has only a short paragraph in  The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature.  Over a period of 40 years, starting in the mid-1950s, she published 26 books for children and young adults, as well as some adult thrillers. Betwe...

  It was 1967—The Summer of Love—but for me it was The Summer of Selling Doughnuts and Pies from door to door on the Norfolk coast, and in the evenings working in a burger van in various car-parks in Norwich. I can still smell the onions.  During the day, when we weren't working, me and my cousin would hang out in a small amusement arcade in Wroxham listening to  All You Need is Love  and  Baby You're a Rich Man  on the jukebox while we played the pinball machines. Our other main pastime was sitting beside Wroxham bridge where we watched over-confident men in yachting caps attempting to show off their boat-handling skills to their admiring families.  They steered their newly-rented holiday boats through the narrow arch of the bridge—or into it. Crashes were frequent and often spectacular. Occasionally the entire superstructure was ripped off as a boat collided with the bridge at speed. It was never-ending free entertainment but it's sadly no longe...

In 1965 the Carnegie was won by a book which I don't think is much read today,  The Grange at High Force  by Philip Turner. All I knew about the book before I read it was that many people thought Alan Garner's  Elidor  should have won the Carnegie that year. Aidan Chambers in particular was damning in his criticism of Turner's book and made the contrast between it and  Elidor  the focus of his criticism of the Carnegie committee. Here's what he said: "The Grange at High Force  is typical of the kind of book, in story, writing and production, which, over the last ten years, has come to be considered, it seems, by 'discriminating readers'  among adults , the epitome of good-quality children's literature. It is intellectual, sophisticated, over-written, unremarkable for anything in the slightest questionable in thought, word or deed. It reflects an adult's rather sentimental view of childhood. It is passionless, cautious in its opinion, conservative ...

It was a rainy Friday morning and we were about to drive from London to Nottingham for some birthday celebrations. The M1 is a boring road, especially in the rain, and we were trying to think of somewhere to visit on the way to break up the journey when I remembered the Manor at Hemingford Grey, Lucy Boston's house. It's not really on the way, but when I looked on the website I saw that the garden is open every day, and even if we couldn't go round the house (you have to book to do that) it would be an interesting diversion. It proved to be far more than that! We arrived late morning in the rain, parked on the driveway and set out to explore the garden and yes, it is worth going out of the way just to see the garden. I always like visiting gardens in the rain, mainly because you usually have them pretty much to yourself, but also because I just like gardens in the rain. This one was planted almost entirely by Lucy Boston after she bought the house in the late 1930s and it s...

Many years before Anthony Browne began his wonderful love affair with gorillas and other apes, Lucy M Boston produced a passionate, moving and surprising novel about an escaped gorilla finding refuge in the garden of Green Knowe, her lightly-fictionalised ancient home on the edge of the fens. The real house is The Manor at Hemingford Grey in Cambridgeshire, and you can  visit the house and garden. If you haven't read  A Stranger at Green Knowe  yet (it won the Carnegie Medal in 1961), here is your spoiler alert. I can't really say what I want to say without revealing the ending. The first section of the book is written from the point of view of the young gorilla, describing its everyday life as a member of a family of gorillas in the wild. I can't say how accurate it is, but I found it completely convincing. It is also genuinely frightening as a ring of hunters closes in on the gorillas, killing most of them and capturing one, whom they name 'Hanno'. Anthony Browne ...