AS IN THE LONG AGO

I recently re-read Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden , the winner of the 1958 Carnegie Medal. It was a surprising experience in many ways, because this was not quite the book I thought I remembered. When I'd finished it, I was inspired to return to the greatest of all children's books about gardens, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911. Just think - Tom's Midnight Garden was published 63 years ago, and The Secret Garden a mere 47 years before that. Time does indeed seem to play strange tricks as we grow older. Philippa Pearce writes a great deal about Time, but that's not what gives her book its power to move the reader, for this is a book about loss and longing, about memory and grief, about the way the world changes throughout a long lifetime. I never read this book as a child, and first discovered it when I was in my twenties, at an age when one lives in the present and the future rather than in the past. And though m...

My reading of Carnegie Medal winning books has brought me to 1957 and to the strange case of William Mayne, whose novel, A Grass Rope , won the prize that year. For reasons that I’ll explore later Mayne was considered one of the most important children’s authors of the second half of the twentieth century. He also became perhaps the most notorious, after his conviction in 2004 for a series of sexual assaults on young girls between the ages of 8 and 16, dating back to the early 1960s. He was sentenced to 2½ years in prison and eventually died in 2010, aged 82.   Julia Eccleshare notes, in her Guardian obituary , that Mayne's books were ‘largely deliberately removed from library shelves following his conviction,’ and a quick check of my local library’s catalogue reveals that only one of his books is currently available to borrow, out of approximately 100 that he wrote. Whether very many of those books would still be on the shelves even had he not been convicted is doubtful. Mayne was...

'The advantage  that children's fiction has over other types of writing is its near irresistible appeal to the reader to identify directly with its characters.' (Colin Burrow in London Review of Books 21/1/21) I was reading Burrow's review of two books, one by Ursula Le Guin and the other a collection of interviews and conversations with her, when this sentence brought me up short. Why had I never thought of this? It explains so much about my approach to reading. When I was a child I always read at night, long after I was supposed to be asleep, and when I did finish a book and close my eyes I would carry on the action in my head, I would be one of the characters, be a part of their adventures, imagine new ones. My involvement was total.  One of Le Guin's later additions to the Earthsea trilogy. Those who identified with Sparrowhawk, the wizard of the earlier books, were in for a shock. As Burrow says 'always in Le Guin there is a  sharp ironical turn against any...