Flambards Now and Then

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 Christina as a young, independent woman setting out to make her own way in life in spite of the disapproval of many, including her Aunt Grace. The book has a very different feel from those set at Flambards itself, Flambards being a decaying country house in Essex.  Most of the action takes place around the airfield on the edge of London. It's about dreams of a new future in which new technologies will change the world, but at the same time we are constantly aware of how dangerous it is to fly these aeroplanes, and also of the ever-increasing threat of war, so that the future of Will and Christina is always uncertain.

I've had a bit of a Flambards month, not only reading K M Peyton's original trilogy and Linda Newbery's excellent 2018 continuation of the story, but also dipping into the thirteen episodes of Yorkshire TV's 1979 adaptation of the first three books. Along the way I had a slightly strange experience. I was reading The Key to Flambards, Linda Newbery's book, in which modern day descendants of the families who feature in K M Peyton's stories are trying to find out more about their family history. I found myself thinking—Hold on, don't they know about the books? This has all been written about. There was a TV series! It actually took me a few seconds to remember that in Linda Newbery's universe the Flambards books have never been written.

It's not just me who has this kind of problem. I was listening to More or Less (the BBC radio programme about statistics and data) and I heard about a controversy that had developed around a piece of research which showed that Mr Spock of the Starship Enterprise, famed for his logical Vulcan thinking, was more likely than not to make incorrect predictions about the way events would turn out. Outraged listeners complained that the research only took into account decisions Spock made while the cameras were running!

So, back to Flambards. I do not think I am, or ever was, the perfect reader for these books. I really enjoyed the descriptions of riding, of the countryside and most especially, in The Edge of the Cloud,  of the building and flying of aeroplanes in the early days of aviation, but the gothic excesses of life at Flambards, the beatings and thrashings, the mad old man and the abuse of servants were not for me. But then I don't much care for Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights either. I'm blocking my ears now to keep out the screams of horror and astonishment I can already imagine from readers, but really, why do they still make teenaged boys read Wuthering Heights for GCSE? A teacher I know of, realising that most boys and many girls would use one of the movie adaptations as an alternative to the task of reading had a rubber stamp made to save time when marking essays. It said: ONLY IN THE FILM! 

K M Peyton's original four books are all set between 1908 and the early 1920s. The heroine, Christina, is 11 years old at the start and has been an orphan for five years, shunted between relations until her Uncle Russell sends for her to live at Flambards. All the money at Flambards has been spent on horses and they live in luxury while the house slowly falls apart. Uncle Russell has been crippled in a hunting accident, but that somehow doesn't stop him thrashing his sons on a regular basis. The younger son, Will, breaks his leg in a hunting accident right at the start, and is glad, because he hates horses and dreams of building aeroplanes and flying. The elder son, Mark, is as far as I can see (but I'm only a man) a truly revolting character who mistreats both horses and people with equal callousness, and who has no redeeming features beyond his dark good looks. If you think Rupert Campbell-Black in Jilly Cooper's Rutshire chronicles you will not be far wrong. This is the boy Christina is destined (in his father's dreams) to marry. The money she'll inherit when she is 21 will save Flambards, that's the plan.

The K M Peyton books are romantic historical novels dealing with the decline of the English country house, the breakdown of the social order, the Great War and its aftermath, women's suffrage and the early days of flying, but Linda Newbery's book is very much a contemporary novel and its genius lies in the way that it links the impact of the modern war in Afghanistan on one of the present-day characters with the experiences of veterans of WW1, at the same time telling the story of its central character, Grace Russell, coming to terms with her parents' divorce, the loss of her home and, worst of all, with the loss of her leg when she's hit by an out-of-control car. 

Jacket illustration by Kathy Harnett

Part of this process, for Grace, is discovering her family history which is closely tied up with the old house, Flambards, where she and her mother come to stay. I can tell you from personal experience that is not easy to interest teenagers in family history, but it works in this case because Grace identifies so strongly with her ancestor, Christina, and because the discoveries which are made uncover other connections with the present day. I do think though that we find it easier to believe in Grace's interest because we, the readers, know so much about Christina and the others from reading those original books, the ones that Grace can't read because they don't exist.

I don't want to say much more about The Key to Flambards for fear of giving too much away. What I will say it that I found myself very moved at various points in the book, without ever quite understanding why it was happening—there was no specific trigger, just a build-up of small events.

I suppose I should also say something about that much-loved Sunday evening TV series. It clearly had a bigger budget than other adaptations of children's books from the same era that I've watched recently. It employed top writers like Alan Plater, and the oddly memorable score was by David Fanshawe, but I couldn't cope with the acting. It seems, like a lot of TV acting from the period, very stilted to modern eyes. Luckily the series made K M Peyton into a household name, and hopefully sold lots of books and one way or another paid for plenty of horses and their upkeep. And a lot of people loved it. Whether I would have loved it too, back then, I can't say as I had a one-year-old daughter and no television. I think not, though. Five seconds of Frank Mills's hideous country bumpkin accent as Fowler was more than enough for me. He was a great English character actor, constantly on TV for decades, but he couldn't do a rural accent to save his life.

The Flambards books are still in print, as are the even more wonderful Pennington books. Patrick Pennington is a bad boy teenaged hero who deserves to be far better known.

And finally,  because Linda Newbery's book brought it back to mind, here are two of my late wife, Ellie's great-uncles. Bob was killed at Ypres in 1916 and Walter at Arras in 1917, two of six brothers from a small Suffolk village who fought in WW1. 

Bob Elliott 1896-1916

Walter Elliott 1885-1917

When we visited northern France a few years ago the most haunting experience came when we spotted a small graveyard by the roadside, miles from anywhere, small grey stones lined with trees. It was very quiet and swallows were flying constantly in and out of the gravestones. Slowly we realised that these were the graves, not of British or French, but of German soldiers.

Originally published on ABBA November 2021