Vanished Worlds
70 years ago, in 1950, Elfrida Vipont won the Carnegie Medal with The Lark on the Wing, the second in a series of five books about the musical career of Kit Everard, a young Quaker. When I came to this book the only thing I knew about its author was that she wrote The Elephant and the Bad Baby, that brilliant collaboration with Raymond Briggs which is still one of my favourite picture books. In many ways The Lark on the Wing is a straightforward story about a girl who wants to become a professional singer (the author is more than a little snobbish about 'amateurs' and, it must be admitted, about lower forms of music, like Gilbert and Sullivan and sentimental popular songs). Kit faces various obstacles in the course of the book which, naturally, she overcomes. It is, as Marcus Crouch observes, a 'serious and deeply moving book.' He goes on to say that 'It matters very much to her (Elfrida Vipont), and to her readers, that Kit should find herself and remain true to h...