Quietness is Best - October 2019
At the end of one of my favourite stories from Alan Garner’s collection A Bag of Moonshine , Cocky-keeko, the foolish cockerel is crying out for help: But the old man was working too far distant for the cat to hear. So the fox stopped behind the woodshed. “Quietness is best,” he said, as he bit the head off Cocky-keeko; and he granched him up, bones and all, leaving the tail feathers for the wind to blow. “Eh, dear,” said the old man. “There’s some as just won’t be told.” I like quietness. An editor once told me I wrote quiet books, before saying, sympathetically, that quietness was bound to come back into fashion eventually. I like reading quiet books too, and I have a special fondness for the work of Charlotte Zolotow (1915-2013). For many y...