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If long awaited holiday plans have been cancelled, a literary replacement is Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book in Susan Cooper’s haunting Dark is Rising sequence. This Cornish seaside adventure could have been a Blytonesque romp, but Cooper’s instinctive feel for the menace and mystery behind so much English pastoral lifts it into an altogether more epic and haunting quest. It has everything, from ancient maps to clifftop tunnels, and, of course, a vicar in a silk jacket, which readers of John Masefield will recognise as the one true sign of duplicitous intent.
When nothing but transportation to an entirely different world will do, there’s also Ursula K. Le Guin. She drew sketches of the mist-wreathed Earthsea archipelago before writing a word; and the sagas of those islands are still unequalled for high fantasy. But while the world is complex and the philosophy profound, the stories have a mythic simplicity. The first book, The Wizard of Earthsea, tells of how Ged, a village boy, becomes a great wizard. He defeats a dragon by learning its name and escapes temptation by transforming into a falcon; but his greatest foe is a relentless shadow loosed into the world by his youthful pride, which threatens to devour him whole.
For those sensitive to dragons and sinister shadows in general, staying at home can be just as good. You don’t get more homely than a story written ‘sitting in the kitchen sink’, as Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle entrancingly begins. She wrote the book while in self-imposed Californian exile, longing for the familiarity of a life that seemed far removed, just as creative fulfilment and love seem tantalisingly out of reach for the Mortmains in the book. For anyone, child or adult, pressed by doubt and anxiety, this charming and optimistic account of first-time love will be the perfect balm.
While the immediate future remains uncertain, exploring the past can provide a welcome perspective. In Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy, children are sold, disposed of and enslaved with wicked 18th-century abandon. The child-catcher Mr Otis removes unwanted babies from mothers’ arms for cash, promising to deliver them to the Coram Foundling Hospital in London. Alas, a grisly fate awaits for most who fall into his hands. This ingeniously plotted Gothic thriller winds readers on a coiling tour of many historical iniquities, from vulnerable children to the ever-lurking horror of slavery. But the healing power of time and friendship is the ultimate destination of this absorbing novel.
Of course, for some inexplicable reason children may also be missing school. If they are, the blissfully puerile wit of Geoffrey Willans’s Down with Skool, alongside Ronald Searle’s spidery observations of gerunds in the wild, will correct them of this notion, as any fule kno. The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White, offers a more magical vision of educational possibility, with transformation into a fish and a badger on the syllabus. And if older children haven’t yet read Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole Diaries, it could be a good time to realise that nothing was ever quite as bad as being a teenager in the 1980s.
Children’s literature moulds and influences the adult imagination, and the very best speaks to both the child and the child reader in all of us. It places fantasy lands, the natural kingdom and domesticity all on a level without judgment, a world of freely interchangeable wondrous realities — all of them currently more alluring than our own.
Because you read about adrian mole
Also by Piers Torday
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