This is the fourth book in The Dark is Rising Sequence, and it picks up not long after the previous book ends.
Will Stanton has been very ill with hepatitis, and the doctor ask advised his parents to send him somewhere to rest for a while and recover his strength. In the previous book, his sister Mary had gone to stay with relatives in Wales after she had the mumps, so his parents agree to send him there. Even after he recovers, Will has a nagging feeling that he’s forgotten something very important. What he’s forgotten are the clues that he and his friends discovered at the end of the previous book, but little by little, they come back to him.
Will calls his relatives Aunt Gem and Uncle David, but really, they’re distant cousins. On his way to stay with them on their farm, Will sees a mountain that locals call “the Grey King”, which begins bringing back Will’s memory of the clues to the next item of power that he and his friends are supposed to find. An encounter with a strange dog with silvery eyes brings back the rest of Will’s memory, reminding him that he is the youngest of the Old Ones and it is his mission to find a magical harp in Wales.
The owner of the dog is an albino boy named Bran, who surprisingly knows the clues that Will had been struggling to remember. Bran reveals that Merriman visited him before Will arrived, told him to keep an eye out for Will and help him, and taught him the first part of the clue rhyme as a show that he can be trusted. The boys talk about what the clues in the rhyme mean. Will is supposed to find the harp on “the Day of the Dead”, which Will thinks means Halloween and which is coming soon, but he’s confused because the rhyme also refers to the end of the year. Bran says that Halloween might have once been regarded as the time of the New Year (which is true, and I discussed it in the History section of my Halloween Ideas site), and the two of them discuss some old traditions and superstitions about Halloween.
On Halloween, Bran and Will go into the mountains, and Will’s knowledge and abilities are tested before they are given the harp. Yet, Will is not the one to play it because he doesn’t know how. Bran is the harper. He also seems to have a strange connection to one of the lords who guarded the harp in the mountains. On the way down, the boys have a frightening encounter with a fox who has been killing sheep in the area, but weirdly, nobody else else can see the fox but the boys. A disagreeable farmer shoots poor Bran’s brave dog because he thinks that the dog is the one killing the sheep, and Bran is inconsolable. (I hate books where the dog dies.)
However, their work is not yet done. Will has to use what he’s learned from Bran about playing the harp to wake the Sleepers, who will aid the Light in the upcoming battle against the Dark. Bran also comes to learn his true identity and that of his mother. Although he is not one of the Old Ones, Bran is special and will play a pivotal role in the battle between Light and Dark.
The book is a Newbery Medal winner. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
Even though this book is the Newbery Medal winner in the series, I didn’t like it as well as the earlier books. It’s partly because the dog Cafall dies, and I always hate books where the dog dies. I love dogs, and also, I realize that it’s often a cheap way to give readers and emotional wrench, to kill off a beloved animal. Also, I missed the familiar characters from the earlier books. The Drew children are not in this story, and even Merriman doesn’t play much of a role. For most of the story, Will is alone, although he does make an important friend in Bran, whose past is more mysterious than most people know.
Although, Cafall also represents one of the innocent sacrifices in the name of the battle between good and evil. Bran is angry at Cafall’s death and says that neither he nor his dog were part of Will’s battle or quest, and it wasn’t fair for them to be dragged into it or for Cafall to be killed. He’s partly right, although he is actually much closer to the center of this battle than he knows. Another character in the book talks to Will about the apparent callousness of the Light for those who end up being sacrificed in the struggle. Will’s answer is that some things cannot be helped. They might want to protect everyone and make things work out well for everyone, but circumstances don’t always make it possible, and there are times when trying to save someone or make someone happy could cause something else to happen that would be worse for everyone. I’m not completely satisfied with that explanation because, in this particular instance, I don’t see why this sacrifice was necessary and I feel like it could have been avoided, like I felt that another tragedy in The Dark is Rising could have been avoided. I suppose the principle that avoiding one sort of bad thing could lead to something worse could be true, but I just don’t feel it in these stories.
I was more convinced and intrigued by the concept of people who aid the dark without knowing that they’re doing it. In the previous book in the series, the author addressed the idea of neutral parties in the struggle between good and evil, but this book introduces the idea of ignorant or deluded people who do bad things without realizing. In the story, they aren’t regarded as true agents of the Dark because they haven’t consciously joined the Dark side and don’t even know that there’s any Light/Dark struggle happening around them, but they are doing what the Dark wants them to do and hurting people and the cause of the Light either because they are being tricked and manipulated into doing it or because they have some other motive that allows them to do bad things because they don’t care as much about the concept of good and evil as much as accomplishing their own goal.
In this case, the unwitting helper of the dark is the farmer who shot Bran’s dog. He genuinely did think that the dog was killing his sheep, so he thought that he was just protecting his property by killing the dog. That could be seen as a good motive gone astray, but when Bran’s real history is revealed, it is also revealed that the farmer also has darker motives for his bad behavior that he has been trying to keep hidden. It’s not just about protecting his sheep but also his resentment against Bran and Bran’s father, so he enjoyed hurting them by killing their dog. The farmer’s resentment goes back to when Bran’s mother, Guinevere, brought him out of the past to be raised by his adoptive father in the 20th century. Bran’s real father is King Arthur, but by the time Bran was born, Guinevere had already betrayed Arthur and feared that he would reject his son because of what she did. She wanted Bran to grow up in a safe place, away from his parents’ struggles. At her request, Merlin (which is Merriman Lyon’s real identity), brought her forward in time to the 20th century to find a new home for Bran. Bran’s adoptive father is a good man, and Guinevere knew that her son would be safe with him. He loved her in return and wanted her to stay and marry him, but Guinevere knew she couldn’t stay, so she left secretly, leaving Bran behind. Her departure might have been hastened because the farmer was jealous of Bran’s adoptive father for having Guinevere. Although he didn’t know Guinevere’s true identity, she was a beautiful woman, and the farmer wanted her for himself. He apparently tried to attack her or maybe even force himself on her, and he was fought off by Bran’s adoptive father and a friend of his. Although the farmer is a married man, he still harbors possessive feelings about Bran’s absent mother and resentment toward the men who stopped him from taking her. By extension, he also resents Bran. In the end, he is driven mad by his obsessions and his manipulation by the forces of the Dark.
The day before his eleventh birthday on Midwinter, Will Stanton has an uneasy feeling that something is about to happen. First, the rabbits that his family keep behave oddly. Then, other animals seem to be afraid of him when they never have before. When he and his brother James go to pick up some hay from Mr. Dawson, Mr. Dawson makes an odd comment about “the Walker” being abroad and that it’s going to be a bad night. Then, Mr. Dawson says that he has something for Will for his birthday. He gives Will an odd iron ornament and tells him to keep it safe and not talk about it with other people. Everything about this day seems odd to Will, but he accepts this unusual gift.
That night, Will has an increasing sense of terror, and a rook apparently breaks the skylight in his room during a snow storm. The next day, Will can’t seem to wake up his sleeping family. He puts on warm clothes and leaves the house with a strange feeling that this is somehow his destiny. Things in the area look different, as if he is now in a different time, sometime in the past. Eventually, he sees a man he knows who works for Mr. Dawson, John Smith. John Smith is working on horseshoes for a black horse that belongs to a mysterious stranger in a dark cloak. The mysterious stranger offers him food and a ride on his horse, but Will refuses both. The stranger gives him an uneasy feeling, and without really knowing why, Will says that he is looking for “the Walker.” The cloaked stranger tells him that “the Rider is abroad” and tries to grab him, but John Smith pulls him out of the way, and the stranger is angry. John Smith tells Will that he is just newly woken and will have to figure things out for himself but to trust his instincts today. A beautiful white horse appears, and John Smith says that Will can ride it, if he wants, but Will’s instincts tell him that he needs to go on alone. As he leaves, Will sees John Smith giving the white mare shoes that look like the iron ornament that Mr. Dawson gave him.
As he explores the countryside further, Will encounters a wandering tramp that he saw attacked by rooks the day before and confronts him as being “the Walker.” The Walker is defensive and suspicious, and he asks Will to show him “the Sign.” Will realizes that he must mean the iron ornament that he now wears on his belt, but before he can show it to the Walker, the Rider comes and frightens the Walker away. The Rider sees his Sign and comments that Will only has one of them so far, and that won’t help him much. Fortunately, the white mare comes and carries Will away from the Rider.
The white mare carries Will away into the hills, he has a sensation like he’s falling, and then, he finds himself alone in the snow near a pair of carved wooden doors that appear to be standing by themselves, attached to nothing. Will pushes on the doors and finds himself in what seems to be a great hall, hung with tapestries. There is an old woman and a tall man standing by the fireplace, and they greet him. Will tries to ask them about the doors and why they seem to be standing by themselves, but the doors have vanished behind him. The man says that Will’s first lesson is that nothing is what it seems to be.
The man introduces himself as Merriman Lyon (introduced in the previous book in the series), and he says that he and Will were born with the same gift, the power of the Old Ones. Now that it’s Will’s eleventh birthday, his gift is awakening, but he must learn how to control it. At first, Will doesn’t think that he has any particular gift, so Merriman shows him how he can receive mental pictures from someone else’s mind and send them a mental picture and how he can even put out a fire with his mind. Will becomes convinced that he does indeed have powers that normal boys don’t have. Merriman tells him that this gift is a burden, like many special gifts, but he was born with this gift for a special purpose.
Merriman says that he doesn’t want to tell him too much yet because the full knowledge of his destiny may be dangerous for him while he is still learning to use his gift. However, he does tell Will that he is actually one of the Old Ones, the first of his kind to be born in the last 500 years, and he will be the very last of them. Like other Old Ones, he will play a role in the battle between good and evil. His first role is that of the Sign-Seeker. He must find the six Signs and guard them. The iron ornament is the first Sign, but the others won’t be as easy to find.
Will returns to his family and his ordinary life, buying Christmas presents for his siblings for the coming holiday, but he knows that his life is no longer ordinary. He has much to learn about how to use his powers, and the sinister forces that pursue him to try to stop him from carrying out his mission.
The book is a Newbery Honor Book. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book was adapted as a movie called The Seeker in 2007.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Fantasy books sometimes have to deal with the subject of religion and the relationship between magic and religion. This book also does so somewhat, but I noticed that it also seems to try to remove itself from consideration of the issue at the same time. At one point, Merriman discusses the idea of witches and witchcraft trials with Will, telling him that none of those involved were Old Ones, like the two of them. He says that everyone involved with witchcraft trials were ordinary humans, most of the people who were called “witches” were innocent victims although a small number were genuinely evil, and generally, the witchcraft trials were the result of human madness and irrationality, not genuine magic. In other words, readers don’t need to worry about trying to reconcile the power of the Old Ones with witchcraft because the author says that the two of them are two different, unrelated things.
Will and his family celebrate Christmas during the course of the book, and they go to church, so it’s apparently fine for an Old One to also be a Christian. Yet, there is a scene at church on Christmas where Will and John Smith have to stop the forces of the Dark attacking the church. The minister tries by calling on the powers of God and exorcising the evil spirits, but John Smith says that the minister’s efforts don’t work because “This battle is not for his fighting”, apparently indicating that the powers of Light and Dark as portrayed in this story are somehow outside of any religion or the interference of any god because they are forces that are completely unto themselves. The traditional Christian view would be that God commands the forces of good and light while the devil commands the forces of evil and darkness, but they’re saying here that’s not the case in this story. Will’s thought is that there is a place that exists out of time where all the Gods that ever were came from and also all of the forces and powers in the world, and it seems like some of these exist independently of each other, that they don’t have any beginning and so none of them is less old than any of the others. There is an element of pagan and folklore traditions that runs through these books, and I think that part of this concept references that, but I also see that looking at the battle between Light and Dark in this way, as being something independent of absolutely everything else, leaves the author of the stories free to have it play out in whatever way makes a good story without having to make it adhere to any rules and traditions other than the ones she’s chosen.
Of course, even fictional magic has to follow some rules in order to make logical sense to the readers. As I said, there are pagan and/or folklore traditions that are implied to be true or to have more significance than most people would suspect. Will uses holly as a form of protection for his home during Christmas. Aside from its association with Christmas, there are also many folkloric superstitions about holly. It is also revealed that part of what makes Will so special is that he is the seventh son of a seventh son, another concept from folklore.
A theme that is carried over to this book from the first one in the series is that evil can sometimes appear innocent and even friendly. People who have appeared as friends before can be revealed to be secretly evil or coerced to the dark side, even people who have been close before. Those who aren’t as in tune with the battle between good and evil may be fooled by friendly smiles, charming manners, and a pleasant appearance, but those who are aware of the difference between dark and light can feel when someone isn’t right.
There is one case in this book where a previously good person turns to the Dark because he feels betrayed about how Merry put his life at risk for the cause of the Light. I feel like this could have been avoided if Merry had been more honest with him in the beginning about the risks of what they were doing and the reasons why it was so important, but Merry seems to feel like it was all inevitable, something that was fated to be. Yet, at the end of this person’s life, Merry emphasizes that all of the choices this person made were his own, and although he went through much suffering because of things that had to happen as they did, he could have still had a better life even while undergoing his ordeals if he had made different choices along the way. I think I see what he means, that there are some things in life that are unavoidable but people can make them better or worse through their own choices and behavior, but I still feel like Merry set him up for this bad situation because he didn’t explain things properly when he should have. Maybe that was Merry’s bad decision, too?
Parts of this book actually reminded me of The Box of Delights, a vintage children’s fantasy book that also takes place at Christmas. In both books, Herne the Hunter, a character from folklore, makes an appearance, and the boys in each story get turned into different animals through their adventures with magical books.
The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston, 1954, 1955, 1982, 1983.
Seven-year-old Toseland is traveling by train to stay with his great-grandmother Oldknow at the old family home, Green Noah, for Christmas. His mother is dead, and his father now lives in Burma with his new wife, who Toseland doesn’t know very well. He has no brothers or sisters, and he spends most of his time at boarding school, so he is often lonely, wishing that he had a family outside of school, like the other boys. His great-grandmother is the only other relative he has, and he has never met her before. He is a little nervous at the idea of meeting her because he knows that she must be very old.
When Toseland arrives at the station, it’s raining, and there has been flooding, but there is a taxi-man waiting to take him to the house. When he arrives, he is immediately fascinated by the large, old house and all of the things in it. It reminds him of a castle, and he marvels at how his great-grandmother could live in such a place. He is surprised at how at home he feels there and how easily he likes and gets along with his great-grandmother. For the first time in his life since his mother died, he really feels at home, and when he asks if the house partly belongs to him, too, his great-grandmother reassures him that it does.
The two of them talk about what to call each other. Toseland’s great-grandmother asks him to call her Granny (although she is still often called Mrs. Oldknow throughout the book), and she asks him if he has any nicknames. Toseland says that the boys at school call him Towser and his stepmother calls him Toto, but he doesn’t like either nickname. Granny Oldknow says that Toseland is a family name and there have been other Toselands before him. The last one was his grandfather, and his nickname was Tolly, so Granny asks him if he would like to be called that also. Toseland says that he likes that nickname better than the others, and his mother used to call him that, so he is called Tolly from that point on.
Granny Oldknow shows Tolly to his room and helps him begin to unpack. It’s a wonderful room with many old toys that used to belong to the other children who have lived in the house in the past. Among the toys is an old dollhouse which Tolly realizes is a miniature version of the house they’re in. When he finds the miniature version of his room, he notices that there are four beds in it instead of one. He asks Granny Oldknow if other children stay at Green Noah, and she cryptically says that they do sometimes, and he might see them, but they come when they want to.
Tolly becomes fascinated by a portrait of three children in old-fashioned clothes with their mother and grandmother. Granny Oldknow tells him that those three children lived in the house long ago. The oldest boy was an earlier Toseland, who was nicknamed Toby. His younger brother was named Alexander, and their little sister was named Linnet. Granny Oldknow had been an orphan when she was a child and was raised at Green Noah by an uncle. Because she was an only child, she often lonely and liked to pretend that the children in the picture were her siblings, so Tolly decides that he’d like to do the same thing.
Tolly asks his great-grandmother questions about Toby, Alexander, and Linnet and learns details of their lives. Toby had a sword because he was going to be a soldier when he grew up, a pet deer, and a horse named Feste who loved him. Alexander had a book in Latin that he loved to read and a special flute. Linnet used to keep birds in a wicker cage that is still in Tolly’s room, along with the toy mouse that used to belong to Toby. Sometimes, Tolly thinks that toys in his room move when he’s not looking, and at night, he hears children moving about and laughing, and he thinks that it’s the three children from the painting.
Tolly comes to the conclusion that the three children are still around Green Noah and that they’re playing hide-and-seek with them. He tries to play with them, too, and the children apparently give him a twig in the shape of a ‘T’. Granny Oldknow tells him that she used to play hide-and-seek with the children when she was young, and they would give her an ‘L’ twig because her first name is Linnet, like the little girl in the painting. Later, he hears the children singing Christmas carols. Tolly becomes frustrated that the children tease him and never really show themselves to him, but Mrs. Oldknow tells him that “they’re like shy animals” and that he has to give them a chance to decide that they’re ready to come to him.
He finds the key to the old toy box in his room, and inside the box, he finds more things that belonged to the three children. When he shows them to Mrs. Oldknow, she talks about how things were when the three children were alive at Green Noah. Tolly is shocked when he realizes for the first time that Toby, Alexander, and Linnet are all dead. Mrs. Oldknow gently tells him that they lived at Green Noah centuries ago and could not be alive now. Sadly, the children all died young in the Great Plague during the 17th century. Their illness was sudden and brief, and they all sickened and died in one day along with their mother. Tolly and his great-grandmother are descended from the children’s older brother, who wasn’t at home when this happened. However, the children never left Green Noah, which used to be called Green Knowe years ago. Tolly still loves the children, even though they’re ghostly and elusive. He craves the sense of family he gets from them, having been deprived of family feelings for so much of his young life.
Mrs. Oldknow continues to tell Tolly stories about the three children and other members of his family. As his connection to his ancestors grows, Tolly begins to catch glimpses of the children more and more, and eventually, he’s able to see them and talk to them. He asks the children about their mother, and the children say that she’s in heaven but doesn’t mind them coming back to visit their old home from time to time. The children don’t seem sad at being dead, enjoying the freedom of playing around their old home with the animals and the spirits of their old pets, who keep them company. Their final illnesses had only lasted a few hours before they died, and their deaths happened so long ago that they say that they hardly remember the Great Plague and what it felt like. Tolly is still sad and frustrated that the children appear and disappear so suddenly, but his attachment to them grows and so does his attachment to Green Noah itself. As Christmas comes, Tolly develops a bond with his family, both living and dead, and a realization that the old family home that connects them is also his home, a place they can all return to.
The book is the first in a series and is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
This is a ghost story, but it’s not a scary ghost story. There’s nothing frightening about the three ghost children. It’s sad that they died so young, but at the same time, they’re not very sad about it themselves. They seem to enjoy playing together endlessly with the animals around their old home and seeing the new relatives who inhabit the house, their older brother’s descendants. Even their former pets are no longer sad at the children’s passing because they are also spirits who continue to play with them through the centuries. There is one semi-scary part of the story involving a witch’s curse placed on an old tree called Green Noah, which is how the name of the house was changed from Green Knowe, but Tolly is protected by the ghosts of his ancestors.
There is never any desire for the characters to rid Green Noah of its ghosts. They are family and are part of the place, as much a part of it as the living are. The ghosts do not feel trapped there, either. They are just revisiting the home they loved and the family members who now live there. They can come and go as they please, and the ghost children often do.
This also is not the kind of story where a child knows that a place is haunted but can’t convince the adults or tries to hide the ghosts’ presence from the adults. Mrs. Oldknow is fully aware that the ghosts are there and has known about them since her own childhood. Generations of children in the family have probably known about them and played with them, and they are also not the only family ghosts who inhabit the old house. At one point, Tolly and Mrs. Oldknow hear a woman singing and the rocking of a cradle, and Mrs. Oldknow says that she’s heard it before around Christmas, a grandmother singing to a baby. Tolly is confused because even little Linnet wasn’t a baby when she died, and Mrs. Oldknow says that this isn’t the children’s grandmother but somebody from generations earlier than the three children. This grandmother ghost has been around so long that Mrs. Oldknow doesn’t know who she or the baby are supposed to be, although we are told that they are about 400 years old, where the three children died about 300 years earlier. Generations of the same family have lived in the house and have all left their mark on it, and part of them is still there. Now, Tolly has also become part of this family home, and it’s also a part of him. The ghosts are hesitant to fully show themselves to Tolly at first and seem more attached to Granny Oldknow, probably because she’s lived there longer, since she was an infant. The ghosts know her, and she knows all of their stories. However, they are all family, and Tolly develops a new connection to his family as his great-grandmother tells him the stories about them, and he can hear and see the ghosts more often.
Really, that feeling of connection and connectedness is the primary focus of the story. In the beginning, Tolly is lonely, feeling like he doesn’t have a family and doesn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. His father lives far away in Burma with his new wife, and Tolly doesn’t feel connected to them. His mother is gone, and he spends most of his time at school, even having to remain there during the holidays when other students are going home to their families. His great-grandmother inviting him to Green Noah is the first time that Tolly feels a real connection to anyone in his family since his mother’s death, and through her stories and his encounters with the ghosts, he comes to see that he really is part of a much larger family, going back ages. Just because most of his family is now dead or scattered doesn’t mean that they’re not his family. They still love him, and he loves them, even across the centuries. Green Noah really is a family home, and it’s a place that family can return to, even those who seem to be gone forever. It’s a place that has known both the joys of a happy family and the tragedies of loss that families experience from time to time. Through it all, it’s still home, and importantly, it becomes the home that Tolly has been wishing for.
The story takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and by Christmas, Tolly has received important presents. First, the ghostly Alexander grants him the give of his special flute, which had been a reward from King Charles II for singing so beautifully for him when he was alive. Tolly also has musical talents, and his great-grandmother decides to switch him to a different school so he can develop his talents and so he can stay at Green Noah during his school holidays. On Christmas, Tolly also receives his own pet dog, very much like the one that the ghostly Linnet owned, and he names his dog after hers, just as he has been named after all the other Toselands who have gone before.
In some ways, the story reminds me a little of When Marnie Was There (some people might know the story from the Miyazaki movie version), which has similar themes of family and belonging and ancestors reaching out across time to remind children that, while life is brief and often complicated, love is eternal and everyone belongs somewhere and to someone. However, The Children of Greene Knowe is a much gentler story, and it also contains some shorter stories about Tolly’s family.
Kay Harker is an orphan, the ward of Sir Theopompus, usually in the care of his governess, Miss Sylvia Daisy. One day, Sir Theopompus asks Kay if he has any idea what he wants to do when he grows up. Kay says that he likes the idea of being a jockey, but Sir Theopompus says that he could be a sea captain, like his great-grandfather. According to the stories about him, Kay’s great-grandfather sailed around the world and stole a treasure from the priests of Santa Barbara worth about a million pounds (British money). The stories differ about what happened to the treasure, though. In some versions, his crew mutinied and took the treasure for themselves, but other stories say that he brought the treasure home with him and hid it somewhere in his family home, the home where Kay now lives.
Sir Theopompus asks Kay if he’s ever come across the treasure, but Kay says he hasn’t. Sir Theopompus suggests that if Kay finds the treasure, the two them could split it between them. Kay says that wouldn’t be fair, if he had to do all the work of finding it by himself, and also the treasure is stolen property, so it would rightly belong to the priests of Santa Barbara. Still, Sir Theopompus encourages Kay to search for the treasure. Kay doesn’t believe that the treasure is really in the house or that his great-grandfather would be a thief, and he doesn’t think it’s fair to tell such stories about him when he isn’t there to defend himself. His governess tells him that he has been impertinent and sends him to bed early.
Kay is later woken by someone calling to him to open the door, and he sees a door in his room that he has never noticed before. The voice he hears belongs to the black cat called Nibbins, who tells Kay to come with him and not make any noise. Most of the house is asleep, and Nibbins refers to the ones who are awake as the “midnight folk.” He leads Kay down a secret passage that was once used by smugglers.
There, Kay learns that his old toys were his “guards.” He doesn’t know where his old toys are because his governess packed them away when she came, saying that they would just remind him of the past. Nibbins says that his old toys had stumbled onto a clue about the hidden treasure and went in search of it. They didn’t think it would take them long to find it, but he hasn’t heard from them since. Kay sadly fears that his old toys may actually be dead. (A horrifying thought.)
Then, there’s an even more shocking revelation. Nibbins shows him that there are spy hole where Kay can see what’s happening in various rooms in the house, and in the dining room, he witnesses a meeting of witches! Nibbins shows Kay where the witches keep their brooms, and they take a couple of the brooms on a ride to the woods, where Nibbins introduces Kay to a poacher called Bitem. They witness the witches having a bonfire and a magical ritual at Wicked Hill. Nibbins says that he used to be a witches’ cat and helped with rituals like that. Sometimes, he still feels the call of magic.
The leader of the magical group is a wizard called Abner Brown, and they overhear him saying to the witches that they are going to hunt for the Harker Treasure. Abner has learned that the treasure is not actually in the Harker house, but it’s somewhere close by. Abner reveals previously-unknown details of the treasure’s history, including the fact that his own grandfather had once been in possession of it and hid it until someone called Benito Trigger found it. Abner has found evidence that his grandfather tracked down Trigger and confronted him in this very area and that Trigger may have killed him. Abner believes that the treasure is still hidden somewhere near to where his grandfather died. Nibbins leads Kay back to his bedroom through another secret passage before anyone discovers that he is gone.
Kay knows that what he witnessed the night before wasn’t a dream because, in the morning, he sees the remains of the leftover goose that the witches were eating the night before, picked to the bones. The servants think that the cats got at the goose and ate the leftovers, but Kay knows better.
Then, the portrait of Kay’s great-grandfather comes to life, and his great-grandfather invites Kay into the portrait, showing him the house as it was in the past. His great-grandfather denies having stolen the treasure years ago, but he says that it was entrusted to him and that he lost it. He was in Santa Barbara when the territory was breaking away from Spain, and the archbishop gave him the treasure to guard from the revolutionaries. However, his crew did mutiny and turn pirate. The crew took the treasure, and they abandoned Kay’s great-grandfather ashore, far from any European colony. For a time, he says that he was a slave of a tribe of Indians (Native Americans), but he eventually escaped and made it home to England. He heard that his old ship may have sunk, but he doesn’t know for sure. Even he doesn’t know where the treasure is now, thinking that it must have either sunk with the ship or been scattered by the crew. It’s always bothered him that he was unable to fulfill his promise to keep the treasure safe. He wants Kay to learn what happened to the treasure and, if possible, restore it to its rightful owners.
Through Kay’s midnight adventures and the ghosts of the past stirred up by the magic of the witches, Kay begins to learn the full sequence of events that led to the treasure being lost, and eventually, what happened to it. Along the way, Kay also makes the startling discovery that his governess is actually one of the witches!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
There were some parts of the story that I found difficult to follow because the story kind of jumps around, people start talking about things as if we should already know about them, and some things that Kay encounters are not fully explained. Many of them seem like dream sequences or imaginings, except they have lasting consequences. Then, there are times when people go into lengthy explanations that seem to meander, and there are people who go by multiple names. For awhile, Kay almost seems to forget about seeking his great-grandfather’s treasure and starts looking for the treasure of an old highwayman instead, and there is a strange interlude with King Arthur and his knights.
Still, this story is a children’s classic, and it’s almost like a collection of all the features that are found in classic children’s literature: an orphan, talking animals, witches, pirates, ghosts, mermaids, a highwayman, King Arthur and his knights, hidden treasure, etc.
For awhile, I thought that the story might end with the implication that much of it was in Kay’s imagination. Kay is a lonely boy who doesn’t see his guardian very often and lives with a strict governess and no other children for company. I thought maybe he was spinning dreams or imagined stories to explain other events happening around him. I spent part of the story working out how a child might interpret a strict governess who took away his old toys as a witch, and I thought maybe she was in a romantic relationships with Abner Brown, which would be why Kay would see him as a wizard. Then, maybe these young people had parties in the house with their friends after Kay was put to bed, so he imagined that they were having witches’ meetings. They could also be hunting for the legendary treasure, so all the parts related to treasure-hunting could be true. However, the book implies that the magical parts of the story are real. Even the magical things Kay experiences have real world consequences, which help both him and readers to realize that what he has seen has really happened.
I thought that the story became a little more cohesive after Kay makes the discovery that his governess is actually one of the witches. He eventually learns the full truth of what happened to the treasure years ago and meets up with his old toys/guards, who are still alive and have been seeking the treasure the entire time. Kay’s toys/guards bring the treasure from its hiding place to a secret hiding place in Kay’s room and help him to alert the proper authorities and restore the treasure to its rightful owner. Kay’s governess is arrested when she and her friends are caught trespassing in pursuit of the treasure and in possession of smuggled goods. The governess is released when Abner Brown pays the fines for their activities, but she leaves the area instead of returning to Kay. Kay’s home life changes for the better because a friend of his mother comes to live with him and look after him.
Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man by Donald J. Sobol, 1967, 1982.
The Idaville police department has an excellent record, but that’s because the chief of police’s ten-year-old son is Encyclopedia Brown. People praise Chief Brown, and Chief Brown doesn’t feel like he can admit how much help his son gives him because he doubts anyone would believe him. Encyclopedia himself doesn’t want to admit to other people that he helps his father figure out tough cases because he doesn’t want to seem too different from the others kids at school. However, Encyclopedia also has a detective business, helping the neighborhood kids to solve their problems for only 25 cents a day, plus expenses.
I always liked Encyclopedia Brown books when I was a kid! There are a couple of instances in this book of underage kids smoking, but I’d like to point out that smoking isn’t portrayed as a good think. Bugs is shown smoking in a picture, but he’s a young hoodlum and Encyclopedia’s nemesis, not one of the good guys in the stories. In another case, there’s a kid who smokes coffee grounds with a homemade pipe because he’s too young to buy tobacco. At first, he thinks he’s clever for figuring out how to do that and sneak a smoke without his mother’s knowledge, but it ends up getting him into trouble, and he promises Encyclopedia that he’ll give it up if he helps him out. Encyclopedia doesn’t lecture him, but he does refer to smoking as “burning your lungs”, so it seems that he isn’t in favor of it.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Stories in the Book:
The Case of the Marble Shooter
Algernon Kehoe is a master at marbles, but when he beat Bugs Meany, Bugs took all of his marbles, including his best shooters. Can Encyclopedia get Algernon’s marbles back?
The Case of Bugs Meany, Detective
Bugs Meany resents Encyclopedia for interfering with his schemes, but he can’t fight him directly because Encyclopedia’s detective partner, Sally, is the toughest and most athletic girl in their grade at school, and she’s beaten Bugs in a fight before. However, this time, he thinks he’s come up with a great way to get revenge – turn his gang, the Tigers, into a rival detective agency and beat Encyclopedia at his own game.
Someone steals a violin from the kids’ friend, Mario, and Bugs shows off that he can get it back before Encyclopedia and claim the reward for finding it. Of course, the kids’ first thought is that Bugs stole the violin himself. Can they prove it?
The Case of the Underwater Car
Encyclopedia and some friends want to go camping, and his mother tells him that he ought to ask Benny to go as well. Encyclopedia and the other kids like Benny, but they don’t like to camp with him because he snores badly. Sure enough, that night, Benny snores again, and Encyclopedia and the other boys have trouble getting to sleep. Encyclopedia leaves the tent for awhile and witnesses a bizarre car accident. The car misses a turn in the road, and the driver jumps out, screaming for help. The driver claims that he fell asleep at the wheel and that he woke up just in time to save himself. He says that his back is now badly injured, and he’s making a large claim on his insurance. However, Encyclopedia knows how to prove that the whole accident was staged.
The Case of the Whistling Ghost
A boy named Fabius hires Encyclopedia because he thinks his camera was stolen by a ghost. Fabius likes to study bugs, and he went inside the old, abandoned Morgan house to see if he could find any interesting bugs there. He was about to photograph a spider when a white ghost came down the stairs, making scary noises and an odd whistling sound. Fabius got spooked and ran off, leaving his camera behind. Later, when he got up the nerve to go back for his camera, it was gone.
The Case of the Explorer’s Money
A famous explorer dies, and a large amount of his money disappears. With so many people coming to his estate to attend an auction of the explorer’s belongings, how can Encyclopedia figure out how the thief plans to evade the searches being conducted by the police and get the money out of the estate?
The Case of the Coffee Smoker
A friend of the kids is being blackmailed. Someone is threatening to tell his mother that he’s been secretly smoking coffee grounds (because he’s too young to buy tobacco and thinks he’s found a clever way around the problem). He promises to kick the habit if Encyclopedia can stop the blackmailer. It isn’t hard to figure out who the blackmailer might be, but proving it will take more thought.
The Case of the Chinese Vase
A friend of Encyclopedia’s has a job cutting lawns to earn extra money for his family. While he’s working on a job, someone breaks an expensive vase in his client’s house, and they accuse Encyclopedia’s friend of doing it. Encyclopedia knows that it was actually the daughter of the house who did it, even though he wasn’t in the house at the time himself. How?
The Case of the Blueberry Pies
This year, there’s been a change to the pie-eating contest because local mothers think that the usual eating contest is gross and unhealthy. To make it healthier, they’ve limited the eating portion to two pies and added a race portion to the event. (Because running is a good thing to do immediately after eating two whole pies quickly?) However, one of the contestants seems to win too easily. How did they cheat?
The Case of the Murder Man
Cicero, a boy actor, wants to put on a mystery play with himself as the star as entertainment for an interfaith youth gathering. The problem is that he doesn’t have a good mystery story in mind, and he recruits Encyclopedia to write one that the audience can solve along with the characters.
The Case of the Million Pesos
Encyclopedia’s friend, Tim Gomez, is worried about his uncle, who is in jail in Mexico. He’s a famous baseball player, but he’s been accused of robbing a bank. Tim thinks his uncle was framed by a man named Pedro Morales because the woman he loved married Tim’s uncle instead, and he’s jealous. Tim’s uncle has an abili, but it’s not one that would be easy to prove. Even though the robbery occurred in another country, Tim asks Encyclopedia to consider the problem and see if he can think of something that will help.
Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol, 1963, 1982.
The Idaville police department has an excellent record, but that’s because the chief of police’s ten-year-old son is Encyclopedia Brown. People praise Chief Brown, and Chief Brown doesn’t feel like he can admit how much help his son gives him because he doubts anyone would believe him. Encyclopedia himself doesn’t want to admit to other people that he helps his father figure out tough cases because he doesn’t want to seem too different from the others kids at school. However, Encyclopedia also has a detective business, helping the neighborhood kids to solve their problems for only 25 cents a day, plus expenses.
This is the very first book in the series and introduces the character and how he begins solving mysteries. It also explains how he meets his detective partner Sally Kimball and his neighborhood nemesis Bug Meany, who is the leader of a gang of boys called the Tigers.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Stories in the Book:
The Case of Natty Nat
In Encyclopedia’ first case ever, he helps his father to find the real criminal in a robbery case.
The Case of the Scattered Cards
Deciding after his first success that he wants to be a detective, Encyclopedia starts his own detective business out of his garage. His first client is a boy named Clarence, whose tent has been stolen by Bug Meany and his gang of friends called the Tigers. This is the first time that Encyclopedia meets Bugs, who becomes his neighborhood nemesis.
The Case of the Civil War Sword
Bugs Meany offers to trade a sword that he says dates from the Civil War and was once owned by Stonewall Jackson to a boy in exchange for his bike. A real antique sword would be world a great deal more than a bike, but Encyclopedia can tell that it’s a fake.
The Case of Merko’s Grandson
Sally Kimball is one of the prettiest and most athletic girls at school, and she’s also one of the smartest. She wants to prove that she’s as smart as any boy and challenges Encyclopedia to a mystery-solving contest. It’s boy against girl, with Bugs Meany and the Tigers surprisingly rallying behind Encyclopedia. (Bugs has reason to resent Sally, who beat him in a fight after he was bullying another kid. He resents her more than he resents Encyclopedia.) Encyclopedia solves the mystery that Sally poses for him, but rather than becoming another nemesis, Sally joins Encyclopedia’s detective agency.
The Case of the Bank Robber
Encyclopedia and Sally go down to the bank to open an account for the earnings from the detective business, and they witness a robbery in progress. They see the robber collide with a blind beggar and run off, but when the police catch up with the robber, he doesn’t have the money from the robbery with him. A visit with the blind beggar settles what happened.
The Case of the Happy Nephew
A man with a criminal history is accused of robbing a shop. He says that he’s innocent because he only just returned from a long car trip, but his small nephew accidentally proves that can’t be true.
The Case of the Diamond Necklace
Chief Brown is embarrassed because a necklace that he was supposed to guard was apparently stolen from an event where it was supposed to be auctioned off. Encyclopedia notices an inconsistency in the witness statement that proves what really happened.
The Case of the Knife in the Watermelon
A member of a local gang of kids broke into the storeroom of a grocery store and tried to rob it. (It’s the Lions this time instead of the Tigers. First, I think it’s funny that they have the same name as a benevolent club, and second, I want to make a joke about how there should be a third gang in their town call the Bears – Lions, Tigers, and Bears, oh my!) Fortunately, he was frightened away before he took anything, but in his getaway, he accidentally tripped and stabbed a watermelon with his knife, leaving the knife behind. The owner of the grocery store becomes Encyclopedia’s first adult client (other than his father), hiring him to figure out which kid in the gang it was.
The Case of the Missing Roller Skates
Encyclopedia had Sally’s roller skates because he was fixing them for her, but before he can give them back, they’re stolen from the dentist’s office during his appointment. Encyclopedia tracks down the thief!
The Case of the Champion Egg Spinner
A kid has been winning an egg spinning contest against other kids after convincing them to bet some of their prized possessions. The other kids ask Encyclopedia to find out how he’s been winning.
The Bodies in the Bessledorf Hotel by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, 1986.
Officer Feeney is the first person who suggests that, someday, there might be a dead body at the Bessledorf Hotel. The hotel is coincidentally located next to the local funeral parlor, which is why the subject of dead bodies comes up, and Officer Feeney has a way of suggesting frightening things that scare Bernie Magruder, son of the hotel’s manager. Officer Feeney’s reasoning is that most people die in bed, so it only makes sense that some of them would be hotel beds. The hotel has 30 rooms, and with people coming and going, it’s surely just a matter of time before a guest dies there. It’s a morbid thought, although Bernie reasons that Officer Feeney is overestimating the number of people who pass through the hotel because it isn’t always full and some of the guests are long-term residents.
Still, Bernie gets a shock after he returns to the hotel, and the cleaning lady, Hildegarde bursts in on him and his parents, hysterical about finding a body in a bathtub of Room 107 with all his clothes on. Bernie’s father tells his wife to call Officer Feeney to write a report of the death and considers whether they can remove the body secretly, perhaps in a laundry cart, to avoid bad publicity for the hotel. Unfortunately, some of their guests already heard Hildegarde screaming about a dead body, so word is out. They want to know if it’s a case of murder or suicide and how it’s being investigated, and one of the long-term guests, who is a poet, has already written a short poem for the occasion.
However, by the time they all get to the room where Hildegarde saw the body, it’s gone. There is nothing in the bathtub, not even water. Officer Feeney shows up and demands to know what’s going on, and Hildegarde insists that she really saw something. The Magruders believe her, but they have no explanation for where the body could have gone. The guests speculate about body-snatchers and ghosts.
All they know about the man who occupied that room is that he gave his name as Phillip A. Gusset, he checked in the evening before, and he said that he would be leaving the next morning. Officer Feeney asks them if there was anything odd about him, like if he seemed nervous or unwell. Nobody remembers anything like that. They remember that he had a mustache and a hat with a red feather and just a single bag with him. He did kind of make Bernie’s parents uneasy, and he seemed to have a strange scent about him, although they find it difficult to describe what it actually smelled like. Officer Feeney says that, without a body or any evidence that something has happened, there doesn’t seem like anything to investigate. Bernie’s father is relieved that there won’t be any report of a murder or death occurring at the hotel because, otherwise, the owner might fire him. Bernie remembers that the man’s slippers were still in the room and goes to get them in case they’re evidence. When he gets there, he discovers that the slippers have mysteriously disappeared.
Bernie’s friends, Weasel and Georgene, think that people will probably never want to rent that hotel room ever again, and Bernie’s father renumbers the rooms so there will be no Room 107. Weasel convinces Bernie and Georgene to help him search the area for the body, thinking that whoever took it would most likely want to dispose of it quickly. They search down by the river, but they only find a bag of garbage that Bernie’s younger brother, Lester, left there to trick them.
Even though there’s no evidence that anything happened and the police aren’t investigating the situation, the incident of the disappearing guest appears in a newspaper in Indianapolis, where the hotel owner, Mr. Fairchild, lives. Mr. Fairchild calls the hotel to demand to know what’s going on. Mr. Fairchild says that he want the hotel to put on live entertainment in the evening on weekends to draw attention away from the incident and bring people in. However, he expects Bernie’s father to hire the entertainment out of his own money since Mr. Fairchild thinks this situation is his fault, and most entertainment is out of the Magruders’ price range. Fortunately, Bernie’s father has joined a barbershop quartet, so his group can do their singing at the hotel.
The singing goes well, but a strange woman with orange hair checks into the hotel and keeps making comments about dead bodies there. Then, one of the waiters finds this woman dead in her room, Room 321. Just like the first body, this body also vanishes. By this time, Bernie’s father suspects that the woman faked her “death” just to scare the waiter and ran away as soon as he was gone. As Bernie’s parents investigate the room, they notice an odd smell that reminds them of the first guest who disappeared. The smell really unnerves his father, but strangely, not his mother. It’s a faint smell that’s difficult to identify, but it conjures different images for both of them. Bernie’s father says it reminds him of sweaty clothes, cigars, and pastrami, while his mother says it makes her think of flowers and a porch swing in the evening.
The Magruders aren’t sure why someone wants to fake deaths at the hotel, but this latest faker didn’t pay for either her room or dinner, and somehow, the newspaper has heard about it and reported it again. Mr. Fairchild is angry, and Bernie knows that they need to figure out who the prankster is before they do it again!
The book is part of the Bessledorf mystery series, also known as the Bernie Magruder series. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
Attempts to investigate the mystery alternate with the Magruders’ attempts at cheap hotel entertainment. The barbershop quartet works until one of the members gets laryngitis. Some of the guests start a food fight when the entertainment is bad. Then, Joseph gets some of his friends from the veterinary college who play instruments to come. Personally, I like the part where Lester suggests that they hold a haunted house at the hotel and take people on tours of the rooms where “dead” bodies have been found. They reject that idea, but there are hotels and bed-and-breakfasts that give haunted tours, and people come to investigate ghosts. That actually can be a successful gimmick. I once intentionally stayed in a supposedly haunted hospital that had been turned into a hotel in an old western mining town. A possible murder once occurred there, but I enjoyed the visit.
When a new guest shows up at the hotel with that same, strange scent, Bernie knows that it’s their culprit, back again in another disguise. Now that he knows who to watch, he starts planning how they’re going to trap the person.
I had a couple of ideas in beginning about who was doing all of this and why, but there are some surprising twists in the story. Bernie’s first attempt to catch the villain is weirdly thwarted by the discovery of a dead body that is actually a real, dead person. It’s not a guest; it’s a body stolen from the funeral parlor next door. The bad guy decided to change his tactics.
One of the clues to the person’s identity is that mysterious smell and the way it has an opposite effect on Bernie’s parents. It irritates Bernie’s father but makes his mother feel strangely nostalgic. The truth is that they’re both remembering the same thing or the same person, but although they can’t remember right away exactly what they’re remembering, they have very different feelings about it.
Surprisingly, although Mr. Fairchild threatens to replace Mr. Magruder with another manager, he actually shows up at the hotel himself and discovers that he likes playing detective and figuring out what’s going on. He’s also impressed with the way Mr. Magruder stayed to finish managing things even after he told him that he was planning to hire someone to replace him, and that secures the family’s position.
This is one of the most famous time slip stories for children! I remember either reading it or having it read to me when I was a kid, but I have to admit that I really remembered only the broad strokes of the story until I reread it as an adult.
When the story begins, Tom Long is sad and angry because his brother, Peter, has caught the measles, and it’s going to ruin their summer holidays. The two of them originally planned to spend the summer building a tree house in the apple tree in their backyard garden, but now, Tom is being rushed away from the house (sent into exile, as he thinks of it) so that he won’t catch the measles from his brother. Tom thinks that he would rather be sick with Peter than sent away by himself.
Tom is going to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen. His aunt and uncle are kind people who like kids, and in a way, it makes Tom feel worse because it makes him seem unreasonable for resenting spending the summer with them. If they were cruel, he could run away and everyone would tell him he was right for doing so, but when people are nice to you, there’s less to complain about, and Tom is in a complaining mood. The major problem with staying with Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen is that they live in a small flat with no garden. Tom can’t even get out and see the sights of the city because he’s supposed to be in quarantine for awhile, just in case he’s already caught the measles from Peter and it hasn’t started to show yet. (It takes about 10 to 14 days after infection before measles symptoms start to show, so Tom has to stay in quarantine that long to be sure he’s not sick. Anybody with experience of coronavirus quarantines knows the drill, even if they didn’t before.) So, basically, Tom is going to be temporarily shut up like he’s sick, with the goal of making sure that he’s not sick and not going to be, but without the company of his brother or the comforts of his own home. They’re doing it for Tom’s welfare because measles can have serious side effects, and it’s not something anybody wants to get. There are sound reasons for trying to both protect Tom from infection if he hasn’t been infected already and also trying to protect others that Tom might infect while they’re waiting to make sure that he’s really okay, but it’s still a depressing situation. They’re planning on Tom quarantining for ten days with his aunt and uncle, just about a week and a half, provided that he doesn’t show any symptoms that would force him to quarantine for longer. The only people Tom is allowed to see during his quarantine period are people who have already had measles and are now immune to it, like his aunt and uncle.
The flat where Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen live is in an old house in or near Ely, England that has been divided up into flats. It’s not a bad house, but Tom doesn’t think it seems particularly welcoming. He’s also a little offended that the guest room where he’s supposed to be staying used to be a nursery and has the characteristic bars on the windows that old-fashioned nurseries have to keep children from falling out. Aunt Gwen explains that those are left over from when the house used to be a private home and aren’t meant for him, but Tom is in no mood to be treated like he’s a baby. The one feature of the house he likes is the old grandfather clock that belongs to Mrs. Bartholomew, the owner of the house and his aunt and uncle’s landlady, who lives upstairs. The clock’s chimes can be heard all over the house, and it’s something of a joke and a source of irritation to the people living in the house because, even though the clock keeps perfect time, it never chimes the right number. The chimes are always some random number for no apparent reason. Of course, there is a reason.
Tom is bored and restless. All he has for entertainment is crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and his aunt’s old books from when she was a kid, and the books are just school stories for girls, so Tom doesn’t find them interesting. Tom helps his aunt in the kitchen, and he loves her cooking, but it’s a bit rich and gives him indigestion. Because of that, he often has trouble sleeping, but his aunt and uncle insist that he get ten hours of sleep a night because that’s what kids his age are supposed to need. They won’t let him read or get up or do anything when he can’t sleep, so he just has to lie awake, bored.
One night, while lying awake in bed, Tom hears the clock downstairs strike thirteen. That strikes him as odd because he’s never heard a clock strike thirteen times before, and he didn’t even think it was possible for a wrong clock to do that. He starts considering that maybe there is actually a hidden, thirteenth hour of night that his uncle knows nothing about, so that one free hour should belong to Tom, to with as he wishes. He’s not sure that idea really makes sense, but he feels compelled to get up and go downstairs to investigate.
When Tom gets downstairs, he can’t read the clock because it’s too dark, and he can’t find the light switch. Then, he gets the idea to open the back door so he can read the clock by moonlight. However, when he opens the back door, he sees a beautiful lawn and garden instead of the empty yard his aunt and uncle told him was there. At first, Tom is angry that they lied to him about there not being a garden. He thinks to himself that he’s going to come back and see the garden in daylight. As he’s heading back inside to look at the clock, he encounters a young maid. He’s surprised to see the girl enter someone else’s flat without knocking or ringing the bell in the middle of the night. Then, he begins to notice that the house is different from the way he saw it during the day. The grandfather clock is still there, but the laundry box, milk bottles, and travel posters have been replaced by an umbrella stand, a dinner gong, an air gun, and a fishing rod. The girl calls out that she’s lit a fire in “the parlour,” and Tom watches as she crosses to another room, kind of melting through the door instead of opening it like a living person would. Is Tom seeing a ghost? Then, the vision fades, all of the old-fashioned furnishing are gone, and everything in the downstairs hall looks the way Tom remembered it from his arrival.
In spite of realizing that the house might be haunted, Tom is happier from his adventures and knowing about the beautiful garden outside. He now has something more exciting to think about than just being bored. However, he’s still mad at his aunt and uncle for keeping him in the dark about the garden outside. He tries to hint to them that he knows about it, but when he mentions seeing hyacinths blooming, his aunt tells him that’s impossible because it’s summer, and hyacinths are out of season. Tom is unsettled by that, and he runs downstairs to check. When he gets there, the lock on the back door is different from what he remembered the night before, and when he opens the back door, there’s no garden there, only the dust bins his aunt and uncle mentioned and a man working on a car. Tom asks the man, who lives in the flat where Tom saw the maid enter to light a fire if he has a maid, and man tells him no. Tom tries to ask him about the garden, but he starts crying when he realizes that the garden couldn’t have been real. The man tries to ask him what’s wrong, but Tom doesn’t want to explain it. He stops Tom from running into old Mrs. Bartholomew, who has come downstairs to wind the grandfather clock. Tom watches the winding process with fascination and feels calmer.
Tom begins to reason out how he could have seen a garden the night before when there isn’t one there now. He’s sure that he didn’t just dream it or imagine it, so he decides to conduct an investigation. He considers the different pieces of the puzzle – the house that looks different at night, the clock that chimes thirteen times, and trees that are now in the backyards of neighboring houses but which must have been part of the large garden he saw. Tom begins writing a series of letters to his brother about what he’s experiencing and his investigations into it, which he asks Peter to burn after reading. At night, he stays up, waiting for the clock to chime thirteen again … and it does. When it does, everything is as he saw it before – the different furnishings downstairs, the different latch on the back door, and best of all, the garden.
Tom visits the garden every night, noting that every time he goes, it’s a different time of day or a different season of the year. Time in the garden doesn’t correspond to time in the real world. Months can pass between his visits, even though Tom goes there every single night. It seems like, no matter how long Tom spends there, exploring, only a few minutes of the night has passed when he returns. One night, he sees a tree struck by lightning, but the next time he looks, the tree is just fine. Tom starts a discussion with his aunt and uncle about time without fully explaining why he wants to know how time works. When he poses the question of how a tree could fall over and then be standing upright again later, his aunt thinks that he’s talking about fairy tale or something he dreamed or imagined. His uncle says that it’s impossible without turning back the clock. The mention of a clock being turned back intrigues Tom, but his uncle says that’s just an expression, meaning to relive the past, which nobody can actually do. It’s a clue to Tom, though, about what’s really happening in the garden.
Tom also quickly realizes that he seems to have little substance when he’s in the garden. He can climb trees in the garden, but he can’t open doors by himself, for some reason. If he concentrates hard, he can walk through doors like a ghost, which is both frightening and fascinating. Also, most of the people he encounters can’t see him. Animals react to his presence, but people tend to look through him or past him and don’t seen to hear anything he says. There are three brothers who spend time in the garden, and Tom thinks that he’d like to be friends with the middle boy, James, but James never sees or hears him. The boys have a younger cousin, Hatty, who follows them around. They’re not very nice to her and often ignore her or exclude her from their activities, but Tom discovers, to his surprise, that Hatty can both see and hear him. Hatty becomes Tom’s friend, and they begin talking to each other, playing, and exploring the garden together.
Hatty is a sad and lonely girl who often plays imaginary games by herself in the garden. She tells Tom that she’s a captive princess, that the cruel woman who claims to be her aunt isn’t really her aunt, and that the mean boys aren’t her real cousins. The truth is that Hatty is an orphan and that her aunt resents her being her responsibility. Hatty’s aunt and cousins have money and servants, but Hatty is emotionally neglected. She has no one to be close to and share secrets with except for Tom.
Tom is so captivated by his shared time in the garden with Hatty that he tells his aunt that he’d like to stay longer. His uncle is mystified that Tom is really that interested in staying with them because he knows their apartment is boring, but his aunt is enthusiastic about him spending an extra week beyond his quarantine so she can show him some of the sights of the city. Then, Tom catches a cold that requires him to stay in bed for longer, but he is still able to visit the garden at night.
By this time, Tom has figured out that the garden once existed in the history of the house and that Hatty was someone who lived in the house at some point in the past, but he doesn’t really understand how or why he is able to visit her in the no-longer-existing garden at night. He still thinks that Hatty might be a ghost and even the garden might be some kind of ghost that haunts the house. However, Hatty tells Tom that she thinks he’s the ghost. Tom denies it, knowing that he’s not dead in his own time, but it’s true that, whenever he’s in the garden with Hatty, he is somewhat non-corporeal, unable to affect physical objects but able to walk through solid objects when he tries, and he is invisible to most people. Tom says that the only reason why he can walk through closed doors is that the garden itself, and every physical thing in it, is a ghost – he’s not passing through them so much as they’re passing through him because he’s solid, and they’re not really. Tom and Hatty argue about who’s a ghost and who’s not because, from each of their perspectives, they’re both real and alive, but yet, the entire situation is unreal. Tom sees pieces of the past changing and disappearing, and he knows what’s real in his time. However, Hatty can also say the same – she knows what’s real in her time, and Tom has a definite ghostly quality when he’s in her garden. What is the truth, and how long can the two of them continue meeting like this?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Chinese). It’s been made into tv versions (parts sometimes appear on YouTube) and a movie in 1999. The movie is also available online through Internet Archive.
If you’re interested in other time slip stories, see my list of Time Travel books.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Things to Do
First of all, I just have to get it out of my system: Tom’s family is not a creative bunch. I know the aunt and uncle took Tom in on short notice, but I’m just saying that with a little imagination, they could find more things for Tom to do during his quarantine. Two weeks is not that long if you have things to do and think about. There were always art supplies at my house when I was a kid, and even if you don’t have them on hand, paper and colored pencils or crayons aren’t very expensive. The cooking is a good activity, and maybe the aunt could teach Tom some new recipes that he could make by himself. With as much as the aunt is cooking, she’s also probably using things that come in boxes and cans, and boxes and cans can be made into things. Also, they could get the kid a book on something more interesting he can learn and use, like magic tricks he can practice or secret codes. They wouldn’t have to buy him books for just a couple of week, either. They could just go to the local library and ask the children’s librarian for some recommendations. They could teach him how to fold different kinds of paper airplanes or carve things out of soap (save the shavings in an old nylon stocking – it’s almost like soap on a rope you can use in the shower) or make a kite he can fly in the park when his quarantine ends. Heck, if he had a deck of cards, he could at least learn different types of solitaire games. There are over one hundred variations, and the kid just has to be entertained for a couple of weeks, 14 days. The activities don’t have to be very impressive if you can think of enough of them to have a different one each day for him to try to break up the monotony of the the more usual stand-bys, like reading and puzzles. Just to prove that it’s possible, I made a list:
Drawing – I mentioned before that paper and crayons or colored pencils aren’t too expensive, and he doesn’t need to be any good at it. It’s just a challenge and would give him something creative to do, maybe while listening to music on the radio or something. Bonus points if you know enough about art to tell him about different styles of art and suggest that he try some different styles, like cubism or surrealism. He could also use art supplies to map out things, like a plan of the tree house he and Peter want to build. After he’s done that, he could draw a creative map of an imaginary castle or mansion or a haunted house or an entire amusement park or an elaborate clubhouse he would build if there were no restrictions on space or money. It doesn’t have to be possible or even drawn particularly well as long as it’s entertaining.
Paper airplanes or origami – You can make some fun things out of folded paper, and if you know how to make different styles of paper airplanes or can find a book about it, you can conduct tests to determine which styles fly the best. Yes, you then have a lot of paper airplanes laying around, but if your goal is to pass the time, cleaning up also takes up time.
Card games – I covered that. There are a lot of things you can do with a deck of cards, even if you’re just playing solitaire. He could try to build a house of a cards. He could also learn card tricks and the order of poker hands. (I know that not every family would be okay with a kid learning the rules to a gambling game, but my parents never minded as long as we didn’t gamble with money, and it’s the sort of mildly daring activity that appeals to kids. Besides, this kid has nobody else to play with right now, except for his aunt and uncle.)
Magic tricks – I covered this one. There are (and were back then) books of magic tricks that a boy could study, many of which use ordinary objects that a person could find around the house. He could practice a new trick each day or spend an entire day with one book, trying anything that looks interesting.
Secret codes – Again, they had books about this even back then, and once you know a few principles, you can start making your own codes. When I was a kid, I liked to experiment with basic alphabet shifts, and secret codes often formed the basis of treasure hunts that I had with my brother. Tom can’t have a treasure hunt for his brother yet, but he could be encouraged to plan one. Give him a notebook where he can practice his codes and make notes of possible hiding places. He can also write coded messages to send to his brother and challenge him to read them.
Current events – Kids don’t often read the newspaper, but his aunt and uncle could introduce him to features of the newspaper and what’s happening in the world. A new newspaper arrives every day, and it’s a source of reading material. At least, he could look at the comics or the sports pages, if he likes sports.
Model town or castle – As I said, there are probably cardboard boxes and cans being thrown out of this house, and they could be appropriated for some kind of craft project, ideally one that would take awhile for Tom to build and that he could add to each day. One of the best things to make out of random junk would be a town or a castle. Tin cans are towers and turrets, and cardboard boxes are the main buildings. Cover the outsides of the cans and boxes with plain paper and draw on them for decoration. Make people out of paper and cardboard. It could turn out amazing if he’s willing to put the time into making it as detailed as possible, but if it doesn’t turn out amazing, it’s okay because it was just junk anyway.
Plan for the future – This quarantine will end. Tom can mark off days on the calendar until he’s in the clear. Give Tom a guidebook to the city and tell him to make a list of places he wants to go and things he wants to do when the quarantine is over. It could be amusing for at least an afternoon. He’ll learn about the sights and landmarks of the city and be mildly entertained thinking of fun things to do in the near future. It will give him something to look forward to. It’s also an incentive for Tom to behave himself because his aunt and uncle can tell him that they’ll take him places he wants to go if he’s good about abiding by the rules of the quarantine until it’s over. Admittedly, Ely is one of the smallest cities in England, so there wouldn’t be as many sights to see as in London, and Tom already knows about the Cathedral, but there are shops, restaurants, and museums there. Some of them were founded after the 1950s, but there were some in Tom’s time, too. He visits at least one museum with his aunt at the end of the quarantine and goes to the movies with her. If they can’t find enough to do just in Ely when Tom’s quarantine is over, they could also spend a day visiting surrounding towns.
Discover or develop your mental powers – The amusement potential with this one depends on whether the kid has reached that phase where kids get fascinated by things like psychic abilities. Many kids go through a phase like that, and since Tom seems to like the idea of being in a haunted house, he’s probably the right age. If you can get him a book about psychic powers or telekinesis, he’d probably find it a fascinating read. The aunt and uncle could talk to him about whether or not such things actually exist, and he could try to test himself to see if he has any such powers. I had an English teacher in middle school who actually did that with us. There was only one test I really did well. Most people don’t do those types of tests well at all, but it’s amusing for at least an hour or two to try or talk about. If he happens to do better than average on anything, he could brag about it to his brother and his friends, telling them that he discovered and honed his psychic powers in a spooky old house during his vacation.
Write a story or poem – All you need is paper, a pencil, and some imagination. Writing a long story and trying to do it well could cover the entire quarantine period by itself, it would give him something to think about, and he’d have something to show for his relative isolation. Of course, the real goal is to be entertained and pass the time, so the story or poem doesn’t have to be great. It can be as crazy as Tom wants to make it, as long as he’s amused.
Start learning a language – Two weeks isn’t enough to really learn to speak a language, but it’s enough to learn a few words and phrases. If his aunt or uncle has an old textbook lying around from their student days, they could use that, or they could pick up a used one cheaply or get one from the local library. It might make Tom groan because it’s a little like school, but it would be a challenge to practice using words from another language. Of course, that depends on which words and phrases the kid learns. There can be a lot of amusement potential in learning to insult people in other languages, although that lesson should also come with the warning that you never know which languages other people might know.
Board games – A classic! If they’re not into card games, Tom can spend evenings playing board games with his aunt and uncle. Most people have chess and checkers sets (his uncle does offer to teach him chess later in his visit), and Monopoly and Clue (or Cluedo) were common back then. Monopoly games are notorious for taking a long time to finish.
Invent a game – There are a lot of things you can do if you have paper and pencils, and one of them is to design your own board game. It can be about anything, and the rules can be anything you want. When you think you’ve got it the way you want, try playing it and see if there are any adjustments you need to make. Tom can also make his own jigsaw puzzles by cutting up a picture he’s drawn or gluing a magazine picture to a piece of cardboard and cutting it up. The cardboard can come from an empty cardboard box or he can remove the cardboard back of a drawing pad, if he no longer needs it.
Jokes – Get Tom a joke book and have him mail his brother a new joke every day. When he’s done reading the book, they could challenge him to try to make up some jokes of his own. Sending and receiving mail is an activity by itself, and Tom does write to Peter during the story.
Learn to dance – This is assuming that the aunt and uncle also know how to dance, but I think it was pretty common back then for people to know at least a couple of basic dances. Tom could practice with his aunt in their living room (if they have to rearrange the furniture to do it, that’s another time-consuming activity), and it would give him something to do for some mild exercise. Even if a boy might be embarrassed to dance with his aunt, nobody’s going to see them while he’s in quarantine, he doesn’t have to tell people who taught him, and if he’s willing to learn, it could help him later at school dances.
See? If you think about it, there are plenty of things to do for just a couple of weeks. There are even more if you’re willing to invest in buying things like craft kits or model kits or other things necessary to start a new hobby, but I was trying to be as basic as possible, mostly relying on inexpensive books and paper and pencils. However, the plot of the book requires Tom to be bored and lonely, so they can’t do those things, and that brings us back to the story.
Measles
How readers receive the beginning premise of the story, that Tom was sent away from home because his brother has the measles, depends partly on their generation. I have never actually seen a live case of the measles in my entire life, as of this posting. I was born in the early 1980s, and growing up, everyone I knew who had the measles was an older person who had it as a child in the 1950s or earlier, before the time that this story was written. Vaccines against measles have been available in the United States since the early 1960s, too late for my parents but well before I was born.
I know that this disease still exists, and it’s been the subject of recent controversy because there’s been a recent outbreak in the American Southwest among unvaccinated people (2025), but I grew up in a community where measles vaccines were required for going to public schools. Because all of the kids I knew when I was young went to the same school with the same requirement, everybody I knew in my own generation was vaccinated, and none of us ever got measles.
I’m pointing this out because the first generation of children to read this story would have found the situation familiar, but it’s not something that happened to me or anybody else I knew as a kid. When I was a kid, I used to think of measles as an old-timey old people’s disease, one of the diseases that your characters could get in the Oregon Trail computer game that could either delay or kill your characters, but not something that I ever expected to encounter in the real, modern world. When I read books like this as a child, that was kind of how I thought about it. For me, it marked the time period of the story as “old.”
The closest equivalent from my youth was chicken pox because that was a spot-causing disease that I knew people had to be quarantined for, and it was unavoidable because there was no vaccine available in my earliest years. I did have chicken pox as a small child, which is why I have a scar on my face now, and I was isolated from other children when it became obvious that I had it. However, my younger cousins were vaccinated for chicken pox when that vaccine became available in the 1990s, so they’ve never experienced the disease that afflicted me. For the next generation, I get to be the older person who has a story about an old-timey disease because life moves on. It’s just part of the cycle of time and history. But, just as background for my mindset as a child reader, when I was a kid, I pictured measles as a kind of old-fashioned but more serious chicken pox. That’s not medically true because they’re separate diseases, but I just never saw or experienced actual measles, and that was the closest equivalent I could imagine at that age.
For younger generations, the covid pandemic of the 2020s might be what they picture when someone talks about quarantines.
The Truth About Hatty (Spoilers)
So, what is the truth about Hatty and the midnight garden? This is a time slip story, not a ghost story, although sometimes the two of those go together in books. In this case, the time slip is not based around ghosts but around memory. When Tom is seeing the garden as it was in the past, he is seeing it as it existed in Hatty’s memories. He is somewhat correct in saying that he is non-corporeal there because the garden itself is non-corporeal – it’s a memory. Hatty is still alive in Tom’s time, and Tom is able to enter the garden when she revisits it in her memories and when she remembers him.
The twist in the book (spoiler) is that Hatty is Mrs. Bartholomew, the current owner of the house and the landlady of the flats. When Tom is trying to figure out whether Hatty’s a ghost, he briefly considers asking Mrs. Bartholomew about the history of the house, but he rejects the idea because his aunt and uncle told him that Mrs. Bartholomew only moved to this house fairly recently, after the death of her husband, so Tom assumes that she has no connection with or knowledge of Hatty and her family.
I liked the part where Tom tries to do some research and figure out what time period child Hatty lives in based on the types of clothes people wear in her time. He has some difficulty finding a good source with details about the variations in clothing styles over the years. He does realize that Hatty was a child in the Victorian era, between the 1830s and the early 1900s, but he ends up guessing earlier in the Victorian era than she actually lived, which is why he thinks she’s definitely dead and a ghost instead of an elderly lady in the 1950s.
As Tom continues his time travels into the past, Hatty gradually ages because Mrs. Bartholomew is remembering different times in her life. Eventually, Tom sees Hatty fall in love with a young man she calls “Barty.” Tom is hurt because, when she falls in love with Barty, Hatty seems to forget about him and is suddenly unable to see him any more. It’s because Mrs. Bartholomew’s focus is shifting in her memories, focusing more on remembering Barty than remembering Tom. The last time when Tom tries to go back in time, the garden is suddenly not there, and he crashes into the dust bins outside. His aunt and uncle think he was walking in his sleep, and Tom is depressed that Hatty seems like she’s gone forever. He learns the truth when Mrs. Bartholomew insists that he come upstairs and apologize for waking her by knocking over the dust bins.
Mrs. Bartholomew thought for years that Tom was some kind of ghost who became harder and harder to see as she got older, probably because, as she got older and started thinking about other things, like Barty, she wasn’t concentrating so much on Tom. The night when the garden didn’t appear, Mrs. Bartholomew was dreaming about her wedding, so she wasn’t thinking about the garden. When Tom crashed into the dust bins, he called out her name, and she woke up and recognized his voice. Tom is happy that Hatty remembered him all these years, that she didn’t deliberately forget him, and that she’s not dead or a ghost. Mrs. Bartholomew tells him about what happened in her life after to marriage to John Bartholomew/Barty. Hatty and her husband moved away from the house, and they had two sons, who both later died during World War I. She and her husband continued living together for many years, until his death, when she returned to the house where she’d grown up.
The Time Traveling
So, now you know who Hatty is, but what does the clock and its thirteen chimes have to do with her memories and Tom’s time traveling? The mechanics of the time traveling in time slip stories are rarely fully explained, but the characters in this book do consider and discuss the possibilities. Part of it seems to involve the Biblical reference engraved on the clock about “Time no longer” from Rev. 10 1:6. I thought it was an interesting approach, bringing religious references into the story. When Tom tries to talk to his uncle about how time works, his uncle goes into scientific theories of time and gets annoyed with him when he tries to talk about the angel in the Bible. After talking to his aunt, Tom gets a sense that his uncle believes in a different version of “Truth”, and that makes it difficult to talk to him. Most of what his uncle says about more philosophical and scientific explanations of time goes over Tom’s head.
What Tom eventually figures out from bits and pieces of his uncle’s explanation and his own reflection about his time-traveling experiences, is that perspective matters in relation to time. He has his perspective of how time moves – he’s been traveling back to the garden every night for a few weeks during the summer. However, Hatty has her own perspective of time – Tom has appeared to her in the garden roughly every few months over a period of about ten years of her life. When Tom considers the situation from Hatty’s point of view, he decides that people’s individual experiences of time are just pieces of the much larger experience of time and history. This is the point when Tom realizes that neither he nor Hatty are ghosts, just two people whose experiences of time have crossed. When Tom enters into Hatty’s time, she perceives it as the present and him as a ghost because he’s outside of his natural time period and not fully a part of her present. Similarly, the maid appeared ghost-like to Tom at first because she had somewhat entered into Tom’s present before fading back to her present, appearing to vanish like a ghost. Time in the garden appears to jump around because Tom is entering into different sections of Hatty’s time. That’s why he sees the tree in the garden standing, then struck by lightning and fallen, and then standing again, and it’s also why he sees Hatty as being around his age, then younger, and then getting older. All of those things he sees are just sections of Hatty’s timeline that Tom experiences in isolation from each other, a different one every night.
Toward the end of the book, Tom tries to take advantage of the way time seems to stand still in his own time while he’s in the garden, so he can stay longer with Hatty. He thinks maybe he’ll stay for days or even forever, safe in the knowledge that time back home is standing still, and he can return there whenever he wants, enjoying carefree days of playing in the garden forever. However, he has not fully reckoned that time is still passing for Hatty even when it seems to pause for him while he’s in her time. Hatty has gradually grown up, and is moving forward with her life. She can’t stay a little girl, playing in the garden forever.
When Tom talks to the elderly Mrs. Bartholomew later, she observes that “nothing stands still, except in our memory.” When she was younger, she had always thought that the garden would stay the same forever, but it didn’t. She realized that when she saw the tree in the garden get struck by lightning. Everything changes, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly, but time always moves forward. The property was eventually split up by her cousin James when he was having trouble with his business and needed money. He sold off pieces of land at a time, so parts of the garden were built over by new houses. Eventually, all that was left was the main house and part of the old yard. When James decided to sell off what was left and move to another country to start over, Hatty and Barty bought the old house and some of Hatty’s favorite things, including the grandfather clock. Hatty admits to Tom that she used to intentionally misunderstand what time it was chiming on the clock and often got up extra early in the morning to go play in the garden. This is apparently the source of the clock’s weird chimes that don’t match the real hour. The clock is now connected to Hatty’s memories of the house and the garden, and Hatty’s memories are what controls what time it is in the garden when Tom makes his nightly visits.
Old Hatty was controlling the timing of Tom’s visits through her memories, although young Hatty was unaware of it. However, Tom realizes that even old Hatty wasn’t completely in control, either. Old Hatty comments that this summer, she’s thought of the garden far more than she ever had before and how much she wanted someone to play with when she was little. Tom realizes that old Hatty is describing his desires. When he first came to his aunt and uncle, he was bored and lonely and just wanted to play with someone, like he would have with his brother in their garden. It seems like Tom’s mood influenced Mrs. Bartholomew’s memories and dreams of the past, and their shared wish for friendship produced the midnight garden, so they could play there again.
In the end, Tom decides that “Time no longer” means that both the past and the present are both real and connected, not separate from each other, just as he and Hatty were always both real and connected to each other through their sharing of the same time. They were not separated by time but joined each other in it.
According to Wikipedia, the theory of how time works in this story is based on a book called An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne. When he was young during the late 19th century, Dunne had dreams that seemed to be visions of the future, seeing himself flying in a sort of airplane before airplanes had even been invented. He eventually became an airplane designer, and he also theorized about the nature of time. Dunne’s theory of time, called serialism, postulates that human beings are only conscious of traveling along a base timeline, where we experience the past, present, and future of our physical lives, but that there is also a higher level of time that can be experienced by a higher level of the mind or human spirit. Part of his theory states that, while people eventually die a physical death in the lower timeline, their spirit or consciousness lives on in the higher timeline for eternity. This is partly the conclusion Tom comes to when he starts seeing his time and Hatty’s as being part of some bigger timeline, and it’s referenced by the phrases “time no longer” and “exchanged time for eternity.”
When this story begins, Miss Bianca, who is Perpetual Madam President of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society, is evaluating candidates for the Tybalt Stars award, which is given for mice who are brave in the face of cats. Bernard, the secretary of the society, is helping her. Each of the candidates is undeniably brave, but Miss Bianca notices that each of them also had a self-serving motive behind their bravery, which seems disappointing for a benevolent society. When they stop for lunch and Bernard goes to fetch some salt for them, he finds a note in the salt that says, “Someone please get me out of the salt mines.” The note is signed “Teddy (age 8).” Naturally, Miss Bianca is eager to help the poor boy! Bernard is a little more doubtful about the mission because the salt mines are about a thousand miles away, extremely dangerous, and extremely well guarded. Nevertheless, the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society cannot refuse to help a prisoner, and neither can its President.
Soon, Miss Bianca has members of the society trying to learn anything they can about a missing boy named Teddy, but apparently, no one has reported a boy by that name or age as missing. Bianca uses the lessons of the boy who owns her to learn more about the salt mines and how to get there. In order to get to the salt mines, they’d have to go by train, and it’s a very dangerous route. At the next meeting of the society, Miss Bianca asks for volunteers to go rescue Teddy, but everyone is reluctant to go, and many members of the society don’t like it that Miss Bianca doesn’t even seem to have any facts about Teddy or his situation that could help them. Miss Bianca says that, even though she can’t be more specific about Teddy’s background or how he came to be in the salt mines, the important fact is that he shouldn’t be there, and he needs help getting out. Since no one else wants to volunteer for the rescue mission, Miss Bianca says that she’ll go herself, and of course, Bernard insists on coming with her.
To Miss Bianca’s surprise, her biggest opponent, a curmudgeonly mouse called the Professor (his real name is George) who teaches mathematics, also volunteers to join the mission. Bernard and Miss Bianca are even more surprised when the Professor insists on bringing his friend Caerphilly along. Caerphilly is very elderly, but he’s also a professor of geology. Caerphilly has never actually been to the salt mines before, but he’s always wanted to see them and study them. Bernard and Miss Bianca aren’t sure that Caerphilly is up to handling the dangers that they’re likely to encounter on the mission. Miss Bianca reminds Caerphilly that this is supposed to be a rescue mission, not a scientific expedition. Caerphilly is unconcerned, saying that they can handle the rescue, and he’ll handle the science. Miss Bianca says that the Professor should warn his friend just what risks a rescue mission involves, but the Professor is also unconcerned, saying that the geology department at the university thinks too much of itself, and he wouldn’t mind seeing his friend chased by bloodhounds. (Some friend he is.) Miss Bianca is concerned both because of the danger and because their self-serving motives are just what she was concerned about before.
In spite of that, they decide to proceed with the mission, bringing the two professors. They take some time to make their preparations. Bernard and Bianca research the trains they’ll need to take. The Finance Committee allows them to take along the society’s Treasure – there’s only one, a single gold coin they found in a ruined building. Teddy might need this to pay for his train fare after they get him out of the mines. The Ladies’ Guild also knits mittens for the unfortunate boy because the salt mines are reportedly very cold. Miss Bianca tells the boy she lives with not to worry if he doesn’t see her for a week or so because she’s going to be writing an epic poem and needs privacy.
As they finally set out on their mission, the Professor is pessimistic, but the train journey is uneventful. When they arrive at the salt mines’ train station, it’s a very bare and gloomy building. Bernard finds a wooden door with some steps heading down.
At the bottom of the steps, they find themselves in an underground cavern filled with stalactites and stalagmites. There is also an underground lake surrounded by crusts of salt. The Professor realizes that they have entered the salt mines through a disused and forgotten entrance. In the distance, they hear the sounds of prisoners mining the salt.
It’s a long walk to the active part of the mine, but along the way, they make an important discovery – a mouse-sized city carved out of salt! Each of the buildings in the miniature town are unique and resemble famous buildings from around the world. Miss Bianca thinks that the buildings were probably carved by prisoners who made buildings to resemble the places where they used to live. It’s the perfect place for the mice to stay, though.
Bernard, inspired by this strange place, tries to write a poem for the first time in his life, which isn’t very good. Miss Bianca tries to be nice about it, but he can tell that she doesn’t like it. Bernard is upset enough to try to drown himself (that part of the story struck me as rather shocking, although it’s handled so matter-of-factly as just a product of the weird atmosphere of this place), but he can’t because he just floats in the salt water. It seems like most of the members of the expedition temporarily forget about Teddy. Only Miss Bianca isn’t affected by this strange little town because she lives in a porcelain pagoda at home that her boy gave to her, so these buildings are very much like what she already knows.
Fortunately, the expedition gets some help from some friendly bats who live in the mines. The younger bats in the group say that they’ve seen little Teddy serving the governor of the salt mines, who tends to stay apart from most of the prisoners because the prisoners have attacked him before. This is fortunate news because it means that Teddy is closer to the little salt town than they thought, and it won’t be as difficult to find him as they anticipated. He’s on an island in the middle of the lake of salt water, and that’s not too difficult to reach because Bernard has already proven that it’s easy to float in salt water.
Once they find Teddy, they also have to get him onto a train to get him away from the salt mines, which may not be as easy.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
I generally prefer the plots of the Disney movies to the original books in this series, but this was still a fun story. I was a little disappointed that they never actually used the two professors’ specialties. I thought at first that they would use the geology professor to spout some interesting and useful facts about caves or mines, but they didn’t, and there was nothing in the story where a mathematics professor would be particularly useful. It just seems like a missed opportunity there.
There were some funny moments in the story. I liked the part where one of the bats, not really seeing Bianca clearly because bats are near-sighted, comments to another that, whatever it, if it moves, you should salute it, and if it doesn’t, you should paint it. Bianca takes that as a sign that this particular bat has completed his National Service, also noting that being near-sighted isn’t a barrier for bat National Service because, if it was, no bat would be able to participate.
In a twist at the end of the story, it turns out that Teddy used to live with his uncle and that Teddy’s uncle is the tutor for the boy that Miss Bianca lives with. Once Teddy is restored to his uncle, he comes to the house with his tutor and becomes friends with Miss Bianca’s boy.
Sidney’s Ghost by Carol Iden, illustrated by Paul Galdone, 1969.
Nine-year-old Sidney Robinson’s best friend is a girl named Megan McKenna. The two of them have many interests in common, including fishing, cars, ghost stories, and horses. Megan’s father owns a stable, and Sidney envies Megan for having her own pony. Because Megan’s father sells horses to other people, the kids are used to seeing horses come and go. When Megan’s father can’t find a buyer for a horse, he’ll try to sell it at public auction. However, if he can’t sell a horse at auction at all, he sometimes sells it to the slaughterhouse, where they use the horse parts for glue and dog food. It’s sad, but the kids accept this as part of life until Megan’s father acquires a retired police horse whose former owner died, and Sidney realizes that he can’t let this beautiful black horse suffer this terrible fate.
The horse, officially named Sergeant O’Hara but called Uncle Charley by Megan’s family is a beautiful animal with a gentle temperament. Sidney wishes that he could persuade his parents to buy the horse for him. He is easy to ride and obeys commands, and he has an excellent history of his time as a police horse.
Megan’s father isn’t completely honest as a horse seller. The book goes into some detail about how he prepares horses for sale, painting on dapples and filing their teeth down to make them seem younger than they really are. Even Sergeant O’Hara gets this treatment, although Sidney worries that it hurts the horse. (I looked it up, and it turns out that it can be beneficial to file the sharp points off of a horse’s teeth, which is called teeth floating. However, this is something that should only be done by someone who has been trained to do it because it can hurt the horse to file the teeth down too much.)
Sidney and Megan love to watch the horse auctions and pretend they’re bidding on the horses, but Sergeant O’Hara is auctioned off as planned. Megan’s brother Michael let him loose in the paddock when he was supposed to be watching him, and he got all dirty, so he isn’t fit to be shown. Then, to Sidney’s shock, Megan tells him that her father is planning to just sell Sergeant O’Hara to the slaughterhouse instead of trying again at the next auction. If Sidney and Megan are going to save poor Sergeant O’Hara’s life, they’ve got to do something, fast!
Megan tells Sidney that she’s thought of a plan to save Sergeant O’Hara. The two kids sneak out and take the horse in the middle of the night and hide him in an old barn. As they go to hide the horse, they see a shadowy figure near the barn. Megan is afraid, and Sergeant O’Hara wants to chase the figure because of his police training, but Sidney stops him.
However, even with the horse safely in the barn where hardly anybody ever goes, there is the very real worry that they’ll be caught. The horse will need exercise, so Sidney will have to go ride him at night or when they’re sure nobody else will be around. Still, they feel like they need to come up with an additional plan in case the horse is spotted. Then, Sidney takes a hint from the way Mr. McKenna painted dapples on a horse earlier and suggests that they could paint Sergeant O’Hara a different color so he won’t be recognized. Megan thinks that’s a great idea, and they decide to paint him white, like the Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver.
They get the painting supplies from Sidney’s father’s hardware store, but Sidney grabs a can of paint labeled “Super Glo – White.” It turns out that it’s not just a really bright white; it’s a glow-in-the-dark white. The kids don’t figure it out until they’ve already painted half of the horse. When Sidney sneaks out to feed and exercise Sergeant O’Hara again, he’s frightened when this big, glowing thing comes out of the darkness at him. Somehow, the horse got out of the barn and scared him by running out in the dark, glowing. Sidney realizes after a moment of panic that’s what happened. Because they only painted half of the horse before they stopped, one side of Sergeant O’Hara is glowing white, and the other is pitch black. When the horse gallops back and forth, he looks like a glowing ghost that vanishes with each turn. It’s a neat effect, but having a ghost horse certainly isn’t inconspicuous.
One night, Sidney accidentally frightens his old teacher, Miss Winthrop, when she’s walking home from visiting a friend. Soon, she spreads the story of her ghost sighting all over town. Most people think that she’s getting a touch of senility in her old age, but Mr. McKenna thinks it over and notices Sidney’s comings and goings in the area. When he goes to the old barn to investigate what Sidney’s been doing. Seeing the horse and the glow-in-the-dark paint, he realizes what happened. He appreciates that Sidney and Megan wanted to save the horse and sees the humor in their unintentional ghost act.
Since the kids feel that strongly about wanting the horse and are taking good care of him, Mr. McKenna decides to let them continue to do so, but there’s still one thing that nobody has answered: Who was that mysterious figure they saw around the barn? The answer comes when this mysterious person sets fire to the McKenna’s stables and Sergeant O’Hara has the opportunity to show his skills as a police horse.
My Reaction
When I first read this book as a kid, I was expecting it to be a mystery. It kind of is, but the mystery isn’t about the horse or about any ghost. There are hints from the very beginning of the story that there is a thief in the area, but the story doesn’t really focus on that until near the end. Sidney and Megan hear people talking about a prowler, and they do see the mysterious prowler around the barn, but they’re too busy with their plans to save the horse to pay too much attention. Fortunately, their horse and his ghostly appearance help them to catch the the thief, and the reward money for catching him straightens out a lot of problems so Sidney can keep Sergeant O’Hara.
The gimmick of the “ghostly” painted horse has stayed in my mind for years since I first read this story, but it’s not the only memorable part of the book. One of the things that I remembered best about this book from when I read it as a kid was the difference in Sidney and Megan’s homes and families. The book puts some emphasis on the difference in their family lives, and it’s shown when each of the kids has dinner at each other’s home. Megan has several siblings, and their house is always noisy and boisterous. Sidney is Sidney is a fussy eater at home, but he just eats what’s put in front of him at the McKennas’, like the other kids do. Megan gets a rap on the knuckles from her father for starting to eat before Grace is said. One line from the book that stuck with me for years was when Megan’s brother, Frank, says Grace with this joking prayer: “We thank the Lord for the next meal – we’re sure of this one.” I still think of this whenever someone says Grace aloud.
By contrast, dinner at the Robinson house is much calmer, quieter, and more formal. Sidney is an only child, and his father owns a hardware store, so the Robinsons can afford nicer things. Megan is impressed at the nice tile in the bathroom, and the table is set with embroidered placemats and matching cloth napkins. Megan accidentally bites into one of the cloves in the ham, and when it burns her mouth, she spits the bite of food into her cloth napkin, feeling terribly guilty about it because the napkin really seems too nice for that sort of thing.
I could identify with the feelings the children have about being in houses where people have different habits. There were times when I was young when I felt a little out of place because they were either more formal than I was accustomed to being or more boisterous than I feel comfortable being. People always feel more comfortable with what they’re used to.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 