Posted on by TracyC

Then There Were Five

The Melendy Family Series

Then There Were Five by Elizabeth Enright, 1944.

It’s summer, and the four Melendy children have some big plans! They’ve already started building a dam to make the swimming area on the property of their new house bigger. Their father, who travels frequently, giving lectures, tells them that he’s going to be away for most of the summer. He has to work hard to provide for his big family, and he has also taken a government job that will help the war effort. Mr. Melendy isn’t going to be a soldier because he’s a little old for that and the father of four children. He says that he can’t tell the children about his job, but it will keep him away in Washington for long periods of time. While he’s away, the children will be in the care of the housekeeper, Cuffy, and the handyman, Willy. They will also largely be left to entertain themselves, which is something they definitely know how to do.

Aside from swimming and enjoying themselves this summer, the kids decide that they should also do something useful, to help the war effort. Because of the war, patriotism is running high, and the children feel like they should take on some serious responsibilities. They’ve held events to help the war effort and bought bonds before. This summer, Rush and Randy decide that they’re going to go door to door, collecting scrap metal. Their collecting efforts help them to further get to know their neighbors, and they make friends with the Addison children and a nice, older man named Mr. Titus, who likes to spend his time fishing and baking things and invites the kids to join him sometimes.

However, there is a nasty man called Orin who yells at the children and scares them away when they come to ask him for scrap metal. Soon after this unpleasant incident, Rush and Randy meet Mark, the nice boy who lives with Orin. Mark is an orphan, and he lives with Orin because he’s a distant cousin. Orin’s wife was a nice lady, and Mark liked her, but she died a couple of years before. Orin is mean to everybody, and he mainly sees Mark as a source of unpaid labor on his farm. The Addison children, who know Mark from school, confirm that all of this is true. Orin doesn’t even let Mark go to school very often because he wants to keep him working most of the time. Their teacher and the school superintendent both tried to go see Orin and insist that Mark go to school regularly, but Orin is a violent and frightening man. He chased them both away and sent his mean dogs after them. Nobody really knows what to do about Orin, and most people are afraid to try. He also locks Mark in his room to keep him from running away, although Mark has found a way out and sneaks out sometimes.

The Melendy children feel sorry for Mark, although they try not to be too pitying so they won’t make Mark feel too self-conscious. Rush and Randy start meeting with him secretly to go swimming and fishing and hunt for arrowheads left by the Iroquois who used to live in the area. Rush and Mark also play at being soldiers on a secret mission and go stargazing. Mark knows about the constellations, and the boys watch the Perseid meteor shower in August.

Then, Mark reveals to Rush that Orin and his few friends are making illegal alcohol in a still. They do it because it costs less than buying alcohol. Orin’s friends include a couple of brothers who live in the woods and hardly ever come to town and a man who’s been suspected of bank robbery and murder although nobody was ever able to prove it. The boys spy on Orin and his friends at their still one night, and they hear Orin talking about selling his farm and maybe getting one of the new defense jobs. His friends ask him what he’ll do with Mark if he moves out, and Orin says that he’ll probably just turn him over to the county. One of his friends say that giving Mark to the county might not be so easy because they’ll ask questions, but Orin says he’s thinking of changing his name. The suspected criminal says that he might take Mark because he has trouble keeping workers around his place. Mark tells Rush that he’d rather run away that go live with that criminal, and Rush says that Mark can come stay with his family. The men almost catch the boys listening because the boys are wearing citronella to keep the mosquitos away, but the boys manage to get away before the men catch them.

Rush tells Mark that he’ll talk to his father to see if Mark can stay with the Melendy family or if he knows what else Mark can do. Then, a series of events happen that change everything. First, Cuffy has to go away for awhile to take care of an injured relative, leaving the children even more to their own devices, with Willy and the older children in charge. Then, the in the middle of the night, Rush wakes up to realize that something is on fire. It turns out that Orin’s farm is burning! Rush wakes Randy, and the two of them hurry down to Orin’s farm to see if Mark is safe. They find Mark hurrying to get the animals out of the barn, and neighbors and firefighters are already working on the blaze, but it’s a loosing battle. They manage to save the animals, but both the house and barn are destroyed. Willy, who was also there to help fight the fire, take the Melendy children and Mark back to the Melendy house. Later, Willy informs them that they have discovered that Orin was still in the house and was killed in the fire. (A short flashback informer readers, although the characters in the story don’t know it, that Orin accidentally started the fire when he returned home from his still, drunk, and passed out in the kitchen with a lamp too close to a wall calendar.)

Mark was never fond of Orin because Orin treated him badly, but without Orin, Mark’s custody is in doubt. Mark doesn’t have any other relatives. He’s still only 13 and not old enough to live alone. Rush decides to call his father to ask if Mark can live with them. Mr. Melendy tells Rush to keep Mark at their house for now, and when he returns home from Washington, he’ll straighten things out.

The Melendy children make Mark welcome at their fascinating house, the Four-Story Mistake, and Mark begins to enjoy all the new experiences they give him. He gets to try their books, enjoying classics like Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, Eight Cousins, and various fairy tales. Mark also likes listening to Rush playing music on his piano. Above all, Mark gets the new experience of living with a family that really cares for him. Mark becomes part of the Melendy family’s idyllic summer, but the children worry about whether or not their father will allow them to stay with them permanently.

This is the third book in The Melendy Family series. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, as part of a collection.

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

The Darkest Book in the Series

This book is different from the earlier two books in the series because, while the other adventures were all just treated as fun adventures without anything truly tragic happening when things go wrong, this book actually contains some serious issues. Mark is an orphan living with a violent and abusive guardian who frightens all of the local adults who have tried to intervene on Mark’s behalf. Mark’s guardian is also involved with some seriously shady people and illegal activities. The sudden death of Mark’s guardian frees him from the abuse but also leaves his future in doubt. This is the darkest book in the Melendy series. The book doesn’t shy away from Mark’s feelings and the sadness of Orin’s death, even though he was an awful person. Fortunately, because the tone of this series is optimistic, things work out for the best.

Of course, Mr. Melendy agrees that Mark can stay with the family, but in a realistic touch, adopting him isn’t as simple for the family as taking in a stray dog. Some of the local farmers offer Mark a place working on their farms, including the disreputable man and possible criminal who was one of Orin’s friends. Social service agencies want to know about the home and family Mr. Melendy has to offer Mark before they decide whether or not to allow Mark to remain with them, and a social worker comes to interview him. The social worker sees a taste of the family’s boisterous children and eccentric hobbies (at one point, Mona enters the room, practicing the part of Ophelia from Hamlet), but she is charmed by them and sees that Mark loves being with them, and she decides that the Melendy family will be good for him. There is extra legal work for Mr. Melendy to officially adopt Mark after Mark is allowed to stay with them as a ward or foster child, and the local bank is also interested in Mark’s custody because Orin had a mortgage on his farm, and there are financial issues to be arranged.

In the end, the bank claims Orin’s property because of the mortgage, but Mark inherits the animals because he’s Orin’s only relative. Mark keeps a few animals that can live on the Melendy property, and the Melendys help him sell the others in an auction held on their property. They turn the livestock auction into a fair to raise money for the war effort. Some of them make baked goods to sell, Mona dresses up as a fortune teller, and they hold a talent show with other children from school.

The element of raising money for the war effort continues a theme from earlier books in the series and emphasizes the point that this book was set contemporary to the time when it was written, during WWII. I find books that were written during major events and that take those events into account interesting because it shows how people felt about those events and what they wanted children to understand about them. The kids sometimes make references to the war in casual conversation in a way that seems realistic for a child’s observations, such as when they describe someone as having “teeth like a Japanese general”, although I know that what they’re probably referencing is anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons at the time rather than actual pictures of them. That isn’t mentioned in the story, but I’ve seen those cartoons before, so I can envision what kind of teeth the kids in the story are probably picturing.

The Lighter Side

In spite of the dark parts of the story, the book still has qualities of idyllic life in a big house in the country and the outdoor fun the children have. Some of the images in the story would fit well with cottagecore themes today, such as Mona weaving a strawberry plant in her hair. Oliver collecting caterpillars and watching moths. On Oliver’s 8th birthday, the whole family, including Mark, goes on a picnic to a cave that Mark knows.

There is also a theme around cooking and baking in the story. Mona develops an interest in cooking and baking, and Mr. Titus teaches her recipes and helps her and Randy when they experiment with canning vegetables from the garden. Mona had told her brothers to leave her and Randy alone in the kitchen when they were canning because it was women’s work, and Rush thinks it’s funny that it’s Mr. Titus who rescues them when the job gets too much for them and it becomes obvious that the girls don’t know what they’re doing. Mr. Titus tells the kids at one point that, when he was younger, he was a little embarrassed about his interest in cooking because it didn’t seem like men’s work, but now, he doesn’t care anymore, and he just appreciates doing what he really loves to do.

Another fun note is that the Melendy children like to play a game they call the Comparison Game. One child leaves the room, and the others think of a person they all know or know about. When the other child returns to the room, the others say whether they thought of a male or female person, and the other child starts asking them what that person is like. The child who left the room earlier asks the others what color the person is like, what animal the person is like, what type of weather the person is like, etc., until the child can guess which person they’re talking about by the comparisons made about the person.

Posted on by TracyC

The Four-Story Mistake

The Melendy Family Series

The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright, 1942.

The Melendy family is moving out of their brownstone in New York and going to live in a house in the country. The children aren’t happy about moving because they’ll miss their old home. They’re sure that no other house would ever be as good as their old one.

However, when they arrive at the house in the country known as the Four-Story Mistake (because it was originally supposed to have four stories but the original owner ran out of money and only could manage three floors and a cupola at the top), they are fascinated and charmed by its size and peculiarities. For the first time, each child in the family can have their own room instead of having to share, and there’s also a room that they can turn into an office (really a playroom), like the children had at their old house. Their father takes them up into the cupola and points out the different directions the windows face and how they resemble the outlooks of each of the children. He reminds Randy, the one who misses the old house the most, of the importance of looking ahead.

The children start to enjoy exploring their new house and the countryside around it. Seven-year-old Oliver finds a secret room in the cellar with some old things that belonged to past children who lived in the house. He keeps it to himself for a while, enjoying his secret, but he gradually lets the other children in on it. It takes Randy more time to learn how to ride her bicycle than the others, but she is thrilled when she finally masters it. However, the others are still doing better than she is. When she is separated from them on a bike ride and crashes in town, knocking herself unconscious and getting a cut on her head, she causes a stir. She is tended to by a traffic cop and his wife, who have a house full of plants and a pet alligator named Crusty, among other pets.

Gradually, the children settle in at the house and start feeling more at home there. They start making friends at the nearby school, and Rush builds a tree house with help from the family’s handyman, Willie. One day, when Rush is home with a sore throat and a fever, he gets restless and sneaks out of the house to hide in his tree house. He falls asleep and gets trapped there during a storm when the ladder falls, and he can’t get down. Eventually, his family realizes that he’s missing and rescues him, but he ends up with a case of bronchitis from the hours he spent in the tree house in the rain. Even that isn’t so bad, though, because they bring him food and let him read in bed until he gets better.

As winter starts, the kids play in the snow and use the sleds that Oliver found in the secret basement room. They also discover a hidden door behind some wall paper upstairs. It leads to a hidden room with blue wall paper that they had never noticed before even though they realize that they should have noticed that there were windows on the outside of the house that should have told them there was an extra room. The children decide to keep the hidden room secret from the adults until they can explore it themselves. Inside the room, they find a portrait of a girl labeled “Clarinda.” The kids secretly clean up the room and try to learn who Clarinda was. It takes some time before they learn what happened to Clarinda, but it’s a fascinating and inspirational story rather than a tragic one.

Meanwhile, WWII is still going on, and Mona comes up with a plan to help the war effort. She enlists the other kids to help collect scrap materials, learn to knit, and buy war bonds. They’re a little dubious about some of Mona’s plans, but they get more interested when she says that she wants to put on a play and charge admission to raise money. Mona is writing the play herself. It’s a fairy tale type story called The Princess and the Parsnip. Of course, Mona will also play the leading role as their resident actress. She almost quits the play when she accidentally gives herself a bad hairdo, but fortunately Cuffy helps her fix it. In fact, the play is such a success and Mona does so well that she gets her first real acting job – a role in a radio play.

Her father knows that she’s young, and he talks to her seriously about accepting the job. He makes sure that Mona understands that an acting career will involve hard work and some odd hours. He expects her to keep up with her school work and also take some time to be a real person and family member and not to put on airs. Mona acknowledges that and is really happy when she gets the part.

Rush becomes a little temperamental when Mona gets her job, and he admits to Randy that it’s because he feels bad that he isn’t making real money, like Mona is. The war has been on his mind, and he feels like he wants to do something serious and important and to also feel like he’s earning money for the family. The problem is that he can’t think of anything he can do. Out in the countryside, there aren’t as many job opportunities, so he feels useless. Then, Randy gives him a suggestion: he can teach piano lessons. Rush has always had a special talent for the piano, and they know that there hasn’t been a music teacher in town since the last one left to get married. Rush isn’t sure he likes the idea, but Randy says that if he isn’t interested in the job he could do best, maybe he wasn’t really serious about wanting a job at all. Thinking it over, Rush decides to give it a try, and he’s actually more successful at it than he expected. He almost quits after a particularly difficult student causes him to lose his temper and hit the other boy, but a talk with the boy’s father straights things out between them.

The book covers most of the children’s first year at their new house, with changing seasons and changes in the children’s lives. They have a Christmas with homemade Christmas presents and a few special surprises from their father and Mrs. Oliphant (a wealthy woman who’s an old family friend). There are adventures with ice skating, and in the spring, Randy finds a diamond at the brook. They acquire some new pets, including Crusty the alligator, who becomes another of their Christmas presents, having outgrown the bathtub where he was living with the policeman. Crusty later escapes and takes up residence in the brook before apparently migrating to Pennsylvania. Besides Mona and Rush finding their first jobs, the children begin showing other signs of growing up. Mona attends her first dance, although the children make a point that they’re not too grown-up yet. By the end of the book, the children are well-settled in their new home and are starting to become comfortable with the changes in their lives that come with moving and starting to grow up.

This is the second book in The Melendy Family series. The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, as part of a collection.

My Reaction

This story starts out as a story about kids adjusting to moving to a new house but also turns into a humorous story with Cottagecore elements. The house in the country known as the “Four-Story Mistake” is the stuff of many children’s dreams. It’s large enough for every kid to have their own room plus the room they call the “office”, which is a play room or activity room that all the kids in the family share. Their fabulous house has plenty of rooms to explore, including a cupola and a hidden room with a mysterious backstory.

One of the things I like about this book and others in the series is that there isn’t anything tragic or upsetting in the stories. They’re good books to relax with. When the kids hear the story of the secret, hidden room in their house, there’s an element of drama to the story (one of the stories-within-the story that often appear in this series), but nothing truly tragic. At first, I had thought maybe the original owner of that room had died young, and her family had sealed it up out of grief, but that’s not the case. It turns out that she had dreams of becoming a dancer, so she ran away to pursue her dreams. Her father disowned her and closed up her room after she left, but she actually did achieve her dream, so things worked out for her, and the Melendy kids find that inspiring.

There are woods and a stream nearby, so the kids have outdoor adventures. Even when something goes wrong and the kids have a hard time, like when Rush is sick and gets trapped in his tree house during a storm, it doesn’t end too disastrously, and the hardships are treated more as part of their exciting adventure. Even though Rush suffered during the incident, and Rush’s illness gets worse from being out in the storm, he kind of enjoys the fussing he gets afterward and the time when he’s allowed to stay in bed, reading, while he recovers.

The part where Rush lost his temper with a piano student and hit him surprised me, although how the student’s father reacted to it was even more of a surprise. I think most modern parents would be angry about Rush using physical violence against the other boy, no matter how he was provoked, but that’s not how the father in the story feels. The father knows his son very well, and he understands how he provoked Rush into losing his temper. He also knows why the son was being provoking. The boy wanted Rush to quit as his piano teacher because the boy doesn’t really want to take piano lessons at all. He’s only having piano lessons because his mother wants him to learn to play the piano. Rush handles his loss of temper as professionally as he can, admitting to the boy’s father what happened and offering to resign from the job, but the boy’s father, knowing his son and his son’s motives, refuses to accept that offer. If the father allowed his son to get away with provoking someone else to a fight and then rewarded him by giving the son what he wanted (the end to the piano lessons), the son would learn a bad lesson, that he could get what he wants by behaving badly and being too difficult to handle. It isn’t a good idea to give a kid the idea that acting out gets rewards because it provides an incentive for the kid to continue acting out to get his way.

Instead, the father acknowledges Rush’s professional authority as the piano teacher and says that the boy’s mother wants the piano lessons to continue. Because Rush is the professional authority here, he authorizes Rush to use whatever methods he deems necessary to deal with his student. The father says that he will have a word with his son about this. We never hear exactly what he says to his son, but the son at least grudgingly behaves himself from that point onward, so it seems that the father made it clear to him that bad behavior wouldn’t get him what he wants. It’s true that hitting people isn’t good, but neither is provoking people to a violent reaction, and I was glad that the father acknowledged the provocation and didn’t let it slide. Considering the context of the situation and the character and motives of the people involved, the father’s solution to the problem seems to have been an effective one.

There are coming-of-age elements in the book, partly because the kids are settling into a new home, but also because they’re generally growing up. Some children’s book series have characters who never age, but the Melendy children do age throughout their series. In this book, the two oldest Melendy children get their first jobs, and Mona attends her first dance. I did like it how, after Mona gets home from the dance, she and her siblings run outside to have fun because they want to make the point that they’re not too grown-up yet.

As in the first book in the series, WWII is happening in the background because the series is set contemporary to the time when it was written. The children undertake activities to support the war effort, and their knowledge that the war is happening does cause them to think a little more seriously about life, about doing their part, both for their country and their family. I thought it was an interesting choice for the author to write about children’s thoughts concerning the war while it was happening and the outcome of the war was still unknown. The author seems to be promoting children taking part in civilian activities to support the war, like raising funds, buying war bonds, and collecting useful scrap materials. I think that was probably the attitude of many adults in the 1940s, wanting children to make themselves useful and to show patriotism, and I can see those motives in the choice to let the war be part of the children’s reality. With the story’s other themes of moving, exploring the countryside, growing up, and finding fun and adventure in a new home, I can see how the author could have chosen to focus on those elements and left the time period of the story vague, but I appreciated how the author faced the reality of child readers, acknowledging the war and giving them suggestions for how they could handle their feelings through useful support activities. The countryside in the story isn’t a place where the children hide from the troubles of the world around them but where they can find their own way dealing with them creatively.

Posted on by TracyC

The Invisible Island

The Invisible Island by Dean Marshall, 1948.

The four Guthrie children (Dit, Allen, David, and Winkie – short for Winifred) find it difficult to play in their family’s apartment, where they always have to be careful not to disturb the neighbors. One rainy day, while their mother is at a dentist appointment, the children act out a scene from The Swiss Family Robinson, where they’re throwing the animals overboard from the shipwreck to swim to the desert island when they accidentally break part of the floor, which is also the same as breaking part of the ceiling for the neighbors underneath. When they get a knock at their door, shortly after, they figure that the neighbors have come to complain.

However, it turns out that their visitor is the neighbors’ cousin, who is staying with them. The children explain about The Swiss Family Robinson, the shipwreck, and how they were throwing particularly heavy ducks overboard from their wrecked ship. The neighbors’ cousin is a good-natured man who enjoys talking to the children. When the children’s mother comes home, she apologizes for the damage and explains that she and her husband are currently looking for a new house with more room for the children to play, but they haven’t found a place yet. The cousin says that he comes from a smaller town himself, Anchorage, Connecticut, and he might be able to help them find a place to buy there.

The Guthries do rent a house in that town that has some land attached to it, and the children are excited about the move. They want to be able to camp out on their land, like castaways from their favorite book. When they stop in town to buy some supplies before heading to their new house, they are surprised that there don’t seem to be any children around. The shopkeeper explains that there’s a measles epidemic going around town, and most of the children have it right now. He asks the Guthries if their children have had measles before, and their mother says they have … except for the youngest, Winkie. She decides that, for safety’s sake, she should keep the children close to home until the epidemic is over, and the kids should wait to try to make some new friends in town.

The children are hoping to find some new friends, but there’s plenty to do at their new house in the countryside to keep them occupied for a while. On their first day there, they are delighted to find out that there’s a brook and a lake on their property. The children convince their father to come exploring with them, and he has them help him to make a map of the area, knowing that they will want to camp out later. After walking around a piece of land that’s bordered by the lake and the brook, they realize that it’s actually an island because it is bordered on every side by water. The lake is on one side, the brook on another, and there are two more brooks or streams on the other sides that separate it from the land around it and make it into a sort of oblong-shaped island. They call it “The Invisible Island” because it isn’t obvious that it is actually an island until someone walks all the way around it and realizes that it’s actually surrounded by water on all sides. As far as they know, nobody else besides them is even aware that it’s an island.

The children’s mother has some reservations about the children camping out on the island, but the children agree to some safety rules and bringing along some practical camping supplies. They make a raft to carry their supplies across the water to the island. The children begin calling their new house “The Wreck”, imagining that they are rescuing supplies from a shipwreck, like The Swiss Family Robinson. They create a hiding place for their tents, and they find a spring on the island, although their father won’t let them drink from it until he has the water tested to make sure that it’s safe.

The children have enough supplies to camp on the island for a week, and they begin having an idyllic summer, with little adult supervision. They swim and bathe in the lake, using colorful soap on a rope that Winkie found when the family bought supplies at the store in town. They feed the birds, explore, and pick wild strawberries. They get ideas for how castaways are supposed to act from The Swiss Family Robinson and The Mysterious Island.

Their parents do come to visit them and check on them, playing along with the shipwreck theme by calling themselves friendly “savages” when they visit the camp. Their father helps the children to bring stones from a quarry to build a hut. Their mother tells them that she has started to meet the neighbors, and they have some nice children who could make good friends for the Guthries, once they’re out of quarantine from the measles. Both the nice man who helped them find the house to rent and the local doctor have nieces and nephews. The children don’t care that their mother thinks the children are well-mannered. They’re more concerned about whether or not they’ll be adventurous types, who would have fun with them on their special island. They think that they would hate to share their island with “apron-string children” who would be too tied to their parents and home and wouldn’t appreciate the independence and adventure the island allows. The truth is that the children have been enjoying their freedom on the island so much that they’re not sure that they want to give it up yet to make friends with the local children, and in a way, they’re grateful to the quarantine for giving them this time to explore by themselves.

However, there are some strange things that the children have started to notice about the island. One day, Winkie’s soap on a rope disappears and reappears in a different place, strangely looking less used than when they last saw it. The children’s wishes also seem to be granted by a mysterious, unknown person. When they wish aloud for a book about castaways that they haven’t read before and book about birds so they know more about the birds they’ve been seeing, they soon find a wooden box that contains books matching that exact description. When they wish that they had more strawberries, they suddenly find more strawberries in their icebox that they can tell came from a store instead of the wild strawberry patch. Winkie has a bizarre encounter with a “dryad”, and the footprint of a 6-toed giant suddenly appears on the beach. Maybe they’re not as alone on the island as they thought, but who else is there with them?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (in audio form!)

My Reaction and Spoilers

Copies of this book are difficult to find now. It’s become a collector’s item, and copies go for hundreds of dollars on Amazon at the time of this writing. It’s a shame because it’s really a charming story, and I think it would really appeal to fans of Cottagecore. If I hadn’t found a copy on Internet Archive, I couldn’t even talk about this book at all.

There were many children’s book series published in the mid-20th century about children having adventures in the countryside and independent of their parents and guardians, like The Boxcar Children series or many of the books by Enid Blyton. Some of these books and series seem a little more realistic than others. Most require the children’s families to be at least middle-class or wealthy to be able to set the children up for their adventures. Some books, particularly the ones by Enid Blyton, feature parents who are preoccupied with their own problems or activities and seem less concerned with the children’s welfare than about getting the kids out of their hair. I thought The Invisible Island had a good balance of independence for the children and adult supervision.

The adults in this book know that the children have been camping before, so they have some basic camping skills, and they come to visit the children about every two days, to see how they’re doing and make sure they aren’t having any problems. The kids pride themselves on their independence (they brag that they’re “not apron-string children”), but at the same time, their parents do regularly check on them and are aware of developments on the island, sometimes more so than the children realize. The children confide to their parents some of the strange things they’ve noticed on the island, but not everything because they’re enjoying their adventure so much that “the castaways” don’t want to be “rescued.” Eventually, readers come to understand that the parents know who’s been hanging around the island and that the children are not in any danger.

Adults will probably realize pretty quickly that some of the neighbor children are also camping out in the area, and that these children are the ones moving things around, giving them things, and staging fantastical stunts, like the appearance of the “dryad” and the giant’s footprint. It’s just that they can’t introduce themselves to the Guthrie children yet because the quarantine is still on, and they have to stay mostly separate. As the quarantine ends, they’re able to let the Guthrie children see them and interact with them more, although the game doesn’t completely end until the official end of the quarantine and the surprise party they hold to celebrate. The book ends with the children and their new friends making plans for more adventures that summer.

One of the great things about this book is that it’s one of those children’s books that reference other children’s books. There are other vintage children’s books like this, where the child characters take their inspiration for their games of imagination from their favorite books. The books are named throughout the story, and presumably, child readers from the time when this book was originally printed, would also know these stories and identify with the children’s pretend play. The main favorite book of the Guthrie children is the classic The Swiss Family Robinson, which inspires them not just to camp out but to turn their camping trip into one big game of imagination in which they’re shipwrecked. Most of the things they do in the story are based around that concept, although some fantasy elements also creep in, like fairies and dryads and granted wishes, because the children also enjoy fantasy books and poems. The new friends they make in the area turn out to enjoy similar stories, so some of the mysterious incidents they stage are also based on those stories, further appealing to the children’s imaginations as well as their sense of adventure.

I wasn’t completely sure if the book that their new friends gave to the Guthrie children was meant to be a real book because there are many books with titles like The Smuggler’s Island, and I had trouble locating a book from before 1948 with that exact title. Since the other books and poems they reference are real, The Smuggler’s Island might be real, too. If anybody knows what it is and who wrote it, please let me know. On the other hand, that book, because the children say they’ve never read it before, might just be invented by the author to represent that general genre of children’s fiction.

Other real books, stories, and poems referenced by this story include The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (which is a sequel to both his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways), The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll (at one point, David recites the lines from the poem, “His intimate friends called him “Candle-ends”, And his enemies “Toasted-cheese”), and the poem Overheard on a Saltmarsh by Harold Munro (which was the inspiration for the dryad scene because it contains a nymph and a goblin and a necklace of green glass beads).

The concept of a quarantine probably would have made this an excellent story for the coronavirus pandemic, but the setting is idyllic and enchanting for any time. The children are clever in the way they set up their camp, trying to keep it as secret as possible. Their island also includes a spring (which is safe to drink from) and a cave, and they start building a stone hut in this book.

There’s only one thing I can think of to complain about in this book, and that’s the concept of the “savages.” When the parents describe themselves as “savages” when they visit the children, they’re playing on themes from earlier vintage books with islands and shipwrecks. “Natives” and “savages” in those stories can either be helpful or, more commonly, threats to the castaways. I’ve complained about this before in previous book reviews with similar themes because there are stereotypes around these generic “natives” and “savages”, and modern children should be taught not to talk about people in those ways. However, there is no malice behind it in this story. The characters aren’t making fun of anyone or disparaging anybody for being “primitive.” It’s just that they’re playing a game of imagination built on these earlier stories, and they’re using this concept as a plot device to work themselves into the story as something other than visiting parents, preserving both the children’s sense of independence and the imaginary world of the children’s game. Anybody who can understand that should be fine with this book.

My only other complaint is that this book is so rare and so long out of print. I really do think it would appeal to modern audiences, especially fans of cottagecore.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Secret of Grey Walls

Lone Pine Series

The Secret of Grey Walls by Malcolm Saville, 1947.

It’s shortly after Christmas, and Petronella (called “Peter” by her friends) is home from boarding school for the holidays. She has a strange dream about running through the woods with an unfamiliar girl and finding a house with gray walls, but she’s not sure where it is or what the dream means. She wakes up when there’s a fire in her dream.

Petronella and her father live by themselves in the countryside because her mother died when she was a baby. Her father misses her when she goes away to school, but he knows that it’s important for her to go, and although he would like to spend all of their holidays together, he also knows that it’s important for her to spend time with her friends.

When Petronella goes to visit her friends, the Mortons, Mr. and Mrs. Morton and their housekeeper, Agnes all receive news that changes the children’s plans for the remainder of their vacation. (This is after Mr. Morton is home from the war after serving in the RAF.) Mr. and Mrs. Morton have to go to London to see a lawyer about some business, although they’re vague about the reasons why. Agnes’s news is that her sister is sick and in the hospital. With all of the adults leaving the Mortons’ house at Witchend, Mr. and Mrs. Morton wonder who they can have looking after David and the twins until they return. They consider different people they can ask, but Agnes says that all of the children can come to the village of Clun with her. Her sister has a very big house, and she’s been worried about not having anyone to look after the house while she’s in the hospital. There will be plenty of room for all of them, and Agnes says that she would appreciate the company in that big, old place. The children can even invite the other members of the Lone Pine Club to join them.

At this point in the series, not all members of the Lone Pine Club have actually met each other. David invited Jon and Penny, a pair of cousins, to join the club while visiting the hotel that Jon’s mother, who is Penny’s aunt, owns in another town. This trip will be an opportunity for the whole club to get together and get to know each other. Jon and Penny are very excited about the trip, especially Penny, who is a talkative girl who enjoys meeting new people.

On the train to meet the others, Penny strikes up a conversation with a man named Alan Denton, who brought a dog onto the train. Denton recently left the Navy and is heading home to manage his family’s sheep farm near Clun. He is very surprised when Penny says that they are also going to Clun because it’s a very small town, and few people visit there during the winter. The old house where they will be staying is usually run as a boarding house for summer visitors, but there won’t be anyone else there during the winter. The old house is called Keep View because it has a view of a crumbling old castle. There isn’t much else left of the castle other than the old keep. The children are fascinated as Denton describes the castle and other points of interest in the area, like a circle of standing stones. He says that visitors sometimes dig for old flint arrowheads.

The other kids are going to Clun by bicycle, except for Peter, who is riding her pony, Sally. Along the way, the kids meet up with a caravan of gypsies they know from a previous book. (Yes, this is a mid-20th century British children’s mystery adventure story, so of course, there are gypsies. The book spells it “gipsies,” and they also call themselves “Romany.” In the case of this series, the Romany are friends of the kids, not suspicious characters, as in many other children’s books from around this time.) The kids tell the Romany where they are heading, and they say that they’ve just left Clun. Ordinarily, they like the area, but there’s been some trouble there lately. Someone is stealing sheep from some of the sheep farms. The Romany know that people are often suspicious of Romany, so they thought that they’d better leave the area before someone accuses them of being involved with the thefts. Before the kids leave the Romany, the Romany remind them about the special whistle that they gave to Peter, saying that if she blows it, any Romany who hears it will come to help.

Peter, meanwhile, has a disturbing encounter on her trip to meet the others. She meets some men whose truck has broken down. The men behave oddly, and although the truck says that it’s a furniture truck, Peter is sure that she hears the baaing of sheep inside.

The kids don’t start to put together pieces of what’s going on until they reunite in Clun. While they are getting to know each other and exploring the area, they suddenly meet up with Alan Denton, who is distraught because his sheep farm has been the latest victim of the sheep thefts. Peter mentions to the others about the strange truck with the sheep sounds, although Denton dismisses the idea that Peter might have encountered the sheep thieves on her way to Clun because he doesn’t think that the thieves would have been able to load all the sheep onto a truck without being noticed.

Meanwhile, a strange man called Mr. Cantor rents a room at Keep View from Agnes. The boarding house doesn’t usually get boarders in the winter, and the children had counted on having the house to themselves during their stay. Mr. Cantor says that he’s recovering from an illness and needs some peace and quiet, which is disappointing to the children because that means that they’ll either have to spend most of their time outside or being very careful not to disturb Mr. Cantor. Although the children like being outdoors, it is cold, and they know they can’t be outdoors all the time, and a houseful of children isn’t usually quiet. Mr. Cantor seems a little strange, and some of the kids get the feeling that he isn’t quite what he seems to be, but he knows a great deal about the history and landmarks of the area. He entertains the children with stories about local history and ancient burials, and they begin feeling better about him.

However, something happens that causes them to becomes suspicious of Mr. Cantor. After a visit to Mr. Denton’s sheep farm, the children get lost. They find a strange grey house and try to ask directions there. Nobody answers their knocks or calls even though the children are sure that someone is watching them from inside the house. Then, they realize that someone is also watching them from the woods. They briefly see this person leaving, and this person has a bicycle that rattles badly. When the children get back to Keep View, they realize that the bicycle they heard belongs to Mr. Cantor because it makes that same distinctive rattle. Was Mr. Cantor spying on them? Who was in the house, and why didn’t they want anyone to see them. Does any of this have something to do with the sheep thefts?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I’m new to this series of mid-20th century British mystery adventure books. This is the first book I’ve read, so I’m really getting to know them as some of them are getting to know each other. I was a little disappointed that this particular book seems to be set after WWII is over because I knew that the series started during the war and that the war was part of the story, but that does put this book contemporary to the time when it was written.

This story and the series in general does have a similar feel to other British children’s mystery adventure stories and series written around the same time, especially the Enid Blyton books, such as Enid Blyton’s Adventure Series and The Famous Five Series. Like the characters in the Enid Blyton books, the members of this friendship club attend boarding schools and have outdoorsy adventures on school holidays. The Romany appearing in this book is also a common element found in Enid Blyton books and other children’s books written around the same time. In all such books, there are stereotypical elements surrounding the Romany characters, although I think the Romany in this book were treated more kindly than the ones in Enid Blyton books. The use of the word “Romany” as well as “gipsy” is one element of understanding, but also the Romany characters in this book are friendly and helpful characters, not suspicious ones. There are people who are suspicious that the Romany are involved in the sheep thefts, but our heroes know that isn’t the case, defend them publicly, and help to expose the real thieves.

I really liked the addition of Mr. Cantor in the story. Like other kids’ mystery books of this type, there is more adventure in the story than mystery, but the appearance of Mr. Cantor adds that needed element of mysterious. For much of the story, it’s difficult to say what Mr. Cantor’s motives are and whose side he’s on. The kids have the feeling from the beginning that he’s not quite what he seems to be, but they find themselves having mixed feelings and debating back-and-forth about him as the story continues. When he’s nice to them and telling them stories about the history of the area, they decide that they like him and that they were silly to be suspicious before. Then, when he seems eager to agree with the authorities that the Romany are responsible for the sheep thefts, they look at him suspiciously again. There are some funny moments when the youngest members of the group, the twins Dickie and Mary, make friends with Mr. Cantor and try to distract him and keep an eye on him while the others do some investigating. The twins are irritated at being left behind by the older kids, but they do throw themselves into the roles of spies and put a lot of effort into making Mr. Cantor their special friend, guilting him into spending time with them. Mary gets Mr. Cantor to entertain them by telling them fairy stories and acts sweetly enthralled, while Mr. Cantor struggles to come up with story ideas to keep the kids happy, and Dickie thinks that the whole thing is stupid and little-kiddish.

I was a little surprised at the way characters in the book talked to each other at times, both children and adults, although I suppose I really shouldn’t have been. They use words that sound rough and insulting, like “stupid” and “ass” in very casual ways, both in describing themselves and each other. I’ve heard that before in British movies and television shows, but it always surprises me because it sounds so ill-mannered. Nobody in the book or in any of the shows I’ve seen seems to mind it, though. It’s just surprising when you hear someone who seems like they’re from the upper classes or who is supposed to have some of the refinements of a boarding school education throwing around words that sound rude and insulting with no thought about it.

There is a foreword at the beginning of the book that says Clun is a real town, but the author took some creative liberties with the landmarks in the story.

Posted on by TracyC

Bicycle Mystery

The Boxcar Children

Boxcar Children Bicycle Mystery cover

Bicycle Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1970.

Boxcar Children Bicycle Mystery fixing a bike

Grandfather Alden tells the Boxcar Children that their Aunt Jane has invited them to visit her on her farm. To make the trip more interesting for the adventurous kids, he suggests that they make the journey to Aunt Jane into a cross-country bicycle trip. There are motels along the route where they can stay, or they can came out. They won’t be able to take Watch the dog with them this time because he’s getting too old to follow their bikes that long distance, but the kids like the idea of the cross-country bike trip.

The cross-country trip gives the Alden children the chance to meet new people and have adventures. Along the way, they stop to help Mrs. Randall, a woman who is worried about having to fix dinner suddenly for her husband’s boss while her house is a mess. The Aldens see how upset she is while they’re shopping for food themselves, so they volunteer to help her. The boss’s visit turns out to be a success, and rather than coming to discuss a problem at work, he’s there to tell the Randalls that he’s considering Mr. Randall for a promotion. However, the Alden children have the feeling that there’s something else worrying Mrs. Randall that has to do with her son, Carl, who isn’t there. Every time Carl is mentioned, Mrs. Randall seems worried.

Boxcar Children Bicycle Mystery dog in the window

As the children continue on their way, they get caught in a rain storm and take shelter in an abandoned house. There, they find a little gray dog, who seems friendly and well-behaved. The dog is very hungry, and they share their food with him. The dog seems eager to follow them when they leave. They try to tell the dog to go home, thinking that he probably lives somewhere nearby, but he insists on going with them. Benny starts calling the dog Shadow for following them. The Aldens don’t think they can keep Shadow because they don’t think Watch would like them getting another dog, and they’re a little worried that letting him follow them might be taking him further away from wherever he lives, but they don’t know what to do but take care of him until they can figure out where he belongs.

Boxcar Children Bicycle Mystery injured boy

Later, they meet a boy who is minding a roadside vegetable stand who has a broken leg. The boy says that he feels badly because his father can use some help picking vegetables, too, but he can’t do much since he broke his leg. The Boxcar children offer to help, and the boy and his father are surprised that they’re willing to work for free. The kids say that they’re just out for adventure right now, and they don’t mind helping. The father, Mr. Smith, notices the way that Shadow whines constantly, even though he doesn’t seem hurt. They talk about the dog and wonder who the owner is. Mr. Smith thinks that, if someone didn’t want the dog, they probably could have sold him instead of abandoning him. His son, Roy, noticed something odd while he was minding the vegetable stand. A pair of girls commented that it was the same dog that they had seen in a parking lot earlier. Mr. Smith suggests that the kids ask Miss Lucy at the post office if anyone in the area has lost a dog because she knows everyone and everything that’s going on. When they ask Miss Lucy, she says that nobody in the area has lost a dog, and Shadow isn’t at all familiar to her. Shadow seems to be an unusual breed, and Miss Lucy thinks that he looks funny.

As the children travel further, they spot a sign for a dog show. They decide that they should go to the dog show and see if they can meet people who are interested in dogs and might know what kind of dog Shadow is. They meet a man who tells them that the dog is a young show dog, and he offers to buy the dog. When the kids say that they can’t sell Shadow because he doesn’t belong to them, the man and his wife seem suspicious, and the woman takes a picture of them and the dog.

When the kids finally reach Aunt Jane’s farm, Uncle Andy recognizes the dog as a Skye terrier. The kids finally manage to locate the dog’s owner, and it turns out to be a surprise.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

This is one of the early Boxcar Children books, written by the original author. Because of the cross-country trip format, the book is somewhat episodic, with incidents taking place at different places where the children stop on their trip. The story has more elements of adventure than mystery, but the mystery element is there, too.

The Boxcar Children frequently have more independence from adult supervision than most kids have today, which is part of the appeal that the series has for kids. I think that most people who rent motel rooms would be concerned about renting rooms to children by themselves, but it’s important to point out that the word “kids” is relative. In the later books in the series, the kids’ ages are frozen, so the eldest, Henry, never ages past 14 years old. However, in the earlier books, like this one, the kids did age. In this book, Henry is college-aged, so he’s not exactly a kid anymore. The book doesn’t provide an exact age for him, but he’s probably 18 years old or older.

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

The Bobbsey Twins’ Adventure in the Country

Bobbsey Twins

The Bobbsey Twins’ Adventure in the Country by Laura Lee Hope,1907, 1961.

Before I explain the plot of this story, I have to explain that this is one of the early Bobbsey Twins books, originally published in the early 20th century, and like other Stratemeyer Syndicate books that were still in print during the mid-20th century, it was revised from its original form to update the language, culture, and technology in the story and, especially, to remove questionable racial terms and caricatures. The physical copy of the book I read as a kid was the revised version, and I didn’t know about the revisions until I was an adult. When I describe the plot at first, I’m talking about the revised version, but I’m also going to explain some of the differences between the original version and the revised version, so you can see what changed.

The two sets of Bobbsey Twins (Nan and Bert are the elder set of twins and Freddie and Flossie are the younger set) are enjoying their summer vacation at home when their mother receives an invitation for the family to visit the children’s aunt and uncle on their farm and to attend an auction that will be held somewhere nearby. The aunt says that there is something that will be sold at the auction that she thinks will interest the family, but the adults are keeping it as a surprise. The children are excited because they like visiting the farm, and they’ve never been to an auction before.

Mr. Bobbsey has to work at his lumber yard, so the children and their mother take the train to the farm ahead of him, accompanied by their cook/housekeeper, Dinah. (Dinah is black and is a recurring character in the series. The book refers to her as “colored.”) The train trip is a bit chaotic because they nearly forgot to bring their packed lunch, and then, Fred’s cat escapes from its carrier and is nearly left behind when they reach their destination. However, they do get there safely.

At the farm, the children enjoy seeing their cousin, Harry, and visiting all the animals. Freddie loses one of the calves when he tries to take it for a walk, like it’s a dog, and at first, the children fear that it fell in the river and drowned. Fortunately, someone from a nearby farm finds the calf and brings it home. These unrelated misadventures are just the beginning of the children’s summer because there is a mystery that seems to be unfolding at the farm.

On their first night at the farm, Flossie wakes up in the middle of the night because she hears someone playing the piano. She wakes Nan, and the two of them go downstairs, but by the time they get there, whoever was playing the piano is gone. At first, the children’s uncle thinks that it was just a dream, but Nan knows that it wasn’t because a piece of sheet music was knocked off the piano. Later, when they hear the piano at night again, there are smudges on the keys.

The auction is fun. The children each have a little money to buy something small for themselves, just for the experience of bidding on something at an auction. They all find something to buy, and some of the things they find are funny and eclectic. The mystery object that their mother is there to buy is a pony and cart. A neighbor of the aunt and uncle had a pony and cart that his grandchildren used, but they’ve moved away, and the Bobbseys have decided to buy it for their children. The twins’ aunt and uncle are willing to keep them at their farm because they can’t have a pony in the city, and their cousin can use them when the twins aren’t there. The children love the pony, and they have fun with him and the cart with some other kids. However, when they return to the farm after they auction, they discover that the family’s prize bull has been stolen!

The story is somewhat episodic, but there is a thread of mystery that runs through the whole book as the children try to find the missing bull. There’s a boy from New York City who was lost from a group heading to a nearby Fresh Air Camp (part of a charity that has existed since the 19th century to provide poor city children with enriching summer experiences in the countryside – I referred to it before in another vintage children’s book, Ruth Fielding at Sunrise Farm) who witnessed the theft but didn’t realize that the men he saw didn’t own the bull. There’s a Fourth of July celebration and a picnic with other kids, including a local bully. There is some real danger, where Flossie falls over the edge of a cliff and has to be rescued, and the family has to evacuate the farm temporarily when they fear that a nearby dam might break after a fierce storm. Along the way, the Bobbsey twins gather pieces of information that help them find the missing bull.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The original edition of the book is public domain and available online through Project Gutenberg.

My Reaction

The Mystery

The mysteries in the story are pretty simple. The story is pretty episodic, and the nighttime piano-playing is unrelated to the theft of the bull. The reasons for that are partly related to the way the book was written in the original version. Originally, the book was more of a general collection of stories about how the Bobbsey Twins spend their summer on their aunt and uncle’s farm and have little adventures there, and it wasn’t really a mystery story. One of the features of Stratemeyer Syndicate books is that chapters are always supposed to end on cliffhangers to keep the stories exciting and encourage children to keep reading. That format lends itself well to the mystery genre, which is why some Stratemeyer series that originally started as more general fiction or adventure gradually evolved into mysteries, but some of the early books, like this one, kind of end up being somewhere between mystery and general fiction and read almost like collections of shorter, interrelated stories.

The theft of the bull didn’t occur at all in the original story, but there was a thread through the book about the piano playing at night. In both the new and the old versions, they eventually find out why, but there are different explanations between the versions. In both versions, the nighttime piano player is an animal, not a human.

Original Version vs. Revised

Like other Stratemeyer Syndicate books that were in print in the mid-20th century, the early Bobbsey Twins books were revised and reprinted around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, both to update the technology and slang in the stories and to remove inappropriate racial language. The 1960s edition of the book uses the word “colored” to refer to the housekeeper/cook who works for the Bobbsey family and her husband, which was an acceptable term in the early and mid-20th century (as in The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP), but the word “black” became the common accepted informal, generic term and “African American” became the accepted formal, specific term post-Civil Rights Movement because people were trying to distance themselves from racial words that, while they were not meant to be derogatory, had some emotional baggage attached to them. In the case of this particular book, the changes from the original version to the version I have include making Dinah more intelligent and eliminating the use of stereotypical black people speech. In the original book, even though she’s an adult, Dinah seems childlike in her reactions to things and seems to need the children to explain things to her, like the scale they see at the train station. When she speaks, her speech is spelled out with a strong accent (ex. “dat chile” instead of “that child”), and she throws out phrases like, “Lan’ o’ massy!” In the revised version, she acts and speaks more like the other adults.

Something else that changed from the original version is how much emphasis there was on poor people vs. upper middle class people, like the Bobbseys. The older version of the story emphasizes more how poor the kid from the Fresh Air Camp is and how charitable the Bobbseys are toward him. There are also other instances of charity toward the poor, like when Nan lends another girl a dress because they need to wear white dresses for the Fourth of July celebration, and the other girl doesn’t have a white dress. The book is careful to mention that nobody else knows that the other girl was borrowing a dress from Nan, with the implication that it would have been embarrassing or a mark of shame for people to know that it was a borrowed dress instead of one of her own. Things like this appear in many vintage children’s books from the 19th century and early 20th century, but it’s not something you find much in modern modern books, at least not described like that. Even when I was a middle-class kid in the late 20th century, it wouldn’t be assumed that a kid would necessarily have certain types of clothes for a special occasion or that their family would be able to just quickly buy something new for one-time use. It was also normal for people to borrow things from friends, even just on whims, so borrowing a dress for one-time use for a special occasion wouldn’t have been regarded as either an act of charity or anything to cause embarrassment, if other people just happened to know about it.

Even though there are things in the stories that were changed to make the stories contemporary with the time of the revisions, the 1960s, there are still aspects of the stories that would be out-of-date culturally by 21st century standards. One of those issues relates to how the adults in the story handle the children. One of the adults in the story tries to resolve the bully situation by letting Bert physically fight the boy who was picking on him, telling both the boys to wrestle with each other to settle their differences and get it all out of their systems. This is not advice that most modern adults would give to kids, and one good reason for not giving that advice is that it doesn’t work, not even in this book. First of all, the kid being bullied might not be the winner of the wrestling match in real life, and no kid should be forced to fight physically just because some bully wants to beat them up. In the book, Bert wins the wrestling match because he’s had wrestling classes before, but as the case would probably be in real life as well, it resolves nothing. The bully is resentful about losing the fight and continues to bully him and play mean tricks on the other kids. The bully episodes are basically there just to add conflict and excitement to the story, and they don’t do much more than that.

I was a little surprised that they left in the part from the original story where the kids put on their own circus, and they have an act they call the “Sacred Calf of India.” In the revised version, Nan wears an improvised sari for this act, and they teach the calf to do a trick. Animals doing cute little tricks are just fine, but adding in the exoticism seems in poor taste. I suppose that they left this part in the revised version because it’s not trying to be insulting to people from India, more that the kids are trying to play on the concept of circus acts and snake charmers, but it is another example of something that you find sometimes in vintage books but wouldn’t be likely to find in modern ones.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Wouldbegoods

The Wouldbegoods by E. Nesbit, 1901.

“We are the Wouldbegoods Society,
We are not good yet, but we mean to try,
And if we try, and if we don’t succeed,
It must mean we are very bad indeed.”

By Noel Bastable

The previous book in the Bastable Children series, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, ended with the children and their father going to live with their “Indian uncle.” The uncle isn’t identified by name, but he is apparently their real uncle, and he had only recently returned from living in India in the previous book, when he invited the Bastables to come live with him at Christmas. Since then, he has been helping the children’s father with his business, and the children are once again going to school, but not boarding school because their father doesn’t believe in boarding schools. However, the six Bastable children are still motherless and not accustomed to being supervised much in their free time.

During the spring, the children of one of their father’s friends come to stay for a visit. The Bastable children don’t like the other children much at first because they seem too timid and too well-behaved. The imaginative Bastable children decide that what these other kids need is a good game of pretend to get them out of their shells. One of the Bastables’ favorite books is The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, so they decide to make their own jungle and act out scenes from the book. They give their guests the book to read, pointing out parts that they want to act out, while they go set up the jungle. They use the garden hose to create a waterfall, and they haul a bunch of their uncle’s taxidermy animals out of the house to set the jungle scene. They also set loose some guinea pigs and a pet tortoise and cover their dog in coal dust so he can be a wolf. Their father’s friend’s son, Dennis (called Denny), starts really getting into the game, but his sister, Daisy, prefers just to read the book. Matters come to a head when the boys frighten Daisy too much with their tiger costumes, and she faints. It is at that moment that their father and uncle arrive with some friends, seeing the children all gathered around Daisy, whom they first fear has died of fright. Some of the boys are nearly naked, their skin covered in brown dye so they’ll look like Mowgli from the book (no modern children should dye their skin for a costume like that, and that should be something adults explain to them, if they read this book), the taxidermy animals are all wet from the hose, the coal-covered dog is on the sofa inside, and the tortoise and one of the guinea pigs are never seen again.

Naturally, the adults are angry at the situation, and the children admit that their game went too far. The uncle swats the boys with his cane (not the girls because it would be ungentlemanly to hit a girl), and all of the children are sent to their rooms and put on a temporary diet of bread and water as punishment. Their father briefly talks of the possibility of boarding school, which shocks the children because they know how he feels about it. What the adults decide to do instead is to send the children to the country for the summer. Their friend from the previous book, Albert’s uncle, is an author, and he has rented a house in the country, where he will be writing. He always appreciates the children’s imagination and playacting, and he agrees to take all eight children, both the six Bastables and Denny and Daisy. (Albert isn’t there, so he’s probably somewhere with his mother.) Of course, since Albert’s uncle (who is never identified by any other name) will be writing much of the time, readers can guess that the children will have little supervision in the country.

The old manor house that Albert’s uncle has rented is a fascinating place. It has a moat around it, and a secret staircase, although it’s not really secret anymore because people already know about it. The eight children immediately begin doing things wrong in the country because they don’t know what they’re supposed to do and what they aren’t supposed to do, and adults usually only tell them what they’re not supposed to do after they’ve already done it. They ring a bell that is only supposed to be rung in emergencies, and they play in some hay that the horses are supposed to eat. Then, the girls in the group bring up an idea they’ve had.

The girls are still feeling guilty over the earlier bad behavior that got them sent to the country in the first place, so they’ve decided that it’s time for them all to reform their characters. Daisy in particular suggests that they form a society to do it because she knows that when people are serious about undertaking a good cause, they form a society for it. The boys aren’t as enthusiastic about the idea of forming a society around just being good, which doesn’t sound very fun or interesting, but the girls talk them into it. Oswald wants to know how it will be organized and who will be in charge, so they begin setting out some rules. Basically, all of the children are in the society, and nobody is allowed to leave it without telling the others. As long as they are in the society, they must always try their best to be good, and every day, they must try to do some good deed, which they will record in special book. After a debate about the name of their society, they decide to call it the Society of the Wouldbegoods. They also decide that this society must be kept secret from the adults, which is a major reason why their efforts turn out the way they do.

The first evening after they form the society, the children are unusually well-behaved but glum because they’re working so hard to be good. Albert’s uncle notices their odd mood, but they can’t explain to him why they feel this way, and he doesn’t press them. They also quickly have trouble finding good deeds to do, especially ones that are fun or interesting.

Dicky’s first good deed effort is to try to fix a window that seems broken to him, but it turns out that he doesn’t understand the reason why the window is the way it is. Because he changes it, a milk pan accidentally falls out the window into the moat. Oswald decides that the only good deed they can do is to retrieve the milk pan and fix Dicky’s mistake. They immediately recruit the other children to help them drag the moat, but none of them really knows how to do that, and by the terms of the society, they can’t ask the adults or tell them what they’re
trying to do. The only thing they can find to use for dragging the moat is a bed sheet, which they ruin by getting it dirty and tearing it, and it still doesn’t help them retrieve the milk pan. Failing that, they decide to make a raft and use it to reach the pan. This works better, but when they reach for the pan, the raft overturns and dumps everyone in the water, and Dora hurts her foot badly on an old tin in the water. Fortunately, the cook sees them fall in the moat, and she hurries to get Albert’s uncle, who gets the boat from the boathouse and rows out to rescue the children. (Apparently, the kids didn’t know there was a boat before they built the raft.)

Their next good deed goes better, although they don’t entirely think of it as a good deed. The children become fascinated with some soldiers who are training nearby. They like to watch the soldiers as they ride by and have their drills and exercises. When they wave to the soldiers, the soldiers blow kisses to the girls, which gives them a thrill. The kids dress up as soldiers and ask Albert’s uncle if they can borrow the old armaments that are decorating the walls of the old manor house as their weapons, and he says yes. (Oh, Good Lord, why? Nothing bad happens to the kids because of those old weapons, and they apparently don’t damage any of the antiques, but given their track record, this was taking a real risk.) The soldiers are amused by the children, and the next time they pass by, they stop and take a rest with the children. The captain of the soldiers takes some time to explain the soldier’s weapons to the children and tells them that they will soon be sent to the front overseas. (This is way too early to be World War I, and they refer to the Southern Hemisphere, so I think they’re talking about the Second Boer War, which was happening while this book was being written and published.) Before the soldiers leave, the children decide that they want to give them a parting gift, so they get some money from their father and give each of the soldiers a pipe and some tobacco, because the soldiers were all smoking during their rest break. Modern children’s books wouldn’t have the kids encouraging their smoking habit, but in this turn-of-the-century book, the gift goes over well. Sadly, the children never see any of the soldiers again after they leave for the front and don’t know what happened to them. Still, they did something nice for the soldiers.

The children’s experiences with the soldiers sets up their next attempt at a good deed, with mixed results. Part of it gets very uncomfortable, but it has a happy ending. The children notice an older woman who also watches the soldiers and seems to get very emotional when she sees them. They find out that her son is also a soldier who is already at the front, and she is very worried about him. The children decide that they should do something nice for her, so they try to weed her garden without permission. The problem is that the children
don’t know how to tell the difference between vegetables and weeds, so they also pull up her turnips and cabbages. The woman is angry with them, but they apologize and say that they’ll talk to their father about making things right with her.

Then, the children have to bring her a postcard addressed to her that was accidentally delivered to them with the mail for the manor house. They don’t even read it ahead of time although they could because they don’t want to do anything else wrong. This is a rare serious moment in this series because the postcard is from the army, and it says that the woman’s son is dead. The woman is very upset, and the children sympathize with her.

Then, the children decide that they can do something else nice for the woman by making a tombstone for her son. They know that he must have been buried at the place where he was killed on the battlefield, so he won’t have a normal tombstone in England, and they think it would be nice to make a memorial for him. The concept of making a memorial for someone who is buried elsewhere is actually a real thing. It’s called a cenotaph (although I don’t think these children know that word because they keep calling it a “tombstone”), and they are commonly done for soldiers who are killed overseas and buried there or whose bodies can’t be retrieved. (The musician Glenn Miller has one because his plane went down in the English Channel during WWII, and his body was never recovered.) Making a memorial of this type for the grieving family of a soldier would be a nice gesture, if it was done well and with the input of the soldier’s family. The kids do the best they can, carving a wooden tombstone and inscribing a beautiful message on it, but they don’t tell the soldier’s mother about it until after they’re finished. At first, the older woman thinks that they’re making fun of her grief, but Alice persuades her that’s not the case and convinces her to take a look. They decorate the tombstone with flowers and offer a lovely message about the soldier’s service to his country. The soldier’s mother is touched, and she appreciates the sentiment, although she has the children move the memorial to a more private spot. She likes it that the children continue to put flowers on the memorial, and she becomes friendly with them.

This episode also has a happy ending because it turns out that the reports of the soldier’s death were wrong. He was actually missing and injured, not killed. His mother and the children learn the truth when he comes home and sees the children decorating his “tombstone.” Fortunately, he is amused by the memorial and the touching sentiment expressed by the children, and his mother is overjoyed at his return. The children celebrate by chopping up the tombstone and using it for a bonfire.

Around this time, the children realize that they don’t have very many good deeds to record in their book, so they decide that they can make notes about any good thing that they notice someone else doing. Nobody is allowed to write about themselves or to persuade someone else to write something about them because bragging about their own good deeds wouldn’t be good or noble. It’s a fortunate decision because many of the children’s other adventures in the country aren’t directly related to the Society of the Wouldbegoods or their good deed efforts, but they count some of the things that certain children do during their adventures as good deeds (and Oswald gripes about things he did which he thought should have been counted but weren’t).

One day, the children are sent out on a long walk because Albert’s uncle has a headache and the children are making too much noise in the house. They decide to check out a tower that has some spooky local legends about it because it contains a tomb about halfway up the tower. The others credit Denny for a good deed because he offers to go first into the spooky tower. (This tower is somewhat based on a real landmark, but the
author took some creative liberties with it. The man who is supposedly entombed there, Richard Ravenal, isn’t a real person. He was created for this book, but he gets a mention in the lore of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) The children have a frightening encounter there with a beggar. They give him a coin as a good deed, but he sees that the children have more money with them, so he locks them in the tower from the outside, telling them that he won’t let them out until they give him the rest. Oswald notices that there are bolts on the inside of the tower door as well as the outside, so he quickly locks them to make sure that the beggar can’t get inside. This turns out to be a good decision because, when the children toss the rest of their money to him, it isn’t as much as he thought they had, and he pounds angrily on the tower door. (Oswald thought that the others should have counted his locking the door as a good deed because it saved them, but they decide not to because it was really more “clever” than “good.” Oswald thinks that’s an unfair technicality.) The children are safe inside the spooky old tower until the beggar leaves, and they are able to signal to someone else to unlock the door from the outside. This incident wasn’t the children’s fault (for a change), but the adults insist that, from this point on, they take the dogs with them when they go very far from the house.

The children make some other attempts at doing good deeds on purpose, but again, they go horribly awry because the children don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t talk to anybody else about their ideas before they do them. After they cause a disaster that ruins a fishing contest and wrecks a barge full of coal, which costs their father a lot of money to fix, Albert’s uncle explains to them the full consequences of what they did and how much trouble they caused for a lot of people. The children feel terrible about it, and Alice starts to cry. She doesn’t fully reveal the existence of their society to Albert’s uncle, but she does say that they’ve been working so hard at being good and doing good things, but nothing they do works out. She says that they must be the worst children in the world and dramatically says that she wishes they were all dead. Everyone is shocked by this, and Albert’s uncle calmly tells her that they’re not the worst children in the world. He says that he knows they’re all feeling bad about what they’ve done, and he does want them to feel badly because they have seriously caused some real problems, and he doesn’t want them to do these things again. However, he says that he doesn’t want them to give up on the idea of being good because that’s something that they will learn better how to do over time. Also, he notes that, in all the time he’s known then, none of them have ever done anything intentionally mean or wicked, they’ve never lied about what they’ve done, and they’ve always been sorry when things have gone wrong. Being truthful and genuinely regretful for causing harm are worthy qualities.

Oswald feels bad abut that part because he has realized that there’s one thing he’s done that caused a disaster, and he hasn’t admitted it to the others yet. What he did was unintentional, and he didn’t know the incident was his fault at first, but he’s been trying to work up the courage to confess since he realized what he did. Albert’s uncle’s kind words make Oswald confess right away, and Albert’s uncle is appreciative of his honesty for that, too. The others call credit Oswald’s confession as a good deed. He doesn’t think it is, but they say it counts because it was a difficult thing for him to do, and technically, he didn’t have to do it. At that point, nobody had guessed that he was responsible for one of the problems, and if he had kept quiet, it wasn’t likely that anybody would have found out. He had been honest because he simply wanted to be honest and do the right thing, even knowing that people might get mad at him or punish him for what he did.

Albert’s uncle forgives the children, although he still expects them to learn from their misadventures. At this point, the children also begin to consider just how far the Society of the Wouldbegoods will go. So far, it hasn’t been a great success, but they do appreciate what Albert’s uncle says about not giving up on the idea of trying to be good. Still, the children (especially Oswald), decide that it’s time to set an ending point for the society. They decide that each of them will try to do one more good deed of some kind, and when each of them has
one more deed to their name to put in their book, they’ll dissolve the society. From that point on, if any of them want to be good, they’ll do it on their own, when and how they choose do it. (The boys in the group are particularly relieved at this idea, although they’ve all been feeling some strain from the society.)

The children’s escapades still continue, some related to good deed efforts and some just part of summer activities that they do for fun. They try to hold a circus with some farm animals, which get loose. There’s a bonfire that gets out of control and burns a farmer’s bridge (although the children put it out themselves before it gets worse). Dora finds a baby who’s been left alone in his carriage and kidnaps/cares for it. At first, she thinks that maybe he’s the long-lost heir of a noble house who was kidnapped by gypsies, like in books,
and has been abandoned, so she must adopt him and care for him until he can be reunited with his family. Like many of the children’s good deeds, it has mixed results, but this one ends up being more on the side of good. She shouldn’t have just taken the baby from its carriage, and he technically wasn’t kidnapped until she took him. However, it turns out that his nanny was neglecting him, leaving him all alone while she flirted with her boyfriend. When the adults discover that the children have the baby and why they have him, the nanny’s neglect is exposed, and she gets fired.

A couple of the boys later buy a pistol, which they make all the children promise not to tell the adults about. (I thought at first that it was a toy pistol, but it apparently fires real bullets. God only knows why anybody thought it would be a good idea to sell these boys a real gun.) The boys were thinking at first that it would be handy to have if there was a burglar, but one of the boys accidentally shoots a fox with it and kills it. The other children, although they were pretending to be fox hunters, are upset at finding a real dead fox and bury it with a proper funeral before they know that it was one of the other boys who killed it. They get into some trouble over it from the master of fox hounds. The boy who shot the fox explains that, at the time he shot it, it was caught in a metal trap, and it bit him when he tried to let it loose, which is when he accidentally shot it. Albert’s uncle confiscates the pistol because none of this would have happened if the boys hadn’t been playing with a gun, and Oswald thinks that it would serve him right if they really did get a burglar in the house and were unable to fight him off. (I’m pretty sure that they’d be more likely to accidentally shoot one another or one of their own dogs before they shot anybody else.)

Toward the end of the summer, Albert’s uncle agrees to be a host for an antiquities society that wants to see the old manor house and investigate a nearby site for possible Roman ruins. Albert’s uncle is beside himself when he discovers that, rather than being host to a small club, more than 100 people show up to accept his invitation to have tea before touring the grounds. The children, inspired by a book called The Daisy Chain, decide that it would be amusing to bury some pottery that they made themselves, just so the antiquarians will definitely have something to find. That part turns out fine because the antiquarians can easily tell the pottery made by the children from actual antiquities, and they are amused by the children’s “relics.” The problem is that the children also decide to bury some pottery they found in the library along with their own pottery, and those were real relics. The antiquarians get excited when they find those, but Albert’s uncle realizes that those pieces of pottery belonged to the real owner of the rented manor house. The children have to go to the head of the antiquarian society to admit what they’ve done to get the antique pottery back.

From there, the children are inspired by something a tramp says to them to open up a stand offering free drinks (lemonade and tea), but it goes wrong when some people take advantage of their kindness. They also take part in some war games without realizing that it’s all a game or training exercise. Then, while acting out the pilgrimage from The Canterbury Tales, they meet a kind lady, who turns out to have a romantic past with Albert’s uncle! They’re not sure that they like the idea of Albert’s uncle getting married, but they’re willing to try to help him reconnect with his lost love if it will make him happy and for goodness’s sake!

THE EPITAPH

‘The Wouldbegoods are dead and gone
But not the golden deeds they have done
These will remain upon Glory’s page
To be an example to every age,
And by this we have got to know
How to be good upon our ow—N.’

by Noel Bastable

The book is now public domain, so it is available to read online through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (multiple copies, including audiobooks). There is also a LibriVox Audiobook on YouTube.

My Reaction

This book reminds me of a couple of more modern books, The Adventures of the Red Tape Gang by Joan Lowery Nixon from the 1970s and Why Did the Underwear Cross the Road? by Gordon Korman from the 1990s, which are both books about kids trying to do good deeds with unintentional and hilarious results.

Just as in the first book in the Bastable Children series, much of what the children do in this story is due to the children’s naivety and imagination and a lack of adult supervision. Oswald makes it a point to say that they were not entirely neglected by the adults while they were in the country. Although Albert’s uncle frequently had to spend time writing, he did spend plenty of time with the children, and their father and Denny’s father came to see them regularly, along with some other adults. The children enjoyed spending time with the adults and doing things with them, but Oswald doesn’t describe much of what they did with the adults because the things they did on their own were the most interesting. (In the sense of dangerous and disastrous, but also exciting.) At various times in the story, they meet up with adults who are happy to talk to the children and explain things about their business or how things work, but the children also like acting on their own initiative, without asking adults for advice or opinion or taking time to really prepare for things they want to do, like when Oswald didn’t want to take the time to actually train an animal to do something when the children decided that they wanted to have a circus with animals. The children’s innocence and ignorance are played for comedy, but child readers would probably appreciate the children’s sense of independence. Few modern children would be given even half of the opportunities the Bastables have to do things on their own and cause as much trouble as the Bastables do.

Racial Issues

In the first book of the series, I talked about some racial issues in the story, and there are also issues with racial language and attitudes in this book. I don’t know whether or not this book has been reprinted with altered language, like the first one. Some of the incidents in this book might take more editing than the first one, like where the kids darken their skin for acting out scenes from The Jungle Books or giving pipes and tobacco to the soldiers.

There is an instance of the use of the n-word in this book, and this time, it’s something Oswald says rather than something the adults say. Basically, he was talking about hard the children were working, and he was trying to imply that they were working like slaves, but instead of saying the word “slaves”, he says the n-word. Children’s word choice is influenced by the books they read reads and the things adults say around them, and we’ve already established that adults around them use the n-word in a casual way.

Again, this brings up the question of whether or not the author herself this that using the n-word is acceptable or if she’s just trying to portray the way some people around her talked. In a way, I think she does address this topic indirectly, although that might be unintentional. There is a point in the story when the children talk about unpleasant things found in poetry, like death and the devil, and they note that a person doesn’t always have to like the things they read or write about. It struck me that, perhaps, the author was trying to explain that she doesn’t always like, advocate, or believe in things that occur in her stories. This conversation isn’t directly related to the use of the n-word, so I’m not sure whether that would be one of the things that the author didn’t really like or not. It might have been a more general notion, like when authors write about sad things that happen or the things the children do that they really shouldn’t. It is a reminder, though, that characters are not exactly the same as their characters, and they may differ in important ways. The nature of the characters suits the story, but may not be a reflection of the author’s life and attitudes.

There is also one instance of an anti-Catholic attitude, but it’s played for humor. The kids are on a tour of Canterbury Cathedral, and their tour guide says, “This is the Dean’s Chapel; it was the Lady Chapel in the wicked days when people used to worship the Virgin Mary.”

(I’ve heard this accusation about Catholics worshiping the Virgin Mary before, all too many times, mostly from my Protestant grandmother. I belong to a family of mixed religions, and I had experiences like this from a very young age. Catholics don’t worship Mary. Catholics honor Mary, which is different. We also have a sense that those who were bound together by faith never lose that spiritual connection to the living members of the church when they die, so living Catholics can still communicate with the departed spiritually through prayer, which is what the whole thing about praying to saints is about. It’s about communication and spiritual support rather than worship. Catholics don’t have to do this if they don’t want to, but it’s always an option, if they feel the need of spiritual support from another soul who might understand their situation, because there is a sense that the spiritual connection is always there. Mary and the other saints are not substitutes for God or Jesus but rather part of an extended spiritual family that supports its other, younger, and more vulnerable living members in a spiritual way as they all, living and dead, serve and worship the same God. I suppose a simpler way of putting it is the concept that those who love us never leave us, or as C. S. Lewis put it in the The Chronicles of Narnia, once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia. Some bonds are unbroken by death. The punchline to the tour guide’s comment is in H. O.’s response.)

When the children think about the connotations of changing the name of the chapel from Lady Chapel to Dean’s Chapel because of changing worship styles, H. O. speculates, “I suppose they worship the Dean now?” You can imagine how well that question is received. Yeah, do they worship the Dean, or is the Dean just someone they’ve honored by naming something after him? You tell me if there’s a difference.

War and Soldiers

The scenes with the soldiers and war games remind me of something that the author couldn’t have known when she wrote the book. In the following decade, Britain would be involved with World War I (called the Great War before WWII), and many boys, like the kids in this story, would end up going to war. Oswald thinks that it would be exciting to be a soldier, but real war isn’t a game, and he might have many of his illusions shattered. Knowing what I know about this generation’s future, I have some real concern for the children in this story. There’s a very real risk that they could be killed in battle, just as the young soldier in this book that they built that tombstone for in this story could have died in the war that was being fought during his time. This story doesn’t go that dark because the Bastable Children series is a humor series, but there are moments of real sentimentality in the stories. E. Nesbit couldn’t have known about the war that was coming, but she did know about wars that existed during her lifetime. Introducing the children to the soldiers in this story introduces some serious concepts to the children, who are largely naive about many aspects of life, still thinking of many dangerous things as sources of excitement and adventure. We don’t know what happened to any of the soldiers the children befriended, but the knowledge that the old woman’s son almost died brings it to the children’s awareness that death is a very real possibility in that type of “adventure.” It’s a lesson that will accompany them into their future.

Posted on by TracyC

The Railway Children

Railway Children Cover

The Railway Children by E. Nesbit, 1906.

Railway Children toy train explodes

Three children in England live a comfortable and happy life with their parents. Roberta is the eldest, followed by Peter and Phyllis, the youngest. Their family has servants, their mother enjoys helping the children with their lessons and making up stories for them, and their father is clever at fixing broken toys. When Peter turns 10 years old, he is given an electric toy train (a relatively recent innovation for their time and the type of toy only a wealthy family could afford), which is a wonderful present because Peter wants to become a mechanical engineer. However, something goes wrong with the toy train, and it explodes at his birthday party! When Peter’s father comes home, he looks at the toy train and says that he thinks he can fix it, but before he can say much more, some strange men come to the house and want to talk to him. They spend a long time talking while the children’s mother takes the children upstairs. Then, their mother goes downstairs to see their father. When she returns, she seems very upset, but she doesn’t want to discuss it with the children. She only says that their father has been called away and that the children should go to bed.

The next day, their mother is gone for a long time, and the children are worried about what is happening with their parents. Their mother finally returns in the evening, tired and still upset. She tells the children that the men who came the night before brought very bad news and that their father will be away for some time, so she is going to need them to help her. She says that there will be times when she will have to be away for long periods and that she wants them to behave themselves and not fight while she’s gone. She doesn’t want to tell the children what the problem is or for them to ask her or anyone else any questions about it. She only says it’s about their father’s business and none of them really understand their father’s business. They know that their father works in a government office, so his business has something to do with the government, but their mother doesn’t want to say more than that.

Over the next several weeks, their mother is gone for long periods, leaving the children with the servants and with an older aunt who will soon be taking up a position as a governess for another family overseas. The children don’t get along with their strict aunt. The servants are usually more pleasant, but the children have the uncomfortable feeling that the servants know more about their father’s situation than they do. One day, in spite of his promise to behave himself for their mother’s sake, Peter plays a prank on the parlor maid, and the parlor maid angrily tells him that if he doesn’t fix his behavior he’ll go where his father has gone. The children don’t know what she’s talking about, and when they ask their mother, she dismisses the parlor maid. She wasn’t going to keep the parlor maid much longer anyway because she tells the children that they’re going to move to the country.

When they move, they can’t take everything from their house with them because the house in the country is smaller, and their mother says that they have to take the most useful things, leaving many of their prettier things behind. She tells the children that they’re going to have to “play at being Poor.” Readers will understand that they’re not just playing, but the children’s mother tries to frame their move as a great adventure rather than the misfortune it really is. For the children, it is a kind of adventure.

They take a train to the countryside, but when they arrive, they have to walk from the trains station to their new little house because there are no cabs there. A man brings their luggage in a cart. When they arrive at the house, which is called Three Chimneys, it is night, and the woman the mother hired to clean up the house and make supper for them is gone. The man with the cart says that she probably left because their train was late and that she probably left the house key for them under the door step, as people in the countryside tend to do. The key is there, but they discover that the woman hasn’t really done any cleaning for them, and she didn’t make supper. Fortunately, they do have some provisions, packed by the strict but thoughtful aunt, so they are able to put together a small meal for themselves.

Railway Children falling asleep outside

In the morning, Roberta wakes Phyllis and points out that they have no servants in this new house, so they had better get up and make themselves useful. They get things together as best they can for breakfast, although they don’t really know what they’re doing or where everything is. They start the kettle going too soon, burn the kettle, and let the fire go out. The children explore the house’s yard and garden. They can see the train tracks and a tunnel down the hill from the house, and they fall asleep outside because they got up too early. When their mother wakes up, she gets everything ready, fixing their clumsy efforts, and finds a note from Mrs. Viney, the cleaning woman. In her note, Mrs. Viney apologizes for not having everything ready for them the night before because there was a family emergency. She had to leave early because her son-in-law broke his arm, but she promises to be there later that morning to help them.

Life in the country is very different from life in their old home. Their mother now tells them that they are really poor. It’s summer, and the children are not going to school, and their mother spends most of her time writing because she wants to sell stories for money. The children still don’t know where their father is, and it still worries them, but they gradually get used to their new life and to not asking questions about their father. Deep down, Roberta knows that something terrible has happened and that their mother is very upset about it, but because her mother seems like she would be even more upset if the children knew the full truth or just how upset she is, Roberta makes a deliberate decision not to notice anything that her mother doesn’t want her to notice. Whenever it seems like her mother has been upset or crying or whenever there’s been any hint about her father, Roberta deliberately looks away and pretends that she didn’t see anything. She tries to keep cheerful and enjoy this “adventure” that they’re living.

The children develop a fascination for the trains that run by their house, and they go to have another look at the train station. They are not accustomed to being at train stations just to observe them, only to either catch trains or arrive on trains. They are fascinated to notice the details of the station and the train signals. They notice a white mark where the coal is stored, and Peter asks the porter what the mark is for. The porter tells him it’s to mark the level of the coal so they can tell if someone has taken some, giving them a friendly warning not to steal any.

The children’s new poverty doesn’t mean much to them at first because they still have plenty to eat, but when there’s a wet and chilly morning and Peter wants to light a fire, their mother tells him that they can’t afford to light fires in June and that they must save their coal for when it’s really cold. There are other little economies that the family must make. The mother tells the children that they can have either butter or jam on bread, but not both at the same time. If they eat too much at once, they’ll run out before they can afford more.

Railway Children station master

These small things that they can no longer afford give Peter an idea. He decides to stage a daring raid on the coal at the train station for the sake of their family. Although he knows that it isn’t really right, he doesn’t think of it as stealing but more like coal mining because he digs through the coal pile for the pieces underneath, which he figures they won’t miss. However, the station master catches him and insists that he and his sisters come into the train station and explain themselves. Peter explains how his family used to be able to afford fires on wet and cold days, but now they can’t because they’re poor. The station master becomes a little more sympathetic, but he gives the children a lecture about taking things that don’t belong to them. It’s still stealing, even if they think of it by another name. He lets the children keep what they’ve taken so far and lets them go with a warning not to do it again. Peter is horribly embarrassed by the incident, and he is uneasy for a while whenever he sees the station master, but the station master eventually lets him know that he is forgiven and gives them permission to visit the train station again.

The children enjoy visiting the train station and asking the friendly porter questions about the trains and how they work. The porter, whose name is Perks, likes chatting with them and answering their questions. The children watch the trains so much that they begin to recognize that each train is distinctive in its appearance. The trains no longer look all the same to them, and they start giving them nicknames, like the Green Dragon, because it’s pulled by a green engine. When Peter notices that individual trains have numbers written on them, Perks introduces him to the hobby of train-spotting, where people write down the numbers of trains that they’ve seen in a little notebook. (He doesn’t call it by that name, but that’s what he describes.)

The children become especially fond of the train they call the Green Dragon. Every day, they wave to this train, imagining that it’s a magical dragon that will carry their love to their father, wherever he is. Every day, a pleasant-looking older man who rides that train sees them and waves back to them. They begin to think of the man as a friend, waving to him and imagining that he’s also going somewhere to work on “business”, possibly with their father.

Railway Children Phyllis with note

Their new train friend turns out to be very important. When their mother becomes ill with a serious case of influenza, the doctor gives them a list of things they should get for her, most of which they just can’t afford. The children are willing to make do with a diet of bread and water to get her some of the things she needs, but even doing that won’t get her everything she should have. Then, the children come up with a desperate plan. They use a sheet to make a sign to tell the old man on the Green Dragon to look out at the station. When the train comes through the next time, everyone on that side of the train sees the sign, and they all look out at the station, confused because they don’t see anything unusual. It’s just Phyllis at the station, and she slips a note to the old man, explaining their situation and asking if he could get the things they need for their sick mother. The children promise that their father will pay him back or, if he’s lost all his money (as the children are starting to suppose is the case), Peter will pay him back when he’s a man. The nice older man is amused and touched by the message, and he sends them a package with all the things they asked for, plus a few more that he thought of himself. In the note accompanying the package, he says that they should tell their mother only that a friend who heard she was ill sent these things, although they should tell her the full story when she’s feeling well enough to hear it. The old man says that he knows their mother probably won’t be happy that they asked a stranger for help, especially not without asking her first, but he says that he thinks the children did the right thing.

The old man is right about their mother’s feelings. When their mother is well and realizes what the children did, she is angry, and she starts to cry. She says that, while they’re poor, they’re not destitute, and they shouldn’t go around asking strangers for things. Part of that is personal pride and shame at their family’s reduced circumstances. She still can’t bring herself to talk about what really happened to the children’s father and why they’re so poor now. However, they do come to rely on help from strangers and new friends, and they learn that people will help others if they’re asked. Even when they’re not rich themselves and could use some extra money, some people, like the local doctor, still let them them have services at reduced rates and take some pride in their ability to help someone who needs it and who appreciates the help.

Railway Children train engineers

When Roberta decides to get help to fix Peter’s broken toy train, she accidentally hitches a ride on a train engine because she thinks that the train engineers know how to fix trains. The book explains that there are different types of engineers, from people who build engines to people who drive train engines and people who build things like bridges. Not all engineers do the same things, and the people who drive the engines don’t repair them. Fortunately, one of the train engineers has a relative who can fix things. Touched at the young girl’s request for help fixing her brother’s toy, he arranges for his relative to fix it.

The family also comes to experience what it’s like to help someone else who’s less fortunate when a man gets off at their train station, obviously ill and speaking a language that nobody understands or even recognizes. The only language the children have studied in school is French, so they decide to ask him if he speaks any French, even though they can tell that’s not the language he’s speaking. It turns out that the man does also speak French. Their mother speaks better French than the children do, and when she speaks to the man, she recognizes who he is. He is an author from Russia. He wrote a book about the plight of poor people and how to help them, which the mother has read and really appreciates. However, this book put him on the wrong side of the ruling class in Russia, and he spent time in jail as a political prisoner. He was later exiled to Siberia and put in a forced labor camp. The mother is surprisingly frank about the conditions in the camp and the forced marches where prisoners were whipped and left to die if they couldn’t go on. Since this man was able to get away, he has come to England in search of his wife and child. He heard that they had fled to England after his arrest, but he doesn’t know exactly where they are in England. At the train station, he was trying to explain that he was ill and that he lost his train ticket. The family lets him stay with them for a time while he recovers his health.

Railway Children flags

The children become heroes to the railroad when they witness a landslide that blocks the tracks and use the girls’ red flannel petticoats to make warning flags to stop the train. The children averted a terrible accident, and they are publicly thanked and given gold watches as a reward. The old gentleman from the Green Dragon is there, and the children learn that he is a railway director. They write him another note, asking if they can talk to him about an unfortunate prisoner.

The old gentleman meets with the children at their train station the next time his train comes through, and the children tell him about the Russian author, who is still looking for his missing family. The children say that the gold watches are a wonderful reward, but they’re willing to sell them or trade them back to the old gentleman in exchange for help locating the author’s wife and children. The old gentleman recognizes the author’s name and says that he has also read his book. The old gentleman knows some people in the Russian community in London, and since the author is a famous man, people in the Russian community are likely to know where his wife is currently living. He’s happy that the children’s mother is helping the author, and he says he will be glad to make some inquiries on his behalf. The old gentleman also asks the children for more information about themselves. He soon follows through on his promise to help the author, bringing the man’s wife and child to him.

Much of the book is about giving and the ways people help each other. When the children arrange a birthday surprise for Perks, he gets angry at first because he thinks they’re giving him charity. He changes his mind when the children tell him how they collected the birthday presents from various people in the community because they wanted to show him how much they all appreciate him and help that he’s given them in the past. His wife says that he’s been ungrateful for rejecting the presents, but Perks says that it’s not just about being given things but how and why they’re being given. If people gave him things because they thought that he couldn’t afford them or couldn’t work for them, it would have been an insult because he works very hard. If they’re given out of friendship and returned favors, it’s different.

Railway Children Bobbie learns the secret

In the background of the story, there is always the question of what happened to the children’s father and why they had to leave their old home. At one point, their mother worries about why the children have stopped talking about their father and is afraid that the children are forgetting about him. Roberta admits that they talk about him when their mother can’t hear them because she can tell that their mother is sad whenever they mention him around her. Their mother admits that’s true, and she still doesn’t want to tell them the full reason why, only that something bad did happen, and it will be a while before their father can be with them again. The reason for the father’s disappearance adds an element of mystery to the story, although most of the book focuses on the children’s adventures in the countryside. There are clues along the way, from the men who came to get their father to the clothes that Roberta discovers that her mother is keeping for him. There is her mother’s reluctance to be sociable with other people and the way she talks when she describes how awful it is to be in prison, away from your family, and the reasons why a person might be arrested, which aren’t quite the same in England as the reason why the Russian author went to prison. These are the things that Roberta tries to ignore … until she finds something that starkly tells her what all of the adults already know. When Roberta understands the real problem, she can only think of one person who might be able to help: the kind old gentleman who helped them before.

The book is now public domain, so it is available to read online through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is also a LibriVox Audiobook on YouTube. It’s been made into a movie multiple times, and you can see the 2000 version online through Amazon Prime. It fits well with the cottagecore aesthetic! There is also a sequel movie, not based on an E. Nesbit book, which takes place during WWII, when the children in this story are adults and other children are evacuated to the countryside from London.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The Children’s Father

There are clues all the way through the story to what happened to the children’s father. He was framed for being a spy and a traitor in relation to his work with the government, although he didn’t do was he was accused of doing. People thought he was a traitor because there were letters found in his office that incriminated him, placed there by some unknown person, and these letters convinced the jury at his trial that he was guilty. The trial was conducted during those weeks when the children were at their old home with their aunt and were being told not to ask any questions. They left for the country after he was sentenced to prison. Their mother turns to writing, something that she already enjoyed, to earn money to support herself and the children, and she doesn’t want to see much of anyone because she doesn’t want to face their questions about her husband.

Railway Children the old gentleman

Roberta learns the truth about her father when Perks gives her some old papers with pictures in them to amuse Peter after he is injured by a rake the children were fighting over. The newspaper that is wrapped around the bundle has an article about her father. Roberta reads the article and then asks her mother for the full story. Roberta understands why her mother didn’t want to tell the children what happened because she also can’t bring herself to tell Peter and Phyllis what she now knows, but Roberta still wants to understand the situation herself, now that she knows about it. Her mother tells her that her father suspects that the real traitor and the person who framed him is the man who took his job when he went to prison, but he can’t prove it, and nobody believes him. Although her mother has told her not to ask people for things, the situation is dire, and Roberta can’t let her father stay in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, so she asks the kind old gentleman if he can make some inquiries into the situation on behalf of her father. She just can’t keep the matter to herself, and he’s the only person she knows who seems to have some authority and connections and might be able to do something. The old gentleman is happy to help, especially after the children help his grandson when he is injured.

In the end, the real villain is discovered, and the father is released from prison, but the readers and the children don’t see exactly how that happens because the old gentleman seems to take care of it in London, away from the children and their mother. The book ends with the father arriving at Three Chimneys, so the family is happily reunited, but we also don’t see what their lives are going to be like after that point. They no longer have their old home, and I find it difficult to believe that the father would want to return to his old job, like nothing had happened. If all of your co-workers believed that you were some kind of traitorous spy and seemed to like the guy who framed you, returning to that office would be far too awkward. It’s a life-altering event that might have potentially been life-destroying, not just a small misunderstanding. In the end, it seems like the family will be okay. The family has a wealthy supporter now, so the old gentleman might be able to help the father find a new job. The family has also come to enjoy living in the country and has some friends there, and the mother indicates that she wants to continue her writing, so they might not move somewhere else, at least not right away. It will take the family some time to sort out what they’re going to do, rebuild their family finances, and move on from this incident. We just don’t get to see all of that happening as readers. The book ends on the happy note that things are being set right, and the family is reunited.

The Meaning of Charity and Helping Others

I’d like to point out that there is a theme of rich people coming to the rescue of deserving poor people in many books from the 19th century and early 20th century, like in this book and The Five Little Peppers. People in these stories take pride in being self-sufficient and doing their best on their own, but in the end, it’s the recognition of their worthiness from someone with money and authority who is willing to supply support them that really makes a difference in their lives and saves the day. I’ve thought sometimes that the rich-person-to-the-rescue theme seems to contradict the do-it-all-yourself attitudes that the characters in these stories often have, but I think the key to understanding it is in what Perks says about his birthday surprises – it matters how and why gifts are given.

The same gift or act of kindness can take on different meanings, depending on the motives and attitudes of the giver. Perks would have been insulted if people gave him charity because, to him, it would be like people telling him that he was incompetent at getting things for himself and his family, which isn’t true. However, the same gifts take on different meanings when they’re meant as a salute to his friendship and helpfulness to others because he can tell himself that he did things to earn them. The children in this story earn the help they get from the kind old gentleman (who is never named in the story) and others in the community through their acts of kindness and heroism to the community, so they are demonstrating their usefulness and competence instead of asking for things they haven’t earned and don’t deserve. They can take pride in their competence and good deeds, so they’re not mere “charity” cases, who take without giving. At least, I think these are the implications of stories like this. I get the concept about personal pride, but I don’t feel the same way about it because I think there are more important priorities.

Railway Children Perks' birthday

Personally, I don’t have negative associations with the concept of “charity”, either giving or receiving. I’m more like Perks’s wife, who’s just grateful that somebody cares and that people think of them and are willing to give. I appreciate when things are getting accomplished, people are being helped, and objects are being put to good use by people who will actually use them. In situations like that, I’m more oriented toward the results than concerned about image. (My personal image has always been that of an oddball eccentric anyway. A basically pleasant and helpful oddball, but still an oddball. I like to maintain a certain level of eccentricity because I’ve discovered that there’s a kind of freedom in that. It’s like choosing to be a character actor instead of a teen heartthrob. Nobody can be a teen heartthrob forever, but being a character lasts a lifetime, and the ways you can do it are almost endless.) I have no objection to people giving me things I need or helping me accomplish things I want to do, and I’ve done the same for other people. It’s just life to me, and I think it’s best to focus on the good being accomplished and get on with doing things. (By the way, if you enjoy my nostalgic children’s book blog, please consider buying me a coffee to support the site! Proceeds will help support my book addiction, site maintenance, and future reviews and would be greatly appreciated.)

I’ve worked for nonprofits before, and people who work for nonprofits are there to do good and get the job done. They see needs in their communities, and they want to step in and supply them. There are people who make their lives and careers around making positive change. I certainly wouldn’t want people trying to stop those who are trying to do something good for others just because they have a negative attitude and no plan or effort for accomplishing positive change themselves. Of course, when you have a nonprofit or work for one, people come to you for things they need or to support your cause. They come to you because they’re in the mindset for making positive changes to their own lives or in the community, and that can also play into the concept of how giving is done. If someone just isn’t in the mindset of accepting help or gifts or making positive changes, there isn’t much to be done about it until they are in the mindset to do something.

Railway Children the Russian author

I think this book actually does a good job of presenting that concept. The mother’s and Perks’s sense of pride and attitude toward the concept of charity contrast with the old gentleman, who seems willing to just go ahead and get the job accomplished when he sees what people need or what they’re trying to do. Both Perks and the mother seem to feel a blow to their pride when someone helps them or gives them something, yet both of them are happy to offer help to others who need it. Being the one offering something rather than receiving it seems to make them feel like they’re in a position of strength and competence. The mother takes in both the ill Russian author and the old gentleman’s injured grandson, not seeing those as insulting acts of charity. It’s when she’s both poor and ill herself and doesn’t feel strong or competent that receiving help from someone seems to remind her that she’s vulnerable. I think that’s the feeling that gives her a negative attitude toward charity – perhaps not that she’s fine without help but the thought that she’s in a position to need some help is scary. While she’s sick and has a high fever, Roberta tends to her through the night, and she hears her mother calling out for her own mother. It’s a moment of revelation to Roberta that, no matter how old a person gets, they still have moments of vulnerability, when they need someone else to comfort and help them, like a mother would. It can be a bit humbling to go through those vulnerable moments and have someone see you being vulnerable, but it’s human. The revelation that mothers are also humans who sometimes need other adults doesn’t make Roberta love or respect her mother any less. In fact, it makes her appreciate her mother more for what she goes through for her family and makes her more determined to be helpful and supportive to her mother.

Railway Children Perks

I think Perks experiences a similar a similar attitude to the children’s mother. There are hints that he’s had a rough life himself and has worked hard for the level of stability he has now. When the children try to give Perks money for carrying the old gentleman’s gift to their mother to the house, he gruffly refuses it because he doesn’t want to take money for helping their sick mother. His refusal of their money for his service could be seen as an act of charity to them, but it’s framed more that he’s doing a personal favor or like Perks thinks that the children are offering him a kind of charity by trying to pay him for a service he is willing to provide for free. He also helps other people in the community, and helping others makes him feel strong and competent. Receiving something from others makes him feel like there’s something wrong with him or his life or like other people think there is. Perhaps it reminds him of hard times in his youth. It really seems like it’s only the attitudes of the giver and the receiver that determines what forms of giving are acceptable, and it’s bit subjective. The old gentleman understands that when he writes the note to the children that he sends with his gift to their mother, but he also says that he thinks they did the right thing. Maybe there are some kinds of giving or asking for help that are objectively good or right for reasons other than people’s opinions.

This is a good time to point out that the author of this story, E. (Edith) Nesbit, believed in socialism, although she wasn’t a radical on the subject. I think that’s why she examines the subject of helping others and receiving help from the point of view of people from different classes in society in this story. All of the adults in the story take some pride in their positions in society and in maintaining the appearances associated with those position. Victorian society was very class-based, but the family’s poor circumstances take them out of their usual class and changes the situation for them and others. The children and their mother sometimes really do need the help of other people, whether they like it or not, but they still have the capacity to help others in different ways. One of the themes in the story seems to be that everyone needs something from other people at some times. There are times when what they need might be help and support from others, and there are times when it might be a chance to show that they have the capacity to help others or appreciation for help they’ve already given.

This story raises many questions about giving which don’t have firm answers and can be viewed from different perspectives. Are all of the various forms of giving and receiving only different forms of charity, or are they just the interactions of human beings who all care about each other? Are people’s intentions or the image of giving really what’s important, or is it the giving itself? It may be better to give than to receive, but without someone willing to receive, what is the point of the act of giving?

For another early 20th century book that considers the differences between different classes of people and the meaning and benefits of charity, I recommend Daddy-Long-Legs, which is about an orphan whose college education is funded by a mysterious benefactor. That book is set in upstate New York, and it falls under the Light Academia aesthetic.

Fun Stuff

I always like seeing old books and historical books with scenes where people are playing games because I made a website about Historical Games. In this book, the children play a game that resembles Dumb Crambo (which was a precursor to modern Charades) called the Advertisement Game. In the Advertisement Game, the children act out characters they’ve seen in advertisements for each other to guess. There is also a scene with some boys from a nearby boarding school having a Paper Chase, which is a cross-country outdoor game. One player is the Hare, and he leaves a trail of bits of paper for other players to follow as the Hounds.

Posted on by TracyC

Miracles On Maple Hill

Miracles On Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen, 1956.

Ten-year-old Marly and her family are moving from Pittsburgh to the countryside, to Marly’s mother’s grandmother’s old house on Maple Hill. They’re making the move for Marly’s father’s sake. Marly’s father was a soldier and prisoner of war, and everyone says he was lucky to return home from the war. (The book doesn’t specify which war, and no date is given for the story, but the book was written during the 1950s. If it was set slightly earlier than the time of writing, it could be WWII, and if it’s in the 1950s, it would be the Korean War. Not giving the story a date gives it a timeless feel.) Since then, he has suffered from the stress of his experiences. He is frequently tired and irritable. He is easily startled by loud noises, even a door slamming, and he finds arguments between Marly and her older brother Joe too much to handle. On Christmas, he can’t even bring himself to get out of bed to celebrate with his family. (He is suffering from shell shock or PTSD, although the characters in the book don’t use those terms. Mostly, they just describe the symptoms they see in him without giving it a name. Much of our modern understanding of what PTSD is and how to treat it came out of the World Wars and following conflicts, like the Korean War and the Vietnam War. During the 1950s, they had a general sense of what it was, and they called it different names, like “battle fatigue” or “combat stress reaction” or “gross stress reaction,” but not everyone fully understood it or how to treat it. They didn’t have as many resources for dealing with it, so this family is trying to find their own solution by giving the father a quiet place to rest and process his feelings.) Marly’s mother thinks that the peace of the countryside will do him good.

It’s March when the family makes their first trip to Maple Hill, and there is still snow on the ground. Their car gets stuck in the snow before they reach the house. Joe and Marly both get out of the car to find help. Twelve-year-old Joe initially didn’t want Marly to come with him because he’s in a phase where he likes to show off and make a big deal about how much better he is at doing things than his younger sister, but Marly sets off by herself and meets their friendly neighbor, Mr. Chris. Joe is a little offended that Marly saved the day instead of him, but Mr. Chris and his wife are very friendly and helpful. They remember the children’s mother from when she used to visit her grandmother as a child, and they welcome the family like they’re relatives themselves. Marly likes Mr. and Mrs. Chris, but her father finds their friendliness a little overwhelming. He feels like what he really needs is time alone, and he doesn’t feel much like chatting with people.

The old house at Maple Hill is a little run down because no one has lived there for years. The family has a lot of fixing-up to do, but Marly’s mother thinks that the work will be good for the children’s father. Marly and Joe aren’t used to living in the countryside, and they find some parts of it fascinating. They use a pump for water for the first time and take baths in an old tub. The house contains a Franklin stove (and Marly references the story Ben and Me by Robert Lawson).

Marly is upset when her family kills a nest of baby mice, although they tell her that mice are pests, and they have to get rid of them or be overrun by them. Marly loves animals, and she would have loved to keep the cute little mice as pets. Marly talks about her feelings with Mr. Chris when he shows them how he processes maple syrup. Mr. Chris says that he understands how Marly feels. He also has a soft spot for small animals. Although he doesn’t tell his wife about it, he has a little mouse friend who visits him every day. Marly’s family is there for the conversation, and they say that Marly makes too big a deal out of getting rid of pests, but Mr. Chris says that there’s nothing wrong with Marly for caring and gives her an extra taste of the maple sap. To Marly’s surprise, her father takes her on his lap and says that the only thing wrong with Marly caring too much is that she’ll have to spent her life crying more than she would otherwise have to. Feeling an emotional attachment to people or animals can mean having your feelings hurt when you lose them, and what Marly’s father has been through is about the most extreme version of having hurt feelings that human beings experience.

Marly’s father stays at Maple Hill alone for a couple of months while his wife and children return to the city so the children can finish the school year. In spite of her father’s reluctance to be around people, he does become friends with Mr. and Mrs. Chris in their absence. He sometimes calls his family from the phone at their house. Mr. and Mrs. Chris help him adjust to living in the countryside. He discovers how much life in the countryside is influence by changes in the weather, much more so than life in the city, where people spend more of their time indoors, and Mr. Chris gives him an almanac to use. Mr. Chris tells Marly that, when she and her brother return to the countryside in the summer, he’ll take her around and show her everything, and he’ll show her all the “miracles” at Maple Hill, meaning the wonders of the natural world.

However, even people in the peaceful countryside have their troubles. Marly overhears her mother talking to Mrs. Chris, and Mrs. Chris says that she’s worried about Mr. Chris’s health. Jolly Mr. Chris has suffered a heart attack before, and he hasn’t been taking it easy. He’s always been a hard worker, and Mrs. Chris worries that he pushes himself too hard.

Over the summer, when Marly and her brother and mother return to Maple Hill, Marly has to get used to life in the countryside, as her father has. One morning, when she tries to make pancakes for her family by herself, she accidentally fills the kitchen with smoke because she doesn’t really know how to use the old-fashioned stove. Her father comes in and helps her, and at first, Marly is worried that he’s going to get really angry, the way he often has when things go wrong because of his stress from the war. However, this time, he reacts much more calmly because he knows how to handle the situation, and he admits that he did the same thing himself when he first used that stove. It’s one of the first signs that Marly’s father has been improving in the peaceful countryside.

As Mr. Chris promised, he shows Marly the wonders of the countryside and introduces her to different types of plants and animals. Joe likes to show off what he knows about plants and animals and their scientific names from his books, but Marly enjoys learning the colloquial names for plants from Mr. Chris and observing them directly. However, she realizes that she and her brother Joe have to be careful not to overtax Mr. Chris. When Mr. Chris gets really enthusiastic about something, he pushes himself harder than he should.

As the summer comes to an end, Marly’s parents discuss whether the mother should return to the city with the children for school or if they should stay at Maple Hill year-round now. Marly’s father loves life in the country. He has been growing crops on the farm, and he feels better in the peaceful countryside. He wants to stay there for at least for one year before trying city life again. Marly is eager to stay, although Joe is reluctant because he really likes his old school and the museums and theaters of the city. However, even Joe finds some parts of country life fun and fulfilling, so he is persuaded to give it a try. It helps that boys Joe’s age take the bus to the bigger school in the next town, and that school has a marching band, because Joe had wanted to join the band at his old school.

Staying in the country year-round gives the children the opportunity to experience the changes in nature and farm life through the seasons. However, as it reaches a year since they first came to Maple Hill, Mr. Chris suffers another heart attack. While he is in the hospital, Marly’s family steps in to help harvest and process the maple sap crop, turning it into maple syrup. It’s hard work because the family also has their own crop to tend to, but helping Mr. Chris helps Marly’s family as well. Through hard work for the sake of helping someone else and the relationships they build with their new community, Marly’s father’s old tiredness and harshness turns to gentleness, further healing his spirit.

The book is a Newbery Medal winner. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one translated into Chinese).

My Reaction

Cottagecore Style

This book is a gentle story that would appeal to people who enjoy Cottagecore Style Books. It’s full of the wonders of nature and life in the countryside, and the family’s little farmhouse is cozy and charmingly old-fashioned. The “miracles” in the book refer to changes in the natural world that take place over time and with the changing of the seasons. Even Marly’s father’s recovery is natural and gradually takes place over time during the course of the story.

The book doesn’t go into detail about what Marly’s father experienced as a soldier, but it does a good job of showing how the war has affected him. He is tense, nervous, and angry because of his experiences, but not in a way that would be too frightening for children. Getting away from the chaos of the city and working outside in nature does help him. The physical activity of working outdoors gives him an outlet for his stress, and the slower pace of life and limited number of people he sees in the country give the chance he needs to rest.

Cottagecore as a genre and aesthetic became very popular during the Coronavirus Pandemic of the early 2020s. I explained when I wrote my list of books that fit the genre how the pandemic forced many people to change the way they were living. During the height of the pandemic, when there were lockdowns and quarantines, people didn’t get out as much. Many people worked from home, if they could, and limited the number of people they would see. This caused some people to feel stressed and cooped up, but one of the ways they were able to alleviate that feeling was to spend time outside, whether it was in their own gardens or in public parks or in the open countryside. When people were outside, there was less risk of contagion because they either wouldn’t encounter other people or could encounter them from a safe distance. Being out in nature, as much as they could manage, helped people feel a little more free. It gave them a welcome break from being inside their own homes all the time, and seeing beauty in the natural world can be soothing for all kinds of stress.

I mention this because that’s similar to the way Marly’s father and the rest of their family felt when they decided to go to the country. Marly’s father’s condition was hard on his family as well as himself because they were worried about him and because he would become moody and irritable at small things they would do which ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered him much. For a long time since he came back from the war, everyone had to be extremely careful about what they did around him because they didn’t want to upset him. In the countryside, without other distractions and causes of stress, everyone in the family was able to relax more. That’s why books of this kind became so popular during the pandemic; people saw in them feelings that they were experiencing themselves because of the stressful situation everyone was going through. I noticed that the people who handled the social distancing of the pandemic the best were the ones who used it as an opportunity to enjoy a slower pace of life and simple pleasures and to strengthen their connections with a small number of important people, like the people in this story do. Of course, individual circumstances varied, and some people had a greater ability to do this than others, but I think it’s interesting and helpful to note these common ways that people have of dealing with trauma and stress, even when the trauma and stress come from different sources.

Life and Death of Animals and War

There is a subplot that continues all the way through the book about how Marly feels about animals and how her feelings clash with both the way her family feels and the realities of life in the country. She gets very upset when her family destroys the nest with baby mice, and she bonds with Mr. Chris about their caring for small animals. However, Mr. Chris shocks her when he talks about hunting a family of foxes. Marly cares about the foxes because they have five babies, and she can’t imagine how a caring man like Mr. Chris would hunt baby animals. What is the difference between cute little baby mice and baby foxes? Mr. Chris explains that the foxes have been hunting his chickens, and they also eat mice. By eliminating the foxes, he can save the lives of other animals. The area has too many foxes already, and there is a bounty on their pelts. What Mr. Chris and the rest of Marly’s family understand, and which Marly struggles to come to terms with, is that sometimes animals pose a risk to other animals and even to humans. The mice would carry disease if they were allowed to live in the house with humans, and the foxes are killing the chickens. In a perfect world, everything would be able to live peacefully side-by-side without hurting each other, but the world isn’t perfect, and circumstances mean that something that poses a risk to something else sometimes has to be killed. It’s a good metaphor for war.

Marly’s father didn’t go to war because he wanted to. He was sent to war because the government decided it was necessary to prevent something even worse from happening. People don’t normally want to hurt and kill each other, but when faced with someone who poses a real threat, they will. Part of the reason why Marly’s father has suffered is that he had to endure things that went against his natural instincts. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t want to hurt or kill other people, but he had to as a soldier, and he had to survive other people’s attempts to hurt or kill him. To survive those circumstances, he had to change his way of thinking, and now that it’s over, he’s struggling to get back into the mindset of peace, where not every loud sound is a threat, conflicts are minor, and it’s okay to care about people and be sentimental about things. During their time at Maple Hill, the family also meets a hermit who came to the countryside while he was recovering from shell shock from a previous war. The book doesn’t say what war that was, but he’s been in the area for years. If Marly’s father was in either WWII or the Korean War, this man could have been a soldier during WWI, given the time period. The hermit’s experiences show the family and readers that the trauma of war affects people in similar ways across generations and between conflicts, and that what Marly’s father experienced is an inherently human reaction. It also points to the similar ways people have of responding to that type of trauma. Both Marly’s father and the hermit found solace in nature and the peaceful countryside.

Fortunately, Marly and her brother figure out a way to save the foxes from being hunted by scaring them away from their den. If you can get past the early point in the book where they destroy the nest of mice, no further animals were harmed during the course of the story. There is a point where Marly gets some chickens of her own to care for, and I was worried that the foxes would come and eat them, to prove her family’s point that some animals have to be hunted, but I was glad that didn’t happen. Marly does reflect more on how animals eat each other later in the book without needing to have anything else killed. She thinks about how she and her brother saw small animal bones and fur around the foxes’ den and how her own family eats meat and eggs. Mr. Chris says that everything needs to eat something to survive, and that helps Marly to understand the cycles of life and death in the animal kingdom and in farming. The lessons in the book are pretty gentle even though they touch on serious topics.

Boys vs Girls

One of the criticisms that I’ve sometimes seen about this book is the stereotypical gender roles in the story, but I think that’s a little unfair because Marly in particular questions the ways boys act and how other people view boys and girls. It starts very early in the story when the family’s car gets stuck and Joe doesn’t want Marly to go with him to get help. When Marly goes on her own and finds help first because she’s put a little more thought into where to go for help, Joe feels a little bad that his younger sister did better than he did. There’s a kind of competition between them that mostly seems to come from Joe, and Marly gets a little offended sometimes when he tries to leave her out of things so he can be first to do something.

I thought that it was perceptive of her to realize that boys try to prove that they’re better at things than girls because they “seemed afraid they’d stop being boys altogether if they couldn’t be first at everything.” Marly knows that boys aren’t treated the same as girls, and I think her comment comes pretty close to the reason why. The boys have a stronger idea of what they’re supposed to be, relative to girls, and in a way, they’re more threatened when either they’re not as good at something as a girl is or a girl does something that they think is supposed to be a boys’ activity. I’ve noticed men and boys with this sort of attitude even in the 21st century, and it’s ironic that they don’t seem to realize that very attitude puts them at a disadvantage by making their sense of self more fragile and dependent on someone else’s relative skills and interests.

Marly realizes this sense of fragility later in the story when she thinks about how she really likes being a girl better than she would like being a boy. Although some people might tell girls that they can’t do certain things or think of girls as being silly compared to boys, Marly realizes that there is a greater amount of freedom for girls in her time and society to simply be human beings than the boys experience. In some ways, the boys of her time seem like they’re being raised to be like little soldiers, possibly to prepare them for the day when they might be drafted, like their fathers. Boys are urged to be tough, competitive, and unsentimental. Marly knows that her brother cries sometimes, but he doesn’t want to be seen crying. Joe is not expected to care about animals or feel anything about killing them. By contrast, Marly can feel emotions and show them freely about anything she wants because she’s a girl. She realizes that people sometimes laugh when a girl does something silly or makes a mistake or asks what seems like a dumb question or is overly emotional about something, but girls are still allowed to do these things without people thinking much of it. They can do all of these things without anyone questioning their identities as girls or human beings in general. Really, everyone does these things once in a while, but Marly realizes that a boy doing one of these very human things is likely to get more criticism and might even be called “girly.” People of this time would question a boy’s identity as a boy in ways that they wouldn’t question a girl’s identity as a girl, and that’s why Joe acts the way he does sometimes, like he has something to prove to everybody. Boys of her time may have more opportunities in some ways, but in some ways, girls are more free to simply be human. Joe acts like he’s competing with his sister sometimes and trying to show her up, but in reality, he’s competing with society’s expectations for him and his own expectations for himself because of what he’s been told that boys are or have to be.

Toward the end of the story, Marly and Joe are so busy trying to help their family and the Chrises with their maple syrup processing that they miss some time in school. The local truant officer comes to check up on them and find out if they’ve been ill, and she is fascinated when she finds out that they’ve been helping to make maple syrup. She admits that, even though she’s lived in the area her whole life, she’s never actually helped to make maple syrup herself or eve watched it being done. She spends some time with the family, watching them work and asking them questions about the process. Based on what she’s seen, she decides that the children are engaging in a practical and educational experience because they are learning something that is culturally and historically relevant to the area that is not taught in classrooms. In fact, she thinks that this is such a great educational opportunity that she not only makes sure that the children are excused from classes until the work is done but also arranges for field trips of other children from the area to come to the farms and help, giving the two families the extra help they really need and the children’s classmates a unique experience. I thought that was a great example of how a disruption to the usual routine can be an exciting and valuable learning experience, something that I think is also relevant to the changes people had to make to their routines and education during the pandemic, but it also brings up the topic of boys’ work vs girls’ work again.

Throughout the book, there are certain types of work that are considered for men or women, and Marly is happy when her mother counts her among the “women” doing work in the kitchen because it makes her feel grown-up. However, there are times when she boldly speaks up about how girls should be allowed to do other things that boys also do. The truant officer is a woman, but when she arranges the field trips of students visiting the farm to help out, she specifically invites only boys at first. Marly asks her why she didn’t invite the girls because she’d like some other girls on the farm. The truant officer admits that she didn’t think of it as something the girls would want to do, but finding the process interesting herself, she decides that she’ll ask the girls to see if they’re interested. Joe dismisses the idea that girls would help out with the maple syrup because farm work is men’s work. Marly points out that she’s been doing this work the entire time herself, and Joe says that she’s different because she’s kind of a “tomboy” (meaning a girl with boyish qualities or who enjoys activities that boys typically enjoy). Marly insists that she’s not a tomboy because she’s very comfortable with her identity as a girl, and she just thinks that other people are wrong about the range of things that girls can do or be expected to enjoy. It turns out that she’s right that other girls are interested in the farm work and making maple syrup and do want to come on the field trips. They just didn’t before because nobody asked them.

I haven’t actually heard anybody say the word “tomboy” in a long time. When I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, it referred to a girl who acted like a boy and liked things boys liked, and it was a term far older than my childhood. In the 21st century, I more often hear about girls who are described, or more often, describe themselves as being “not like other girls.” There is still a concept that “typical” boys and “typical” girls like or do certain kinds of things and that people who don’t like or do the typical things are different somehow, although I think that concept isn’t as strict as it once was. I think that 21st century society has a more expansive notion of the types of things people of different genders like and do and a greater recognition of the varying interests people can have. Some people still leap to the conclusion that, just because someone doesn’t do or like what’s “typical”, they might be homosexual or trans (which I think might be part of that fear that Marly described about boys worrying that they’d “stop being boys altogether” if they couldn’t be first and best at everything compared to girls), but that’s not always the case. Humans come in many variations, and in the grand scheme of life, figuring out what’s “typical” for boys or girls doesn’t really tell you much about any particular individual person’s interests or feelings. (If you’ve ever tried to buy Christmas or birthday presents for a kid based on general recommendations for boys or girls their age and guessed wrong for that person, you know what I’m talking about.) There are some things that can really only be decided on an individual level. Marly is not a “tomboy.” She knows who and what she is, and she’s a girl who also likes to do outdoor activities and farm work. That’s really all there is to it, and there are more girls like her who find that appealing, when people bother to ask them how they feel.

History and Language

There aren’t many issues with language in the story, but there is one incident that I thought I would mention. There are a couple of points in the story where the characters discuss the history of making maple syrup. Mr. Chris says that one of his ancestors learned how to do it from some “Indians” in the area, meaning Native Americans, and his family has continued using the same process ever since. The truant officer is intrigued when Marly’s family tells her that, and she wonders how the Native Americans first realized that they could process tree sap into a food product. She does a little research and later tells the family a story about how a Native American woman used tree sap in making a kind of mush for her husband, and he liked the flavor, so they continued cooking with it.

Using the term “Indians” instead of “Native Americans” is very common in older children’s books, especially those from the 1950s or 1960s and earlier. This book isn’t unusual for doing that because it was written in the 1950s, although “Native American” is the preferred term of the late 20th and early 21st centuries when referring to “American Indians.” I think it’s generally better to use the most specific term possible in descriptors because it’s both more accurate and less confusing, and most people find it more polite and respectful. When I was a kid, I remember finding the term “Indian” a little confusing sometimes because I was aware that “Indians” are also people from India, although I could usually tell by context which kind of “Indians” authors meant.

(By the way, if anybody out there know which kind of “Indian” is meant when someone is sitting “Indian style”, meaning cross-legged or what some teachers now call “criss-cross applesauce”, do let me know. I asked one of my teachers when they first taught us to do it when I was a little kid, and I never got an answer. She rudely ignored the question, probably because she didn’t know the answer, either. I thought at the time it was probably based on Native Americans because of where we were living, but I was curious which tribe it was. The more I thought about it, I also realized that I couldn’t rule out India as the source because people sit crossed-legged for yoga, and yoga comes from India. Personally, I prefer to just call that kind of sitting as “sitting cross-legged” because that describes exactly what you’re supposed to do, and both of those other terms require more explanation of what they mean than I think should be necessary for just telling someone how to sit.)

The use of “Indian” instead of “Native American” sounds outdated and can be a little irritating to some people, but there is one instance where the truant officer uses the word “squaw” to refer to the Native American woman who discovered how to cook with sap from the maple tree. “Squaw” is a controversial word because, apparently, it can mean “woman” in a generic sense in some Native American languages, but in other Native American languages, it can mean something more vulgar and offensive. The word is only used briefly in that one part of the story and not in any insulting manner, but if you’re going to read this to children or have them read this story, I think it’s important for them to understand that this is not a word they should use themselves in conversation. If they want to refer to a Native American woman, they should just call her a woman and not use an ambiguous term that may seem insulting to some people. If they can understand that, sometimes, a word can mean different things to different people and that it’s important to consider your audience’s feelings when choosing what to say and how to describe other people, I don’t think this will be a serious issue with this story.

One final note that I thought of adding is about Marly’s name. Nobody in the story ever calls her anything but “Marly”, but I think that’s a nickname. In the early 21st century, there’s been a trend of giving children, especially girls, surnames as first names as a form of “gender neutral” name, but that wasn’t common back in the 1950s, and the surname of “Marley” is usually spelled with an ‘e’, unlike Marly’s name. Marly’s name could just be “Marly” as a variant of “Marley”, but I suspect, although I can’t prove it, that “Marly” is a nickname for Marlene or a similar name. I think her name is probably Marlene because there was a famous actress during the 1930s named Marlene Dietrich, and there was a spike in popularity for the name Marlene during the mid-20th century, probably because of her. Marlene Dietrich was known for defying traditional gender roles, both in her acting career and in her private life. Although she was considered a fashion icon in her time, when she described her sense of fashion in 1960, she said, “I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men. If I dressed for myself I wouldn’t bother at all. Clothes bore me. I’d wear jeans. I adore jeans. I get them in a public store—men’s, of course; I can’t wear women’s trousers. But I dress for the profession.” That sounds like the kind of girl Marly is. She knows that she’s a girl, but she’s her own kind of girl, who knows what she likes and doesn’t like.