Candleshoe by Michael Innes, 1953.
I own the movie version of the book, which was originally named Christmas at Candleshoe (although it’s not about the holiday). It contains the text of the original story, but the picture on the front cover is from the movie.
The Disney movie is very different from the original book. For one thing, the hero of the story is a boy (Jay), not a girl (Casey/Margaret), and unlike the movie version, the child’s identity is established for certain by the end of the book. The book has a happy ending, and so does the movie, but part of the movie’s point was that the idea of family isn’t dependent on blood relations alone, so it isn’t important whether Casey is really Margaret or not (although there are strong hints that she is).
The book is a bit hard to follow at first because it jumps back and forth between different places and different sets of characters, although it all takes place during the course of a single day and night. Actually, I’m not sure this can really be called a children’s book, but I included it here because of the movie tie-in. Because of the difficulty level of the book, I’d really recommend it for older children or adults. Personally, I have to admit that I liked the movie better.
The story takes place in the mid-twentieth century, after WWII. There are two manor houses involved, Benison Court and Candleshoe. Benison Court, the newer of the two, is owned by the Spendloves, and Candleshoe, the older one, is owned by the elderly Miss Candleshoe. The two families are related, and neither one of them has as much money as they used to. The Spendloves take in some extra money by offering tours of Benison Court and showing people paintings and antiques owned by the family for generations. To raise some additional money, they decide to sell a couple of the paintings by Titian. To their surprise, the expert they call in to evaluate the paintings tells them that the paintings are forgeries. Archdeacon, who cares for the antiques and library at Benison, reminds the Spendloves that during the war, the paintings were sent to Candleshoe for safekeeping.
Meanwhile, a couple of American tourists, the wealthy Mrs. Feather and her son Grant, having seen Benison, stop by Candleshoe. Mrs. Feather is fascinated by the old place, in spite of its state of disrepair, and Miss Candleshoe invites them to have dinner there and spend the night. Mrs. Feather has an interest in purchasing Candleshoe for herself and fixing it up. Miss Candleshoe and her longtime friend, the retired chaplain, Armigel, know that there is not enough money for them to fix up Candleshoe, and they like the idea of traveling, so they are willing to consider selling the manor house. This plan does not sit well with Jay, the orphaned son of Miss Candleshoe’s housekeeper, Mrs. Ray.
After Mrs. Ray died, Miss Candleshoe cared for Jay, and now, with Miss Candleshoe and Armigel showing signs of senility, Jay has been handling much of the practical running of Candleshoe. On this particular evening, Jay is worried about more than the possible sale of the property. He has been noticing strange people paying unusual attention to the house. He suspects, correctly, that they intend to break into the house that night, and he has assembled a small army of local children, armed with antique weapons, to defend the place. Grant, befriending Jay, admires the boy’s practical turn of mind but worries that they are not up to the task of handling the siege that is coming to this isolated country house. As the danger presses closer, the Spendloves, Archdeacon, and the art expert are heading toward Candleshoe in search of the missing paintings.
The answer to all of these problems may lie in the strangest feature of the house: the Christmas box, a stone monument in the gallery made by Gerard Christmas and dedicated to the memory of an ancestor of the Candleshoes, who may have been a pirate. According to the lore of Candleshoe, the box will open at a time when Candleshoe is in crisis and will save the day.
The book is available online through Internet Archive.
But, is Casey Really Margaret?!
I think so. I want to say, “yes, she is,” but “I think so” is about as definite as I can be because the movie changed the story from the original book.
Whether or not Casey is actually Margaret, the lost heir to Candleshoe, is the burning question everyone is left with after watching the Disney movie Candleshoe. The movie deliberately left Casey’s true identity unresolved at the end, probably because they wanted to have the people at Candleshoe decide to accept her into their family on her own merits, not just because they had to because she’s the heir to the place. In the beginning, the audience is told that missing heir of Candleshoe, Margaret, was kidnapped as a young child by her own father, apparently in some kind of marital/custody dispute, and that she disappeared after his death in a car accident and has not been located although attempts to find her were made in the ten years that have passed since her disappearance. Casey is a teenage girl who was apparently an abandoned child with an unknown past and no memory of her early life who bears an odd resemblance to Margaret, including a couple of distinctive scars that are like ones Margaret was known to have. She is recruited as by con artist to play the part of Margaret, returning to Candleshoe as the lost heiress in order to gain access to the house and find a hidden treasure. Although Casey initially came to Candleshoe under false pretenses as part of a con with the promise of a share of the Candleshoe treasure and a red Ferrari as her payment, she eventually becomes fond of the people there and decides that she can’t let them be cheated by the real villain. Casey proves herself to be part of the Candleshoe family through her loyalty to them, and in the end, they would accept her whether she really was Margaret or not. It’s a nice sentiment, but viewers still have the urge to ask who Casey really is.
Casey is legitimately an orphan or abandoned child, found at about the right time and the right age and in the right place to really be Margaret. She has no memory at all of her early childhood, her parents, or where she came from, and she also bears some telltale scars that match ones that young Margaret was known to have. That’s what we’re told about Casey. Casey’s history is never explained in detail in the movie (we never find out under what circumstances she was found and entered into the Los Angeles foster care system), but from what we do know, her history meshes well enough with Margaret’s known past that it would seem plausible for her to actually be Margaret. Is she really Margaret, and Harry Bundage, the con man, just persuaded her that she was only pretending in order to use her for his own ends? Or, is the real Margaret still out there somewhere? If Casey actually is Margaret, did she lose her memory in the car crash that killed her father, or did he abandon her somewhere before his death, even though he had kidnapped her from her mother and took her to a completely different country?
When Harry Bundage is briefing Casey about Margaret’s background, he poses the theory that Margaret was in the car when her father crashed it and that she may have wandered off in a state of shock after the accident. That explanation might be partly for the benefit of the viewers, helping to explain how Casey could be Marget and not remember it. A young child suffering from shock might be unable to tell anyone who she was or what had happened to her. An accident may even have left some bruising that might have obscured the telltale scars that could have identified her, but again, the matter is never fully settled, and we just don’t know enough of Casey’s background to make a full connection. There are enough pieces to make it possible, maybe even probable, but nothing that definitively settles the matter.
In the final scene of the movie, Casey asks Margaret’s grandmother what will happen if Margaret is ever really found and comes home, and the grandmother says cryptically that maybe she already has. It’s a brief hint that the grandmother thinks Casey might really be her kidnapped granddaughter, even though she accepts that Casey was lying to her earlier about things she said she remembered and knows that Casey herself thought that she was just an imposter. Casey does have those telltale scars, and it does seem like quite a coincidence that two random girls of the same age and similar circumstances would have identical sets of scars. However, the movie stops short of declaring that Casey really was Margaret all along, and the unanswered questions still rankle viewers. So, some of us turned to the original book to get more detail, but it turns out that it doesn’t completely help.
As I said, the original book was different from the movie. Not only was the child hero in the book a boy instead of a girl, he wasn’t kidnapped and taken to America the way that Margaret was. In the book, Jay definitely knows who his mother was, and it’s the question of who his father was that establishes his identity as the heir to Candleshoe. It turns out that Jay’s father was the nephew of the lady of Candleshoe, making her his great-aunt rather than his grandmother. Her nephew had been a ne’er-do-well, and although his family didn’t know it, he had married an American woman before his death. He died not too long after the marriage, but by that point, he had fathered Jay. Jay’s mother knew about her husband’s family, but she wasn’t sure yet whether or not she wanted to tell them about Jay. She took the job as housekeeper so she could observe the family and decide whether or not to reveal their relationship. Unfortunately, she died in an accident before she made up her mind. By the end of the book, Jay’s identity is established, and he is definitely proven and recognized to be the heir to Candleshoe, and because of that, I believe that Casey really is the missing Margaret. At least, that’s as close to confirmation as we’re likely to get. If the child in the book was the rightful heir to Candleshoe, it would make sense if the child in the movie was, too, even if it’s not really the same child.
Of course, that’s not full proof, and it doesn’t answer the questions about Margaret’s kidnapping or her father’s accident or how Casey was found and placed in foster care in California without anyone else connecting her with the missing Margaret when Margaret’s disappearance was reported to the authorities and newspapers. I have a theory that Harry Bundage was right that Margaret was in the car during the accident and that she did wander away from the scene of the accident in shock and possibly suffering injuries that covered up her identifying scars, but that’s still just a theory. There’s nothing in the movie or book that I could use to prove it. We don’t even know exactly why Margaret’s father in the movie kidnapped her in the first place or why Margaret’s mother died not long after she disappeared. (A convenient accident or illness for story purposes so there’s one less person to try to identify Casey/Margaret, or did she kill herself out of despair at the loss of her husband and daughter? The movie doesn’t say, so those are just guesses, too.) There’s a lot of backstory missing, and the book doesn’t clarify these points because of the differences between the book and movie. I guess it’s not really important to the story in the movie, but inquiring minds still want to know.
My Crazy Cousin Courtney Comes Back by Judi Miller, 1994.
My Crazy Cousin Courtney by Judi Miller, 1993.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming, 1964.
The Night Crossing by Karen Ackerman, 1994.
This is a pretty short chapter book. Although the subject matter is serious, and parts might be frightening to young children (the part where Clara and Marta are chased and perhaps some of the parts where the family is hiding), there are only vague references to more dark subjects like concentration camps (people who already know what they are and what happened there would understand, but children who haven’t heard about them wouldn’t get the full picture from the brief mentions). The book would be a good, short introduction to the topic of the Holocaust by putting it in terms of the way it changed the lives of ordinary people who had to flee from it. Actually, it wouldn’t be a bad way to start a discussion of the Syrian refugees in Europe by putting it into the context of ordinary people fleeing the violence of war.
Never Hit a Ghost with a Baseball Bat by Eth Clifford, 1993.
The girls explore the trolleys parked in the museum and admire the manikins dressed in old-fashioned clothing that are part of the displays in each trolley car, but more strange things happen. A teddy bear seems to speak to them, even though it isn’t the kind with a string and a talk-box. The manikins start to seem creepier. Mary-Rose and Jo-Beth are only armed with a baseball bat from one of the displays and the old teddy bear (which terrifies Jo-Beth). But, Mary Rose is determined to find the ghost, even if it’s the last thing she does!
The Dastardly Murder of Dirty Pete by Eth Clifford, 1981.
Harry Onetree and the girls find a ghost town with a hotel, an opera house, and several other buildings. Although Harry only means to look around for a little while, he forgets to set his parking brake (something else Mary Rose warns him about, which he ignores), and their car rolls backward into a ditch. Since it’s getting dark, they’re stranded in the ghost town for the night. But, they’re not alone there.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 