The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House by Mary Chase, 1968.
Nine-year-old Maureen Swanson has a bad reputation in her neighborhood, mostly deserved. The other kids don’t like her because she tells lies and picks fights with them. Maureen is fascinated by an old, abandoned house in her neighborhood where the wealthy Messerman family used to live. Sometimes she likes to pretend that she lives there herself.
One day, while trying to avoid
punishment for her latest antics, she finds her way inside the Messerman
estate. There, she meets a little man
who turns out to be a leprechaun. He
tells her that she should leave immediately and not come back, but instead, she
ends up exploring inside the house. To
her amazement, she finds paintings of the seven Messerman sisters, who
disappeared from the house long ago, and the ladies in the paintings move when
she turns her back on them.
When Maureen tries to tell others about it, no one believes it. When she leaves the house, Maureen takes with her a strange bracelet that she finds on the ground, the same one that she had seen on one of the ladies in the paintings, a gold chain with pigeon feathers. Later that evening, the same lady from the painting shows up at Maureen’s house, asking for her bracelet back. The rumors Maureen has heard about the Messerman house being haunted are more true than she knows, and the wicked Messerman girls will stop at nothing to get what they want.
Years ago, the leprechaun came to the Messerman house along with a maid who was from Ireland. Mrs. Messerman was a very kind woman, and Nora, the maid, was his friend, so he decided to stay. However, the Messerman girls were always selfish and wicked. One day, the eldest of the girls stole the leprechaun’s magic bag of tricks and turned herself and her sisters into birds so that they could always go where they wanted and do what they wanted without anyone stopping them. Mr. and Mrs. Messerman were broken-hearted when their girls disappeared. Years later, after their parents were dead, they finally returned. They were not sad at all, but continued their selfish and wicked ways. Because of the magic, they never age and can turn into birds whenever they like.
Maureen is afraid to admit that she has the bracelet because she knows that her parents will punish her for trespassing on the Messerman property. The next day, the women trick her into entering the estate again, only this time, Maureen enters the estate as it was in the past, when the girls were young. Mr. and Mrs. Messerman are very kind to Maureen and offer to look after her until they can find where she lives. Mrs. Messerman seems to know that her daughters are mean but doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. She asks Maureen to help them if she ever has the chance. It’s a touching moment for Maureen, who suddenly realizes that no one has ever asked her for help before.
Maureen, frightened by the girls, finally gives back the bracelet, and they all fly off again, leaving her alone in the past. How is Maureen going to get home?
This book also goes by the title The Wicked Pigeon Ladies in the Garden. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
This is partly a story about personal transformation. Maureen has definitely been the resident mean girl, but she gains a new perspective on her own life and behavior when confronted with the frightening wickedness of the Messerman girls.
The leprechaun tells Maureen that the only way to get out of the pretend past created by the Messerman girls is to think about what is going on in the real world. When Maureen thinks of her mother, she hears her mother calling her and returns to her own time. The leprechaun catches the birds in a net and almost drowns them in a pond, but Maureen stops him, telling him that Mrs. Messerman had asked her to help them. The leprechaun releases the birds and tells Maureen that they will continue to be, literally, flighty birdbrains, but that their mother’s love will always be with them. Maureen, having seen how cold and cruel the sisters were, never appreciating their mother’s love, learns to appreciate her own family more and to behave better. At the end of the story, she acknowledges that she heard her mother calling her and that call, the product of her own mother’s love and concern for her, was what helped her to return home. Maureen ends up better off than the wicked and flighty Messermans because she not only has a home where people care for her but she has learned to appreciate that home and those people and will now treat them better.
One of the things that I appreciated most about this book was the unusual way the leprechaun was used in the story. The story starts out seeming like it will be about ghosts in a haunted house, but that’s not quite what’s happening. Also, when leprechauns appear in stories, they usually have a pot of gold or play tricks on people, but the leprechaun’s role in this story isn’t quite the same.
Rachel and her younger brother, Scott, stop by the discount store on the way home to admire the model kits. Most of the model kits are too expensive for them to buy, but one kit has been put on discount, The Build-Anything Kit. The kids think it’s a good deal because they can use it to build more than one kind of model.
When they get it home and begin to play with it, they are confused at first. Scott tries to build a model stock car racer, but all the wheels and other pieces are all different sizes. Then, Rachel finds a double-headed hammer labeled, “sizer.” The kids discover that when they hit the model pieces with the hammer, they can make them bigger or smaller. Besides working on pieces, the sizer can also make people bigger or smaller. Rachel makes Scott smaller so that he can drive his stock car model around the room. Then, when he drives outside, she makes both him and the car bigger, so the car is the size of a normal car. A neighbor spots them in this strange car and calls the police, so the children are forced to shrink the car again quickly.
When they get home, they discover that they left the door open and that a man is trying to steal their tv set. Without thinking, Rachel hits him with the sizer and shrinks him. Now, they have to decide what to do with him before the situation gets worse!
At first, the kids keep the thief in a glass, but then they let him out and allow him to drive around in the stock car model. While they are trying to decide what to do with him, they take a look in the model box again and notice some pieces that weren’t there before. They look and feel like stone blocks, so they begin building a castle with them. To their surprise, the man they shrunk runs into the castle. They are worried about him, so they hit the castle with the sizer to make it bigger. Suddenly, the castle is as large as life, and they go inside to discover that they are back in medieval times. What will happen to the thief in the past, and will the kids get back home?
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
#1 Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborne, 1992.
Eight-year-old Jack is walking home with his seven-year-old sister, Annie, when Annie spots a tree house in the woods that they’ve never seen before. In spite of Jack’s warnings, Annie climbs up into the tree house and yells down that there are a bunch of books in there. Jack loves books, so he also climbs up into the tree house to see what she’s found.
There are books in the tree house about all sorts of interesting times and places. When Jack starts looking at a book about dinosaurs, he wishes that he could see one himself. Suddenly, the tree house takes the kids back in time to a land filled with dinosaurs. The two of them have some hair-raising adventures as they try to figure out how to get back home, getting some help from a friendly Pteranodon when they need to escape from a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The kids figure out that the tree house will take them anywhere they want as long as they look at a picture of the place in one of the books and wish to go there. There is a book about Pennsylvania in the tree house with a picture of their home town in it, so all they need to do is to look at it and wish they were there in order to go home.
While they are still in the land of the dinosaurs, Jack finds a gold amulet with the letter M on it. He thinks it belongs to whoever owns the tree house, so he picks it up and brings it back with them, although by the end of the book, the kids still don’t know who it really belongs to. The ownership of the tree house is something that they eventually figure out through their adventures with it. (See book #4 in the series for the answer.)
The Princess in the Pigpen by Jane Resh Thomas, 1989.
Elizabeth is the nine-year-old daughter of a nobleman in London in the year 1600, and she’s very sick. However, while she’s lying in her bed with a terrible fever, she suddenly finds herself in a pigpen in 20th century Iowa with no idea how she got there. At first, she doesn’t even know where she is, and when she is found by the McCormick family, the family who owns the farm, they have no idea who she is or where she came from. That she is very ill is obvious, so they take Elizabeth to the local doctor, who says that she has scarlet fever (what strep throat turns into when it’s neglected, it’s serious and life-threatening) and gives her penicillin, which helps her to recover.
However, there is still the question of how Elizabeth ended up on the McCormick farm in Iowa in the first place. Elizabeth tells them that she is from London and insists that the year is 1600. Ann, the McCormicks’ daughter, who is about the same age as Elizabeth, doesn’t believe that Elizabeth is really from the past. The current year is 1988, and Ann thinks that Elizabeth is probably crazy, but obviously in need of some help. The McCormicks tell the local sheriff about Elizabeth, and he begins looking through reports of missing persons to find one that fits her.
Still,
it’s hard to explain Elizabeth’s strange clothing (Ann is sure that Elizabeth
must be rich because her dress is obviously very fancy) or the antique toys
that were found with her (a doll and a music box). When Ann goes to school, Elizabeth stays at
home with her mother, Kathy, and asks her about all the strange things that she’s
been seeing around her, like cars and electric lights. Kathy assumes that Elizabeth is merely
confused and that her memory has been affected by her illness.
By
coincidence, Kathy is a historian, teaching at a nearby university, and has
studied English history. She is aware of
Elizabeth’s family, including her father, Michael the Duke of Umberland. When Elizabeth asks her if she knows what happened
to her mother, who was also ill when she last saw her, Kathy says that she was
still alive in 1605, which means that she must have survived her illness. Kathy quizzes Elizabeth in English history,
and Elizabeth knows the correct answers because they are all current events to
her. Kathy thinks that someone must have
taught Elizabeth history but notices that Elizabeth really seems to believe
everything she says and knows a surprising amount of detail.
Further research into history and Elizabeth’s family tells Elizabeth the years when her parents and other people she cares about will die, which is distressing to her. Ann begins to believe Elizabeth about her life when Elizabeth describes her home to her, and the description matches one in a book. In the same book,there is also a portrait of Elizabeth’s family from 1605. In the portrait, Elizabeth is a little older than she is now, and her mother has had another baby. Elizabeth’s doll and music box are also in the painting. The book also contains an account of the fire that later destroyed the manor house. According to the book, Elizabeth managed to save the lives of her family by alerting them to the fire and also managed to salvage a couple of valuable books.
Now that Ann is convinced that Elizabeth is really from the past, they must find a way to help Elizabeth to return home so that she can save the lives of her family!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
There were a couple of things that I liked about the time travel in this story. One is that it seems that it was fated to happen. Elizabeth is meant to survive her illness and to save the rest of her family. She was only able to do that because she had been to the future and learned about the dangers they would be facing. When she returns to her own time, she doesn’t change the past but makes sure that things turn out the way they were supposed to.
I also found it interesting that Elizabeth’s family has no living descendants in the late 20th century. Her family continued beyond Elizabeth’s time, but the family line apparently ended before the time period of the modern characters in the story, so we don’t have one of those moments that sometimes occurs in time travel stories where the modern characters meet a descendant of the past characters. That can be a fun moment in some stories, but I appreciate the variety.
At one point in the book, Ann makes a reference to the book A Wrinkle in Time, about other children who get “lost in space and time.”
Greta
loves fog and always has, although other people can’t understand it. When she is ten years old, she begins to get
the sense that there is something in the fog that she should find. One day, when she goes looking for a lost cow
from her family’s farm, she sees a house in the fog that isn’t there when the
fog is gone. Apparently, there used to
be a house on that site, but it’s gone now.
Except when there’s fog.
From
then on, Greta loves to walk in the fog.
When she does, she meets people from the past. One day, she meets a woman named Laura Morrill,
who recognizes her as being from the Addington family and says that her name
must be Greta. According to Laura, there’s
always a Greta in every generation of Addingtons and that there’s always a
child in every generation who has a great love of fog. Greta’s ability to use the fog to travel back
in time and see her town as it once was is apparently inherited.
Greta
makes friends with Retha Morill, Laura’s daughter. However, when Mrs. Morrill gives her a piece
of pie to take home, it disappears, making Greta realize that she can’t bring
things from the past to the present.
Retha’s parents seem to realize it, too.
When Retha offers her a little silver egg cup to take home, Mrs. Morrill
suggests that perhaps it would be better for Greta to leave it at their house
and use it when she comes. Greta also
has the feeling that, when the fog starts to lift, she needs to go home, and
Mrs. Morrill agrees.
On another day, Greta and Retha spot an older girl in the woods. Retha seems to know who she is and calls out to her, but she runs from them. They try to catch up to her, but she gets away, and Retha is upset. It turns out that the girl is named Ann, and she was falsely accused of theft. When it was discovered that she hadn’t stolen anything, the townspeople had tried to find her, but she’s been hiding from them ever since, too afraid to come back. At first, people had thought that maybe she had gone to another town to find work, but now that they know that she’s been living alone in the woods, they’re worried about her. The story also upsets Greta because she has heard a local ghost story about a girl who haunts the woods after being falsely accused, and Greta takes that to mean that Ann will die. The Morrills assure her that they will look out for Ann.
Greta
is tempted to talk to Retha about her mysterious time traveling in the fog, but
Retha stops her from talking about it. Retha
says that even her mother doesn’t want to talk about where Greta goes while she’s
not with them, only saying that both men who go to sea and the women who wait for
them on shore “have to learn to be content and at peace shut in by their
horizon.” To Greta, that means that she
should be content with wherever she is while she’s there and with the fog that
allows her to see her friends in the past.
The
more Greta visits the Morrills, the more she gets caught up in the lives and troubles
of the people living in the past. At one
point, Greta and Retha talk about some of the sad things that have happened to
people the Morrills know, and Retha asks Greta if there is sorrow where she
lives. Greta has to admit that there
is. People generally do have their
troubles, no matter when they live.
Retha says that her mother says that living and dying are both natural
things, so there is no use being sad about them, except when the death is an
unnatural one, like in a war. There is
no war going on in Retha’s time, but Greta lives during the time this book was
written, in the middle of World War II.
Greta is aware of the war and says that sometimes people have to fight
whether they want to or not, but Retha doesn’t think so. Greta realizes that she can’t make Retha
understand the circumstances of the world in the future.
However,
as Greta’s twelfth birthday approaches, she has the feeling that things are changing. Her birthday will be the last time that she
can visit her fog friends, but they give her a special present to remember them
by. Greta’s father seems to know what
Greta has been doing in the fog, and he reveals to her, without actually saying
it, that he once did the same thing himself.
He says that when people grow up, they leave the things of childhood
behind, but each of them is able to keep a special birthday gift from the past
as a reminder that some things do last.
The ending of the story implies that, although Greta’s adventures in the fog were real, not purely imaginary, she has to give them up to make room for the new things that will enter her life as she grows up. Her life lies in her present and future, so she can’t keep going back to the past. However, her experiences with her friends in the past are part of what has made her more mature, and they will stay with her forever.
The book is a Newbery Honor Book. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
The idea of magic and magical adventures ending at a certain age, as the person begins to grow up, is a classic idea in children’s literature. Sometimes, in other books, it’s implied that the reason this happens is because the “magic” was all imaginary, and the child in the story grew out of that particular kind of imagining, but that isn’t the case in this story. The explanation in this book for why the magic has to end is simple but makes sense. The characters don’t really analyze the issue too deeply, simply taking it in stride. We never find out why this particular family seems to have this tradition of going back in time in the fog as children, and the characters seem to decide that there is no reason to find out why.
Unlike in some modern books, there doesn’t seem to be any particular mission for Greta (or her father or any other generations before her) to fulfill in her time traveling. Greta is mostly an observer of the events in the past, not really participating in them directly or changing them in any way. She doesn’t even seem to influence the thoughts or attitudes of people in the past much. When she talks about the concept of war with Retha, she doesn’t try to change Retha’s mind about it or tell her about World War II and other future events because she realizes that each of them really belongs to two different times and sets of circumstances, and each of them needs to live in their own time, dealing with their own situations. It is their differing situations which give them their attitudes. The Morrills seem to be aware that Greta comes from the future, but they treat the subject carefully, never directly stating where she is from, just hinting at it. From they way they act, it seems as though they’ve met other members of Greta’s family before, but again, the ties between their two families (if any) are never explained, and none of them seems to want to delve too deeply into the matter. For the most part, they just seem to take the whole situation as being a natural part of life in their families and in the area where they live, something just to be enjoyed and not questioned. In fact, some of their attitudes seem to imply that they fear questioning too deeply, as if that in itself might end the magic too soon.
Although the story leaves the reasons behind the time traveling very open and unresolved (probably, other children in Greta’s family will be doing this in the future, also not really knowing why), it is really a very calm story. Not having a special mission to complete in the past leaves Greta free to simply enjoy the company of the people in the past, observing their lives without the stress of needing to solve their problems for them, and readers can similarly enjoy the ride without worrying that anything really bad will happen. You do end up being interested in what happens to some of the characters, like the woman who is in danger of losing her family’s home, but events unfold in the way Greta knows they will. She’s sad when she knows that certain people are going to die (not the woman whose home was in danger, that works out well) and there is nothing she can do about it, but it all seems to be part of the natural circle of life, something that matures Greta when she realizes it.
One of the fun things that I liked about the book were some of the unusual first names of the characters, like Retha, Eldred (Retha’s father), and Ardis (Mrs. Stanton).
It’s 1914, and Blossom Culp is just starting high school. Although the principal of her old school tells her that this is a chance for her to make a fresh start, it looks like Blossom’s future is going to be very much a continuation of her immediate past. In high school, she’s still a social outcast, looked down on by girls from better-off families, like Letty, the class president. Also, despite her principal’s assertion that Blossom’s previous forays into the occult were imaginary, the product of the mental confusion that accompanies puberty, and that she is bound to grow out of them, Blossom knows that her psychic abilities are a natural gift and will not be ignored.
Blossom begins high school friendless because Alexander Armsworth has been ignoring her lately because of his important new position as class vice-president, his infatuation with Letty, and his friendship with a couple of local hooligans, Bub and Champ. Alexander is looking forward to his role in planning the school’s Halloween Festival, telling Blossom that he’s over their earlier, childish occult escapades and the Halloween pranks he used to pull. Meanwhile, all of the other girls in school are infatuated with their handsome history teacher, Mr. Lacy, and so is the girls’ gym teacher, much to Blossom’s disgust. Blossom thinks that Mr. Lacy is full of himself and denies that she has any such silly crush on Alexander.
Blossom makes an unexpected friend in a girl called Daisy-Rae, a girl from the country who has brought her younger brother into town to attend school and hoped to get an education herself but has been too afraid of the big town to actually attend classes. Daisy-Rae hides in the school during the day and lives alone with her brother at night in the old chicken coop at the abandoned Leverette house. It is through Daisy-Rae that she learns that Alexander and his friends aren’t so above childish pranks as they claim to be. Blossom also discovers that Mr. Lacy has been romancing her old principal. Mr. Lacy isn’t quite what he appears to be and has some unsavory secrets in his past.
Matters come to a head when Alexander (at Letty’s urging) tries to persuade Blossom to dress up and become the fortune teller for the haunted house that the freshmen class is doing for the Halloween Festival. The haunted house is also a fundraiser, and Letty figures that they can get extra money from people if they’re willing to pay to have their fortunes told, and who would be better for the job than Blossom? However, Blossom isn’t one to go out of her way to please others, especially Letty, and it turns out that they’re holding the haunted house in the Old Leverette place. For some reason, that old house makes Blossom’s mother uneasy. She seems to think that it’s haunted, but in an unusual way. Blossom tells Alexander that she will not agree to be their fortune teller until he agrees to check out the house with her before Halloween and find out what’s wrong with it. She figures that, since both of them are psychic, they can learn what’s so unusual.
As Blossom learns, her abilities don’t confine themselves to the past and people who have died but extend to the future and the people who haven’t yet been born. Inside the Old Leverette house, Blossom suddenly finds herself entering the distant future, the 1980s. In the 1980s, the Leverette house is once again lived in, and Blossom meets a boy named Jeremy who is a lonely social outcast, like herself. Jeremy is a computer nerd, living with his divorced mother. He takes Blossom on a tour of their town as it is in Blossom’s future, much larger than it used to be and with many familiar landmarks missing. However, what Blossom sees in the future gives her the inspiration she needs to solve her problems in the past and hope that things will improve. In return, she also proves to Jeremy that he is far from alone and has had a friend for longer than he ever imagined.
The time travel to the 1980s comes off as being a little corny (or so it seemed to me), but the writing quality of the book is excellent. The author has an entertaining turn of phrase, and the book, like others in the series, is humorous and a lot of fun to read.
Besides being a kind of fantasy story, there are some interesting tidbits of history in the book, showing how people lived in the 1910s. Blossom explains about the things she and her classmates did at school, like wearing beanies on their heads to show which year they were (freshmen, future graduating class of 1918). At one point in the story, Blossom takes Daisy-Rae and her brother to their first movie, a silent film with an episode of The Perils of Pauline serial. While Blossom worries about the future, readers can get a glimpse of the past!
As for what Blossom learns about her own future, she avoids finding out too much because she’d rather not know the details. However, there are implications that she and Alexander may eventually marry and live in his family’s old house.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, 1943, 1947.
This book is actually two books in one. The title Bed-Knob and Broomstick is the one used for editions that include both the first book, The Magic Bed-Knob, and the sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks. Together, these two books were the basis for the Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks, although the plot of the movie is considerably different from the two books. Because the movie is based on both of the books at once and because I read the combined edition, I’ll explain the plots of both of the books in one post.
There are two major differences between the movie and books that change many other things about the plot. The first one is that there is no mention of World War II in the books, even though the books were written during that time. Miss Price was not studying magic to help the war effort, and the children were only in the countryside for vacation, not because they were evacuated there. Also, in the books, Emelius Jones (Emelius Brown in the movie) was a man they met when they traveled through time, not a man living in London during their own time. He was not involved in Miss Price learning magic, although the two of them do end up together in the end.
The Magic Bed-Knob
At the beginning of the first book, the three Wilson children – Carey (who is described as being “about your age”), Charles (“a little younger”), and Paul (six years old) – are spending the summer with their Aunt Beatrice in Bedfordshire. There is never any mention of the children’s father in the books. Probably, their father is dead, although he might have left the family and went to live elsewhere or may be fighting overseas, although there is no mention of that in the book, making me think that it is probably not the case. The children apparently live with only their mother in London, and because she works, she always needs to find somewhere for them to stay during the summer, when they’re out of school. (This is a major plot point in both of the books. In the Disney movie, the three children are orphans who have no memory of their birth parents, and their guardian was killed in a bombing shortly before they were evacuated to the countryside. You only get their full backstory if you see the anniversary edition of the movie that includes the deleted scenes.) While the children stay with Aunt Beatrice, they enjoy playing in the countryside, and one day, they happen to meet Miss Price, who they find with an injured ankle.
Miss Price is a respectable spinster from the village who gives piano lessons and is often seen riding around on her bicycle. When they find her hurt, Carey says that they should get a doctor for her, but Miss Price insists that she doesn’t want one. Instead, she just asks the children to help her get home. As she starts to lean on Carey and Charles, Paul picks up a broom nearby. The older children thought it was just an old garden broom, but Paul calmly says that it belongs to Miss Price because it’s what she rides around on. The others are shocked, but Paul simply says that that he’s seen her improve in her flying, so Miss Price knows that he’s seen her riding her broom more than once. Miss Price is worried that everyone in the village will know now that she’s a witch, but Paul hadn’t even told his brother and sister what he’d seen.
The children help Miss Price get home, and they allow their aunt to think that Miss Price simply fell off of her bicycle. When the children are able to speak to Miss Price privately, they ask her directly if she’s a witch, and she admits that she’s studying to be one. She says that she’s had some talent for magic since she was young, but she never really had the time to develop it. The children are convinced that, while Miss Price might be a witch, she’s not a wicked one, and she says that’s true, that she started too late in life to be that way and that wickedness doesn’t come naturally to her. However, she’s still worried that the children might tell people about her magic.
Carey is the one who suggests that Miss Price give them a magical object as part of their pledge of secrecy (unlike in the movie, where it was Charlie’s idea), with the idea that, if they ever told anyone that she’s a witch, the magic would stop. Charles suggests that Miss Price could give them a magic ring that would summon a slave to do their bidding, but she says that she couldn’t manage that and that she has a better idea. Miss Price asks the children if they have anything on them they can twist, like a ring or a bracelet. The only thing they have is a bed-knob that Paul twisted off the end of his bed (basically, because he discovered that he could).
Miss Price says that the bed-knob will do nicely, and she casts a spell on it that will allow the children to travel to the destination of their choice when they put it back on the bed and give it a twist. If they turn it in one direction, they can travel in the present time, but turning it the other way can send them to the past. Also, because Paul was the one who had the bed-knob, he’s the only one who can make it work. Miss Price isn’t troubled by Paul’s young age because she thinks that it’s best to learn magic young, although she warns the children to be careful.
Because it’s Paul’s bed-knob, Carey and Charles give him first choice of where to go, but they think the places he wants to go sound mundane. He wants to either see a museum exhibit that the others saw without him once or to go home and see their mother in London. Carey and Charles try to persuade him to go someplace more exciting, but Paul insists that he wants to go home.
The bed whisks the children home to London, but when they get there, their mother isn’t home. Apparently, their mother has gone away for the weekend herself, and the children find themselves alone on their bed, in front of their house, on a foggy night. A policeman bumps into them, and when he demands to know who they are and where the bed came from, he doesn’t think it’s funny when they say, “Bedfordshire.” He takes them to the police station to spend the rest of the night. Fortunately, they find a way to get back to the bed and use the spell to return to their aunt’s house before they’re missed in the morning. It’s not quite the adventure that the children had been hoping for when they started out, but it’s just the beginning of their amazing summer!
However, magic turns out to be more dangerous than they thought. Their next adventure takes them to an island with cannibals (yeah, one of those scenes, sigh – I think that the island of talking animals in the movie was more fun), and they narrowly escape after Miss Price has a duel of magic with a witch doctor. Their magical adventures create problems that the children can’t explain to their aunt without giving away Miss Price’s secret. Eventually, their messes and wild stories cause their aunt to send them home to their mother. Miss Price considers that magic might cause more problems than it solves and tells the children that she’s thinking of giving it up for awhile. However, Paul keeps the bed-knob in the hopes that their adventures aren’t done yet.
Bonfires and Broomsticks
In Bonfires and Broomsticks, two years have passed since the children’s first adventures, and Aunt Beatrice has died. Carey and Charles, worried that Paul would talk too much about their magical adventures, tried to convince Paul that it was all just a dream, although they weren’t very successful.
Then, the children see an advertisement in the newspaper that Miss Price is offering to board a couple of schoolchildren in her house for the summer for a fee. The children’s mother works, and she always has to find somewhere for the children to spend the summer, when they’re not in school. They still have the bed-knob, so they tell their mother that they want to visit Miss Price, hoping they can have more adventures with her. At first, their mother doesn’t understand why they would want to visit Miss Price so badly, but since she seems like a nice, respectable woman and an old friend of Aunt Beatrice’s, she agrees.
Miss Price is happy to have the children stay for the summer, but they are disappointed when they learn that she was really serious about giving up magic. The children discover that Miss Price bought the old bed that they had used for their previous adventures at the estate sale after their aunt’s death. She’s been sleeping on it in her own room. They want to try the bed-knob on the bed, but Miss Price takes it from them. She tries to make their summer vacation a normal vacation with normal activities, like picnics and croquet.
But, even Miss Price can’t resist the opportunity to try the bed-knob one last time. One morning, Carey and Charles discover that Paul and Miss Price have traveled somewhere on the bed without them. When the two of them confront Paul about it, he says that they only went to a nearby town, just to see if the spell on the knob still worked. Carey and Charles understand, but Carey thinks that if they got to use the bed once more, she and Charles should have one more turn. She especially wants to try going into the past, which was something they hadn’t had a chance to try last time. Miss Price is reluctant, but finally agrees after Carey pressures her about it.
The children travel to London of 1666 (ending up there accidentally, when they were aiming for the Elizabethan era), where a man named Emelius Jones has been living as a necromancer. When he was young, he studied magic under a mentor who, as he was dying, finally told him that everything he learned was fakery. It was all an act that he used to get money from gullible people, although it paid very well. The old man leaves Emelius his business, but Emelius is always nervous, worrying both because someone might discover that it’s all a fake and because others might believe that it’s real and that he should be hung as a witch. The only reason why he stays with it is because he has no other business to follow.
The children meet Emelius after ending up lost and stopping at his house for directions. The children can see how nervous and unhappy Emelius is, and they ask him about himself, discovering that his home town is actually close to where they’re staying with Miss Price. They reveal to him that they are from the future and invite him to come home with them for a visit.
Miss Price isn’t happy to see that they’ve brought someone back from the past with them, but she ends up liking Emelius. Before sending him home, they learn that Emelius’s aunt, who lived near to where Miss Price now lives, died the same day that Emelius left London in the past, which is coincidentally shortly before the great fire that destroyed a good part of the city. They know that Emelius’s London lodgings will likely be destroyed in the fire as well, but at least he can move into the house that he will inherit from his aunt.
However, after they send him back to his own time, the children and Miss Price learn that Emelius never made it to his aunt’s house because he was executed for practicing witchcraft. Unable to leave poor Emelius to such a terrible fate, they come up with a plan to rescue him.
The combined book edition is available online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Changing Emelius’s past also changes Miss Price’s future. Neither of them has ever married, and both of them have been lonely, and they come to the conclusion that the two of them were meant to be together. In deciding that they will live their lives together on Emelius’s aunt’s farm in the past, they put an end to the magical traveling bed. Only Paul can make the magic bed-knob work, and once he sends them into the past (not going with them), they can never return. But, Carey has one final vision of the two of them, being happy together, so she knows that they will be alright.
Overall, I preferred the Disney movie to the original books. I think the war-based plot was better than the children’s random travels to cannibal-filled islands (I never liked those tropes in children’s stories anyway) and other places. At one point in the books, Carey did speculate about the use of magic in war, but she rejected the idea because the notion of someone with the ability to conjure a dragon that could breathe mustard gas or who could turn whole armies into mice was just too horrible. The spell that Miss Price used against the Nazis in the movie was part of their plan to rescue Emelius in the second book, but I think the movie’s ending was much more exciting.
About a year after the events in the previous book in the series, Roger and Ann are excited when their father writes a play and announces that it will be performed in England. Unfortunately, their parents aren’t planning to take the children to England with them because the trip there will be just business, focusing on getting the play together. If the play is a success, they plan to send for the children so they can do some sightseeing in England, but until then, the children will need to stay somewhere else during summer vacation. Their mother, Martha, calls her sister Katharine to see if the children can come visit their cousins, but it turns out the Katharine is also looking for a place where Eliza and Jack can spend the summer. By coincidence, Katharine and her husband are also planning a business trip to Europe.
The adults talk it over and end up arranging for all four children to stay with Katharine’s husband’s great aunt, Mrs. Whiton, who lives in a house by the sea, not far from Boston. The children don’t find this prospect very exciting. Then the adults tell them that Mrs. Whiton writes children’s books, Eliza is sure that she’ll be trying to analyze them for inspiration for her stories, but Mrs. Whiton turns out to be better than they thought. She is unsentimental, something that Eliza appreciates, and her house is very nice. There is a pretty garden there, and a staircase that leads right down to the beach.
One day, when Mrs. Whiton sends them out to play in the garden, they find an old sundial that has a motto written on it: “Anything Can Happen When You’ve All the Time in the World!” The children have had experience with magic before, so they begin to suspect that this garden isn’t quite what it appears . . . and they’re right. A strange, toad-like creature call the Natterjack introduces himself to the children and tells them that the thyme garden, where there are many varieties of thyme growing, is also a time garden. He explains that he and his family have helped this garden grow since his grandfather’s grandfather was brought there from England along with a shipment of primroses and that they’ve put all of their magic into the garden and its plants. If the children would like to visit another time, all they have to do is to pluck a sprig of thyme and smell it.
Jack, who has decided that he’s too old for magic and is now only interested in girls, refuses to try it at first, denying the existence of magic, even in spite of the talking toad. The other children try it and find themselves at the same house during the time of the American Revolution. Everyone who sees them seems to think that they are the Whiton children of that time, and they end up participating in a ride very much like Paul Revere’s, riding through the countryside to alert people that the British are coming. At first, their ride is thrilling and successful, but if you know the other books in this series, you can guess that things are going to go wrong at some point.
When the kids reach a tavern, they try to tell the drunken men inside that the British will be at Lexington soon, and they say that they don’t care. As far as they’re concerned, if the British are going to Lexington, let the guys in Lexington deal with it. The children are offended that they don’t want to help and try to appeal to their patriotism and fellowship with other Americans. It turns out that they don’t have much patriotism (the United States isn’t a separate country yet, so there is that) or feelings of fellowship because their plan for if the British are defeated is basically “every man for himself.” (I understand this scene so much more now as an adult than I did when I read this as a kid. I think I’ve met their descendants.) The children are angered at this mercenary attitude, and Ann accuses them of being pro-British. One of them insists that they’re not because, “We ain’t pro-anything.” (Yep, this is familiar. Some people just want to be contrary until there’s something in it for them to gain.)
It gets worse when the anti-British talk causes the Natterjack, in a surge of British patriotism, to cry, “Rule, Britannia!” The drunks in the tavern then decide that the kids were trying to deceive them about the British coming because they’re actually on the side of the British, trying to distract them from the British army’s real plans. When they discover that the voice actually came from a talking toad, they declare that it’s witchcraft and decide to throw the children into the pond to see if they will float (an old test in witchcraft trials).
In a bizarre twist, they are saved by a band of attacking American Indians. (Native Americans ex Machina?) There’s no real reason for a tribe of American Indians to be attacking at this particular moment, and the kids in the story seem to realize that. This incident, like many others in this series, is partly based on other books in classic children’s literature, especially the works of E. Nesbit, the author’s favorite children’s author. A similar incident occurs to the children in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, although under different circumstances. The author of this story frequently pokes fun at tropes of classic children’s literature in his books and makes pop culture references from the 1950s, so the more old books you’re familiar with, the more you see the jokes, although I admit that, even knowing the background, this scene still bothers me. In the grand tradition of cheesy 1950s westerns, there’s a vague description of the carnage of the attack with the requisite scalping and tomahawking (yes, they use it as verb). Ann is upset about the attack and covers her eyes, although Roger says that he doesn’t think that this attack could really have occurred in real life because they would have heard about it if it were a real, historical event. Ann worries that they somehow caused it by messing with history. When the tribe is done tomahawking their attackers, the children are worried that they’ll be next, but the Natterjack tells the children that they can escape by smelling the thyme again.
Before we move on, I should point out here that, in different books in this series, it’s never entirely clear how much of the children’s adventures occur in the real world or in some kind of magical, alternate reality or maybe in their own minds, and this is actually intentional. The idea of sniffing a magical herb and being transported through time sounds kind of trippy. The whole “savage painted Indians” (their words, not mine) trope was a staple of old western shows, the kind that kids growing in the 1950s might have watched because that genre was popular, particularly in the late 1950s, when the book was published, so the children’s experiences may be partly patterned after what a 1950s kid might have imagined after watching those shows. (Sort of like the Arabian fantasies that their mothers had in previous books in the series, probably inspired by The Sheik.) So, this incident in the book is partly a take-off on similar ones in other children’s books, but it might also be the author’s commentary on the types of shows that were popular and children’s expectations. Perhaps some of the implication is that the children’s expectations, based on things they’ve read or seen on tv are what caused this weird, otherwise inexplicable attack in the first place. (It’s like on tv, kiddos, and now you can see it in full color! You expected it, so you got it. Still think this stuff is fun?) Part of the problem with this scene for me is that it’s difficult to tell exactly how the author means it. I can guess a little, given the author’s taste for making literary references and parodying tropes of children’s stories, but even as a parody, it’s uncomfortable by modern standards and still makes very little sense why it’s even happening at all. This scene is just plain needless and cringe-worthy in my opinion, but you sometimes run into things like that with older children’s books. It’s some consolation that this is the worst scene in the entire book, so it’s good to get it out of the way early.
Before we return to the main plot again, I’d also like to say that the children themselves don’t seem to understand exactly how the magic works (like other children in this series) or whether what happened to them was completely real or not. They debate about it periodically and wonder about the children that they replaced on this adventure (and on later ones as well). They never quite know if those children went somewhere else while they took their place or if both sets of children were just living out the same adventure at the same time, just seeing it in slightly different ways. These time travel questions are fun to ponder, but are never really explained, just theorized.
When the children get back to their own time from the Revolutionary War period, the Natterjack apologizes for getting them into trouble and asks them to put the plant sprig back in the ground, where it grows again (no “wasting thyme”, ha, ha). He also further explains that the name of the particular variety of thyme they pick in the garden is important because it has some bearing on where in time they will go. The thyme they had chosen was “wild thyme”, and they had to admit that their time was pretty wild. Ann borrows a gardening catalog from Mrs. Whiton’s old gardener and begins studying the different varieties of thyme. When they ask the Natterjack about the massacre at the tavern, he tells them that the mistakes they make or bad consequences of their interference will be erased by the good deeds they do, so their timely warnings about the British coming will have an effect, but that massacre has been erased from history. (Too bad it’s still in the book. There’s still no real reason for it to be there, dang western trope.) Good deeds performed during their adventures will earn them more adventures, so they have to remember to do some good in every time they visit.
So, while Jack spends most of his time getting to know the local teenage girls and doing normal teenage things and trying to ignore his sister and cousins when they talk about magic, the others get to spend their summer having magical time adventures. The next variety of thyme they pick is “splendid thyme.” Once again, they are taken back in the history of the house, where they are again mistaken for past Whiton children. The time period is around the Civil War, and the house is being used as a station on the Underground Railroad. The children help some escaping slaves to flee to Canada. (Their sentiments are strongly anti-slavery, which is a relief after that massacre scene. The escaping slaves aren’t portrayed too badly, although mostly, they’re in hiding during the adventure and are oddly unquestioning of how the kids managed to use magic to get them to Canada so fast, just embarrassingly grateful for it.)
After that, Eliza wants to know if they’re restricted to historical adventures only or if they can visit times that are fictional as well, referencing their adventures with Ivanhoe in the previous book. It turns out that the time garden is very accommodating, and they are able to go back in fictional time to visit the characters in Little Women (which, fortunately, took place not far from where they are staying), especially since Louisa May Alcott based the characters on herself and her sisters, giving the book a sense of semi-reality. Jack, who has been denying the magic all along, comes with them on this adventure, and spends all of his time fawning over the teenage Meg and Jo. The children help to reform an ungrateful family that has been taking advantage of the girls’ generosity (and, as Jo says, reforming “is punishment enough”).
Sharing in this adventure with the other children is enough to get Jack to admit that they’re having adventures, although he still refuses to look at it as being magic, preferring more scientific terms. At one point, he describes a theory of time as looking down on the world from an airplane. From high above, you can see many different places at once, but it would take a person on the ground a long time to get from one place to another. Similarly, Jack thinks that everything in history is happening all at once, but it just takes people a long time to get from one event to another because of their vantage point.
Then, the children get the idea to go visit their mothers in England. However, when they use Common Thyme with their wish, they end up seeing their mothers in the past, not the present. This is the point in the story where it crosses over with their mothers’ magical adventures as children in Magic By the Lake.
Eliza then gets the idea of using thyme seeds to travel through time instead of using a full-grown plant. She and Jack end up traveling to England. However, they end up in the wrong period of history, and because the magical rules are broken, everyone sees them as the modern children they really are and not as people from the appropriate time period. When Eliza manages to offend Queen Elizabeth I and ends up in the Tower of London, they need the help of Ann, Roger, and the Natterjack to straighten things out!
I think my favorite part of the story is really the thyme/time garden itself. Not only is it a fun pun, but I thought that it was clever how the titles of particular varieties of thyme relate to the times and places where the children end up. Different varieties of thyme plants really do have some incredible names in real life. At the end of the book, after the children go to England to join their parents because the play was successful, the Natterjack waits in the garden for the next set of children who will go on adventures, and after looking up other varieties of thyme that the book never mentioned, the possibilities for new adventures are tantalizing: Leprechaun Thyme (for adventures with leprechauns), Elfin Thyme (either for adventures with elves or maybe becoming smaller?), and Woolly Thyme (Want to go see a woolly mammoth? On the other hand, maybe it just goes to a sheep farm. This magic stuff never works like you think it will).
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
The Bassumtyte Treasure by Jane Louise Curry, 1978.
When young Tommy Bassumtyte’s parents died, he went to live with his grandfather. However, his grandfather is now dead, and he is living with his 92-year-old great-aunt, who is in a wheelchair, and her 72-year-old daughter, who has recently had her driver’s license revoked due to her poor eyesight. Although the pair of them have taken good care of Tommy, neighbors have become concerned that they will not be able to do so for much longer because of their age and failing health. Rather than see Tommy sent to a foster home, they decide that he must go to the man who Tommy learns should really be his legal guardian, a distant cousin also named Thomas who lives in the family’s ancestral home, Boxleton House, in England.
The elder Thomas Bassumtyte, who should have taken Tommy when his grandfather passed away, has also since died, but his son, also named Thomas, agrees to take him. Tommy is quickly shipped off to England before there can be a custody hearing in the United States about him because the relatives fear that some official might try to prevent Tommy from being sent out of the country. Tommy is eager to go because he remembers fantastic stories that his grandfather told him about Boxleton House. The current Thomas Bassumtyte also lives there, although the place has become rather run-down, and he fears that he will not be able to keep the place much longer. Thomas was a mountain climber, but he was injured in a fall and hasn’t been able to work much since. He tells Tommy that the two of them might have to move when he is fully recovered and can do more work for the Foreign Office, but Tommy loves Boxleton House from the first moment he sees it and wants to stay.
According to the lore of Boxleton House, a distant ancestor of theirs hid a treasure there, but no one has been able to find it. If young Tommy and Thomas can find it, it would solve many of their problems, and they would be able to keep the house and restore it. All young Tommy has is the mysterious rhyme that his grandfather told him and the strange medallion that his great-grandfather brought with him when he went to the United States in the late 1800s. Thomas tells him that the treasure was supposedly hidden by a distant ancestor of theirs who was fond of riddles, called Old Thomas.
The Bassumtytes were secretly Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I. Old Thomas was alive then and had a son called Tall Thomas. Tall Thomas traveled frequently and was mysterious about the places he went. One night, he returned to Boxleton House with a young baby, who he said was his son. He had married in secret, and his young wife had died shortly after giving birth. Tall Thomas also brought her body back to Boxleton for burial. However, that wasn’t Tall Thomas’s only secret. Although he remarried, giving his son a stepmother, and lived on for a number of years, he was eventually executed for smuggling messages for the captive Catholic queen, Mary, Queen of Scots. The family was stripped of its noble title and only barely managed to hang onto their house and land. If there was a treasure hidden during this time, it was probably something that the Bassumtytes were afraid would be confiscated by the queen’s soldiers as punishment for the family’s disloyalty or something that Mary had given to Tall Thomas to hide for her.
As Thomas tells Tommy more about the house and the family’s history, he points out Tommy’s uncanny resemblance to Small Thomas, Tall Thomas’s son, as shown in an old painting. Tommy feels a strange connection to Small Thomas, and begins seeing and hearing strange things. An older woman comforts him in the middle of the night, having him recite the same rhyme that his grandfather taught him. A small painting later reveals that this woman was Small Thomas’s grandmother. She appears to Tommy other times, giving him a glimpse back in time and clues to solve the puzzles of Boxleton House.
It is only when Thomas accepts the advice of a family friend who works for a museum that they come to understand the full significance of their family’s heirlooms and the hidden treasure. The treasure may not be quite what the Bassumtytes have always believed it was, but then, the Bassumtytes themselves aren’t quite who they always thought they were, either.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
The Haunting at Cliff House by Karleen Bradford, 1985.
This is a relatively short chapter book, but suspenseful, thoughtful, and well-written.
When her father inherits an old house in Wales from a distant relative, Alison, a young teenager, finds out that he plans for the two of them to spend the summer there. Alison’s father is a university professor and is writing a book, and he thinks that the house in Wales sounds like a great place for him to get some writing done while he and Alison have a look at his new inheritance. Alison isn’t enthusiastic about the trip, but she and her father are very close, especially because she lost her mother at a very young age. Besides, the only place she could stay in Canada would be with her grandmother, and her grandmother didn’t seem enthusiastic about having her.
From the moment they arrive at the old house, called Pen-y-Craig or Cliff House by the locals, Alison has a bad feeling about it. It stands on a lonely cliff by a small town. The carved dragon over the door gives her the creeps, and there is something disturbing about a particular room in the house. Sometimes, she can almost hear a voice calling out to her, and she has visions of another girl, about her age. At first, she tries to tell herself that it’s all her imagination, but it soon becomes obvious that it’s not.
Some of the local people know that the house has an unhappy history, and Alison eventually learns that the great-aunt that her father inherited it from even refused to live there during her last years because it disturbed her too much. A little more examination of the room that had disturbed her helps Alison discover the reason why. After having a vision of a young girl hiding something behind a brick in the fireplace of one of the bedrooms, Alison searches the spot and finds a diary dating from 1810, written by a girl named Bronwen, who was the same age as Alison. Like Alison, Bronwen was brought to the house by her widowed father and was unhappy about it, but those aren’t the only parallels between Bronwen’s life and Alison’s.
Alison becomes uncomfortable with her father’s new friendship with a Welsh neighbor, Meiriona. Alison likes Meiriona’s younger brother, Gareth, but when it looks like her father’s friendship with Meiriona is turning into romance, Alison becomes jealous and fears changes in her close relationship with her father, a situation that mirrors Bronwen’s life when her father falls in love with her governess, Catrin. Although Meiriona tries to be nice to Alison, Alison can’t bring herself to like her, and she argues with her father about it.
The only person who seems to understand her feelings at all is Gareth, and Alison confides her worries in him, both about Meiriona and about Bronwen, whose spirit keeps calling out to Alison to help her, although Alison doesn’t know how. She struggles to read through the diary, whose pages are not all legible anymore because they’re damaged with age, to learn what happened to Bronwen and what Bronwen wants her to do now. Gareth tries to reassure Alison that her father’s relationship with Meiriona will not be as bad as Alison thinks. He thinks that the relationship would be good for both Alison’s father and Meiriona because they are both lonely, and he doesn’t think that Alison should worry about losing her father because he’s not worried about losing his sister, even if she goes to Canada to study and spend more time with Alison’s father. At first, Alison isn’t comforted by these reassurances. However, Gareth agrees that the matter of the ghost is serious, and he can feel her presence as well. Gareth warns Alison to be cautious about the ghost but to try to help if she can and to call out to him if she’s ever in danger. Alison would really rather just go home to Canada, run away from her father and Meiriona, and forget the whole thing about Bronwen, but history seems to be repeating itself, and Bronwen’s voice calls out to her insistently for help that only Alison can give.
It’s a bit of a spoiler, telling you this, but although Alison at first thinks that the diary ends with Bronwen killing herself in despair, thinking that her father only loved Catrin and not her and that there was nothing left for her to live for, the truth is that Bronwen’s suicide attempt didn’t succeed and that she made another mistake that she wants Alison to help her to change. Bronwen attempted to kill herself by going to a cave by the sea during a terrible storm, planning to allow herself to drown, but when the water started rising, she became too frightened and decided to leave by a secret entrance to the cave. Not knowing that Bronwen was safe, Catrin attempted to save her and drowned in the cave herself. As Bronwen was climbing to safety, she heard Catrin calling for her but was too frightened of the storm and angry at Catrin to go back for her. Although Bronwen lived on after the incident, she could never get rid of her guilt at Catrin’s death, realizing that, even in the middle of her resentment toward Catrin, Catrin loved her more than she knew, even to the point of giving up her own life while attempting to save hers.
Now, the anniversary of Catrin’s death is approaching, and so is a storm very much like the one that killed her. At the top of the cliff by the cave, Alison finds her time merging with Bronwen’s, and she will only have one chance to help Bronwen make the right decision the second time around. Helping Bronwen to prevent the worst mistake of her life and to make a better choice also helps Alison to reconsider her own choices and future. Just as Bronwen misjudged Catrin, Alison may have also misjudged Meiriona. Instead of losing her father or being forced to accept a poor substitute for her mother, Alison may be gaining a kind of sister who will love her more than she realizes.
The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp by Richard Peck, 1983.
Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, 1943, 1947.
The Bassumtyte Treasure by Jane Louise Curry, 1978.
The Haunting at Cliff House by Karleen Bradford, 1985.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 