Lucy M Boston:
The Children of Green Knowe
Illustrated by Peter Boston
Puffin Books 1975 (1954)
It’s the Christmas holidays and a young pre-teen called Tolly has gone from his boarding school to spend a few weeks at his great-grandmother’s mansion called, mysteriously, Green Noah. Appropriately the countryside is in flood from winter rains, leaving the house like the Ark perched on Mount Ararat. But from the first Tolly will find this the most magical of visits, as does a first-time reader such as myself.
Why does this children’s novel, the first in a series, evoke such admiration and loyalty from its fans? I suspect it’s something to do with the author who, like the aged relative in the tale, is able to invoke the wondering mindset of the young, to evoke the no-man’s-land between fantasy and reality that sensitive youngsters inhabit, and to convey all that to the reader.
That fluid boundary has something to do with the sense of drifting through time that The Children of Green Knowe sets out to create, now intensified by the nostalgia — real or imagined — the reader may feel for a way of life long gone, one which existed in the postwar years but, as with all past eras, is now like a foreign country.
Calmgrove 