A Cinderella in Brazil

Teatro Amazonas, Manaus, Brazil

Journey to the River Sea
by Eva Ibbotson.
Macmillan Children’s Books 2002 (2001).

Born in Vienna in 2025, Eva Ibbotson had to move to England in 1935 when Hitler came to power. That experience — of being uprooted — was drawn on directly for novels like The Morning Gift (about a girl from a secular Jewish family escaping Nazi Germany) and indirectly, I suspect, for Maia, the young protagonist of Journey to the River Sea.

Who has not imagined what life might be like if one was an orphan forced from their familiar environment? Ibbotson experienced the displacement while the fictional Maia is a genuine orphan — not impecunious, it is true — who at the beginning of the 20th century has to travel away from her boarding school to live with distant relatives.

On the banks of the Amazon.

#WitchWeek2021 Day 6: Unhinged Fun

Cover illustration by John Verney

Jean, our final guest for this year’s Witch Week, draws our attention to a neglected children’s novel where treason and plot are the main drivers of the narrative, a great instalment for Bonfire Night

John Verney’s Friday’s Tunnel
by Jean Ping

John Verney’s stories are more like Tintin adventures than anything else I have ever read, short of actual Tintin adventures. I have read four, all centered on the Callendar family of Sussex, and they are all stuffed with fantastical schemes, suspicious characters, and strange coincidences. Friday’s Tunnel is the first, published in 1959.

February Callendar, aged 13, is the second of the many Callendar children, and she is the narrator. Summer holidays have only barely begun — Friday, the oldest, can’t wait to continue his ongoing project of digging a tunnel in the hill at the back of the garden, and February cares only for riding her Shetland pony — but their father spoils the fun by announcing that he has to go off to the Mediterranean right away.

He’s a newspaper journalist and an authority on the tiny island of Capria, and the news says that there’s a coup underway; but he’s sure that there isn’t, and that he’s needed to save the situation before the Americans and the Russians each swoop in to grab the newly-discovered, and very valuable and mysterious, mineral — caprium. There is quite a lot of treason and plot going on, but on the part of whom?

Outsiders and Samaritans

A passenger liner The Samaritan features in Jon Walter’s novel Close to the Wind (photo shows SS Normandie, 1932-46)

Jon Walter: Close to the Wind
David Fickling Books 2015 (2014)

Dominating this book — on its cover and in the text — is an ocean liner. The first part narrates the hopes and fears attending her boarding, the second part narrates the trip and the third the aftermath. As a metaphor for refugees in transit it has taken on added resonance these days, what with the crises over migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa, the Channel Tunnel from France and through Turkey into Europe from Syria (and we mustn’t ignore other international situations, such as the boat people struggling to get to Australia).

In truth of course the situation with regard to refugees is that — as with the poor in the Gospel accounts — they are always with us: to humankind’s perpetual shame there will always be migrants (whether branded as economic or illegal) as also asylum seekers fleeing persecution or war in hopes of a safe haven.

The refugees in this story are fleeing a volatile situation in an unnamed country, perhaps in Eastern Europe or the Balkans (maybe somewhere like Albania), at an unspecified period but in relatively recent times (perhaps the 1990s). The narration largely focuses on Malik Kusak (with his mix of Arab and Polish names) and, for a while, his grandfather (whom he calls Papa, perhaps because that’s what Malik’s mother called him). They have fled from home to a sea port; here they are hoping to meet up with Malik’s mother and travel to safety on board the last humanitarian ship to leave the country, fittingly called The Samaritan. But as is the way of things — especially during conflicts — not all goes according to plan, and Malik finds he is sailing dangerously close to the wind even before he sets foot on deck.

Of chivalry and shysters

Landing craft LCT

Hammond Innes: Dead and Alive
Fontana 1990 (1946)

With a title doubtless designed to recall those wanted posters from the wild west of America, Innes’ novel is about an equally lawless region, Italy in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. And yet it opens, not in the dry, fly-ridden south of that Mediterranean peninsula but on the cold, wet North Cornish coast.

Intriguingly, the star turn opening the show is a wreck. Specifically a landing craft, an LCT Mark 4, stranded on Boscastle beach not far from King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel. And it will lead to a quest in which narrator David Cunningham will play the chivalrous knight seeking a damsel in distress.

But not before he, his business partner and his crew of two have black marketeers, gun runners, resurgent fascists, gangsters, a forger and a rapist to cope with, and a ruined infrastructure to negotiate.

A book inside me

Inverted Commas 7: Call to Adventure

I opened a book and in I strode
Now nobody can find me.
I’ve left my chair, my house, my road,
My town and my world behind me.

Julia Donaldson’s 2004 poem ‘I Opened a Book’ — now a common meme on a social media site near you — is one that must appeal to bibliophiles everywhere. True booklovers well know that particular magic that comes from not only having hold of a book but of turning the door-like front cover and immersing oneself in the words (and maybe also the images) on each page.

Joining dots

Siobhan Dowd: The London Eye Mystery
Introduction by Robin Stevens
Penguin 2016 (2007)

Here’s a wonderful variation on the locked-room mystery: how can a boy who is seen to enter a pod on the famous London Eye wheel somehow disappear when the pod docks again half an hour later? Salim’s cousins, Ted and Kat, are left baffled, as are his estranged parents and Ted and Kat’s parents, not to mention the police. But by coming up with hypotheses for that disappearance and evaluating them, and by some clever underhand sleuthing, Ted and Kat slowly inch towards a solution; the worry is that, as time goes on, finding Salim will come too late to save him.

On the surface this sounds like a run-of-the-mill adventure story where children prove more than the equals of the police in solving a mystery. But The London Eye Mystery is not your average juvenile crime novel: there is a grounding in reality, in the hopes and fears of family life, in the recklessness that sometimes typifies adolescence, and in aspects of the mental processes someone on the autism spectrum may go through.

Hispaniola ahoy

Map of Treasure Island, as first published

R L Stevenson: Treasure Island
Facsimile edition Fabbri Publishing 1990 (1883)

There and back again:
pirates, gold and adventure!
The sea-cook’s the star.

Revisiting a classic first encountered half a century ago is like going back to a place first known in childhood: there are mixed hopes and fears, expectations and unknowns. Will it be as you remembered? Will you be disappointed? Above all, will you like it as much?

Treasure Island (and Treasure Island, the place) lived up to those memories and, with hindsight and experience and maturity, was even richer and more (there, I’ve said it) awesome. I was awed by Stevenson’s easy command of words (he was only just 30 when he began the novel) and his ability to re-imagine a world that existed 120 years before the 1880s, when the novel that sealed his reputation was published. And I was filled with real wonder that it came across exactly as I recalled: the language, the descriptions, the personalities; and the whole was made so much more vivid by a closer reading of the sections that I had passed over in a more desultory fashion: the action around the stockade and the passage of the Hispaniola around the island.

A fine weird imagination

The parts of the world (vertical stripes) still ‘unexplored’ by Western nations around 1881

King Solomon’s Mines by H Rider Haggard.
Reader’s Digest Association, 1996 (1885).

Haggard wrote this as a reaction to Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883); he believed he could write a more exciting novel, leading him in King Solomon’s Mines to produce an action-filled first-person narrative that sold sensationally well on its eventual publication in 1885.

In some ways the quest plot is similar — a group of adventurers sets out, map in hand, to a previously unknown destination, surviving natural dangers, privations, battles and treachery along the way — but where Stevenson’s narrative is epistolary, deliberately archaic (it was set a hundred years before the author’s time) and occasionally backtracked in time Haggard’s storyline is contemporary, follows Time’s arrow, and is mostly told in breathless prose.

It set the tone for the numerous Boy’s Own stories that were to follow in its wake. As with Treasure Island the author tries hard to create verisimilitude by seemingly accurate details.

Secrets galore

Directions for the Secret Way

Enid Blyton Five Go Adventuring Again
Illustrated by Eileen A Soper
Hodder Children’s Books 1997 (1943)

The second in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, Five Go Adventuring Again as before features siblings Julian (12), Dick (11) and Anne (10), together with their eleven-year-old cousin Georgina– hereinafter George — and her dog Timothy (also variously referred to as Tim, Timmy and a ‘peculiar-looking’ and ‘terrible mongrel’). Published the year after Five on a Treasure Island but set during the Christmas holidays of the same year, this outing for the quintet also involves intrepid youngsters, unbelieving grown-ups and a few dastardly villains.

Circumstances dictate that the trio again spend time at Kirrin Cottage by the sea where, not unexpectedly, trouble finds them. In 1943 Britain was still at war, though you’ll find no reference to the conflict bar the fact that a secret formula is close to being stolen by enemies of the state.

Slight but entertaining

The Frog Report
by Benjamin Lee.
Puffin Books, 1978 (1974).

Jonathan Jessingford is the least regarded in his family: the youngest, and short-sighted to boot, he is either tolerated or patronised by his older siblings — sister Jenny and brother Daniel — by his parents Frank and Ada and by his teachers, especially Mr Grindley. But the last shall be first, as the saying goes; and Jonathan proves his mettle when called upon.

This is the early 70s when anxiety about external threats were ever in the air — Cold War spies, terrorists — but also where dull old Dullington Bay on England’s South Coast is the last place you’d expect trouble. Mr and Mrs Jessingford have gone up to London to see a play, leaving the three children alone at home on a dark and windy night to manage by themselves.

As we all know and expect, this is a recipe for disaster. A night-time walk and crumbling cliffs are just the beginning, an illegal immigrant coming ashore just the thing to incite the action proper. What is family friend and GP Dr Bill Lancaster doing on a windswept beach? What’s Commander Tagg’s game? Who is Professor Jan Stepanov? And what is Jonathan’s crucial role in all of this?

African heirs and graces

Elmo Lincoln in Tarzan of the Apes (1918) giving his famous “cry of a great bull ape who has made a kill”; unfortunately this was a silent film so the cry has to be imagined…

Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes
Introduction by Gore Vidal, afterword by Michael Meyer
Signet Classics 2008 (1914)

Everyone must have their vision of Tarzan, whether courtesy of the two feature length animations, comics, book covers or the numerous celluloid stars who have strapped on the loincloth, from Elmo Lincoln through Johnny Weissmuller (who, when he got too old and fat, became Jungle Jim in a TV series), Gordon Scott (“my” Tarzan), Jock Mahoney, Ron Ely (TV and feature film) and Christophe Lambert (an appropriate choice as French is Tarzan’s first spoken human language). Or maybe you’ve come across him in the parody George of the Jungle, an animated TV series which aired in the 60s, spawned a feature film and now a remake to coincide with the centenary of Tarzan of the Apes first book publication. Until lack of height, physique and any practical sense told me otherwise, I’m sure I was not alone in fantasising life as an ape-man, despite the absence of a convenient jungle.