April 2013: Mrs Molesworth's "The Cuckoo Clock" and our next meeting

We finally took on Mrs Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock (1877) this month, having put it on our Books We Must Get Round To list at our very first meeting two years ago.  It was the book that established Mrs Molesworth (1839-1921) as a leading children's author, and a prolific one too - the Enid Blyton of her day, perhaps.  By the time of her death in her early 80s she had produced over a hundred books, sometimes writing as many as seven in a year.  Below is a picture of author Rosemary Sutcliff's own copy of The Cuckoo Clock, sitting on the shelf in her library.

Mary Louisa Molesworth was born in 1839 in Rotterdam where her Scottish father, Charles Stewart, worked as a shipping agent.  The growing family soon returned to England and settled in Manchester, eventually moving to Whalley Range (then a select middle class suburb on the outskirts of the city).  As a teenager, Mary Louisa attended classes given by Reverend William Gaskell, husband of the famous industrial novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell.  She also spent a year in Switzerland, studying French.

In 1861 Mary Louisa married well: to Captain Richard Molesworth, nephew of the 7th Viscount Molesworth.  The couple lost two of their children in close succession in 1869, but five others survived into adulthood.  Mrs Molesworth published her first novel in 1870, and her first children's book, Tell Me A Story, was published in 1875.  The marriage was an unhappy one and ended in legal separation in 1879, by which time Mrs Molesworth was an established author.  Her admirers included the poet Swinburne, who wrote: "Any chapter of The Cuckoo Clock is worth a shoal of the very best novels dealing with the characters and fortunes of mere adults."

In The Cuckoo Clock young Griselda is taken to stay with her very old maiden aunts who live with a very old servant in a very old house - reminiscent of Lucy Boston's The House at Green Knowe.  We don't know why she's there, but she's lonely and bored and she's required to be good.  There is something of Katy in What Katy Did about her.  She strikes up a friendship with a magical cuckoo in a clock, who takes her on various gentle adventures.  Eventually she makes friends with a real child: a  boy called Philip, and the cuckoo tactfully flies back to his clock (which turns out to have been made by Griselda's grandfather).

Mrs Molesworth often wrote about lonely children finding friends with magical help.  Her  cuckoo is strict, sharp and quick to chastise.  Using animals as bossy teachers and guides is a familiar technique amongst many of our favourite children's authors - C S Lewis adopted it in his Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), as did E Nesbit, whose Psammead (Five Children and It, 1902) was frequently acid-tongued, but Mrs Molesworth's overly-didactic and moralistic approach does become rather heavy-handed by contrast.

Overall, we felt that The Cuckoo Clock was an interesting historic piece, but insipid: Alice without Lewis Carroll's originality.  There were some charming ideas (a nightdress decorated with real butterflies and scented drops of dew for refreshment, for example), but the story didn't make any great progress, the adventures were lacking in punch, and the author was at times frustratingly lazy ("This wonderful thing happened but I can't explain it").  It did bring to mind other more pleasurable books: the Mrs Pepperpot series (Alf Proysen, 1956 onwards) and The Faraway Tree series (Enid Blyton, 1939-1951) were both mentioned, as was The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911).

Maybe we'd enjoy one of Mrs Molesworth's many other books more (The Tapestry Room, 1879, perhaps, or The Carved Lions, 1895).  As to her reputation as "the Jane Austen of the nursery": on this one reading it doesn't seem to be justified.  The advantages of the e-book generation come to the fore here; no financial outlay is required to give more of her books a try as many are freely downloadable.

Our next meeting is on Wednesday 8 May 2013, when we will be talking about Alan Garner's 1967 Carnegie-winning fantasy, The Owl Service, named in 2007 as one of the top ten Carnegie-winners of all time.

March 2013: Mary Treadgold's 'We Couldn't Leave Dinah' and our April book

This month we finally - and for some of us, reluctantly - got round to reading a "pony" book; but in an attempt to find something rather more complex than the standard "gymkhanas-and-jodhpurs" stories, we chose Mary Treadgold's Carnegie-winning We Couldn't Leave Dinah (1941), brilliantly illustrated by Stuart Tresilian who also illustrated some of Enid Blyton's later books.  

Set in the summer holidays on the fictional island of Clerinel, somewhere south of Plymouth during World War II, We Couldn't Leave Dinah appears to draw on Treadgold's own childhood holidays in the Channel Islands, with the story echoing the de-militarisation by Britain and their subsequent German occupation.  'It combines evocative landscape descriptions with a gripping adventure story, giving a powerful and moving account of the complexities of divided loyalties, collaboration and threatened relationships in an occupied country, seen through the analytical eyes of teenagers.' (Oxford DNB)  Sadly, despite its award-winning status, it is out of print and quite difficult to find.

Born in 1910 into a comfortably well-off home (her father was a member of the London Stock Exchange), Mary Treadgold was educated at the famous St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith before graduating with an MA in English Literature from Bedford College, University of London in 1936.  She became a children's editor at Heinemann but, dismayed by the 'staggering number of manuscripts about ponies and pony clubs ... the majority quite frightful', decided 'I could do better myself!' and resigned to write her own.  We Couldn't Leave Dinah was developed during time spent confined to air raid shelters in the last months of 1940, and was published by Jonathan Cape in 1941.  Mary joined the BBC in 1941 where she spent 20 years, editing and producing Books to Read before becoming editor of the West Africa service.  She worked briefly with BBC propagandist Eric Blair (George Orwell) who was also at the Overseas Service between 1941 and 1943, and may even have shared his office, the notorious Room 101.  She published eight books for children amongst other works: her final novel, (Journey From The Heron) appeared in 1981.  Mary died in 2001, aged 95.  She never married.

Most of us really enjoyed We Couldn't leave Dinah, and there was a lot of laughter when  we met to talk it over.  However we agreed that - whatever Treadgold's intentions - it really isn't a traditional "pony book" at all.  It may not be her best work either, but it's a page-turner of a thriller, combining adjective-rich prose with breathless feats of derring-do; focused on a tiny island community's response to invading enemy forces in a story where the ponies turn out to be useful props, rather than central to the plot.  With mother conveniently out of the way in Africa, and their father and younger brother evacuated to ghastly cousins in London's Eaton Square, Caroline and Mick are accidentally left on Clerinel with their ponies, and become involved with the Resistance.  Interestingly, we felt that the Melendy children in far-away New York in The Saturdays (1941) were more acutely aware of the war's impact on London than the children on Clerinel in We Couldn't Leave Dinah.

Unsurprisingly propagandist, and - perhaps more surprisingly - in need of a little prudent editing, with some flat-footed racial stereo-typing ("bullet-headed" Germans, plucky English children, phlegmatic and possibly collaborative French-speaking locals), occasionally inconsistent characters, some poorly constructed German sentences and unlikely plot points (would the head of an invading force really bring along his grand-daughter and her maid?), it was nevertheless a compelling read, with human interest as well as humour.

The book invoked memories of other much-loved island and pony stories including Pat Smythe's much-loved Three Jays series (my favourite was Jacqueline Rides for a Fall, 1957); the Pullein-Thompson sisters' many horsey books; and Enid Blyton's Scottish island jaunt, The Adventurous Four, also published in 1941.  Someone mentioned narrative echoes of John Buchan, while Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Disney, 1971) based on Mary Norton's The Magic Bedknob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945), also sprang to mind.

One of our group had purchased a copy of We Couldn't Leave Dinah which was inscribed as a gift for Christmas 1944 to a little girl called Evelyn: we wondered how Evelyn must have felt to be reading the story while the Channel Islands were still occupied and war was  raging across the world.

Has the "pony genre" improved since Mary Treadgold was so despairing in 1940?  Our view is most definitely not.  Recent publications we've read are more shallowly plotted, with overmuch attention being paid to grooming and schooling rather than any more interesting action.

And finally, with apologies for the plot spoiler, we found that Caroline "Could Leave Dinah" after all ...  

Our next book is one from our "Books to Get Round To" list: Mrs Molesworth's morally instructive The Cuckoo Clock (1877).