Books I Have Read - The Railway Children

The Railway Children

By

E. Nesbit

This story was first published in 1906 by Wells Gardner, Darron & Co.  Published in Puffin Books in 1960. Re-printed in 1963, 1965, 1967 (twice), 1968, 1970 (twice), 1971 (twice), 1972 (twice), 1973, 1974 (twice), 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 (twice)

This story has appeared as a television series and has been made into a film.

I liked two things about this story. The first was the story line. Again it is a story with a happy ending. It is a story with an awful lot going on. There is a secret that you know nothing about until the end. The second is the way E. Nesbit speaks to the reader. I am a fan of this style but I have been told that it is frowned upon these days. I should also say that there is another thing I like, the details. I love stories with lots of detail. Detail about the characters, the emotions, landscapes, the reasons why – which is the background into why the family is in the position it is and how they get out of it. This makes for a long story but I don’t mind that.

I love the way Nesbit has been able to make the ‘voices’ of each character their own. She has a real knack of being able to show how even though there are times when the children niggle and argue with each other, in the end they are a family who love and care for each other and the other people around them.

The story is based in England and revolves around the children’s father being taken away by some men one night and not returning until the last chapter. The children and the reader never know why. Because of this, the life the family, Mother, Roberta (Bobby), Peter and Phyllis (Phil), had, has gone and they are forced to move to the country and live in a cottage called Three Chimney’s near a railway. The servants are gone, the niceties of life are gone and the money is disappearing and they are struggling.

Their mother spends her days writing, writing, writing. She is writing to anyone who will listen to her about her husband’s plight and getting nowhere. She is writing stories to sell to newspapers and magazines to bring in some desperately needed money. She also home schools the children and helps them and attempts to keep them happy. 

The children have lots of time to explore the nearby railway station and many other parts of the countryside. This means they encounter lots of people and help all of them in some way. They stop what would have been a terrible train accident from happening. They save a baby from a fire, a young man who broke his leg in a railway tunnel. This young man (Jim) turns out to be the grandson of the ‘Old Gentleman’ they had been waving to as he travelled on the train every day.

I find it interesting how Mother keeps the devastating situation their family is in a secret from everyone, except Aunt Emma, until her daughter Roberta sees a newspaper article about her father’s arrest. Even then it is only Roberta who knows, the other children are not to be told. This is when Roberta contacts the Old Gentleman for help.

I also found it interesting that the children never seem to ask what has happened to their father, they just accept everything. They accept him leaving, them moving to the county, them suddenly being poor. I am sure the children of today would not take these circumstances so calmly. They would question everything.

The reader learns how Roberta is worried about her mother but does not ask why she is working so hard but if it was not for her the doctor would not have been fetched when her mother gets very sick. Their Mother does not want anyone helping them or knowing that they are poor but fortunately the children have other ideas. In the end this means that the Old Gentleman helps to prove their father innocent and released from jail.

Books I Have Read - The Wishing Tree

The Wishing Tree 

by 

Ruth Chew 

Published in 1980 by Scholastic Book Services. Printed in Australia by Hedges & Bell Pty Ltd.

This a small book for younger readers. 

It is about two children, Peggy (Peg) and Brian, ages unknown but they are old enough to walk two blocks to Prospect Park. The park is located in a town or city in the USA. The story starts with the children leaving the park just as the sky is turning pink as the sun starts to set. As they head for the exit they see an old beech tree with what looks like ‘little faces peering out of it’. A bird sings in its branches even though it is November and old woman, sitting on a stone bench with a shopping bag next to her, was watching the bird. A striped grey cat suddenly runs out of the bag. Now remember the cat as he is important as is what is in the shopping bag.

The cat follows the children home but this is no ordinary cat, this is a cat that can talk. It is also a cat that leads the children into a magical land.  He does this by taking them back to the old beech tree. There they find the old lady feeding a mockingbird on a blue tablecloth. She runs away taking the tablecloth with her. The cat runs behind the tree. The bird tells them he has gone inside the tree and the children follow. 

Nothing is as it seems in this story. The tree is not an ordinary tree, it is a wishing tree and as the children find out it is dangerous to wish for things you don’t really want. The old lady is homeless but she is a thief. The blue tablecloth is not just a tablecloth. The box the children find at the bottom of a pond holds something precious. The cat, as I have said, is no ordinary cat, for one thing he likes watching television. One thing or person I should say, that is definitely not what it seems is the giant. It is not a giant and why is he not a giant because he is an ordinary man who wished to be big and he was. 

But wishes do come true, the giant become his normal human size again after a year of being a giant and following the children and the cat through the beech tree they go from brilliant sunshine into freezing cold snow. Laying on the ground, in the snow, is the old lady.  Fred, who was the giant, picks up the lady, who is not soo old, and carries her and the blue tablecloth back into his own magical land, back into the sunshine. Meanwhile the cat goes and lives with the children because, well because as he says, “Magic is all very well, Peggy. But that tablecloth never brought forth anything to compare with your mother’s pot roast.”

I liked this story, again another happy ending with a bit of a moral, I suppose. Be careful what you wish for, you might actually get it.

Books I Have Read - The Family from One End Street

The book 'The Family from One End Street' by Eve Garnett was first published in 1937 by Fredrick Muller. It was published by Puffin Books in 1942 then re-printed in 1945, 1949, 1951, 1954, 1958, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1971 (twice), 1972, 1974, 1975 (twice), 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, (I have been unable to find info on any other reprinting dates for the 22 years until 2004 but as it has been reprinted in the following dates  2003- audio cassette, 2004, 2009, 2010, 2014 I would assume that it was still being reprinted in those 22 years. If you find some dates could you please let me know so I can add them to this blog.

I found a  website rarestkindofbest.com that mentions that 'this book is perhaps most notable for beating J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the Carnegie Medal of 1937.' Amazing!

I have been fortunate to pick up a 1981 edition of this little book from the Life Line Bookfest that was held in Brisbane (2015).

I always like to read books at night, it gives my brain something else to think about before I go to sleep. When I picked this book up I didn't really think that I would like it and granted I nearly put it down as the beginning of the book was not something I would normally like but I decided to read more than the first page before I would cancel it out and I am glad I did.

I found this story delightful first because every story has a happy ending. Second the characters especially the mother Rosie. She has such a fierce love for her family and even though her five children test her patients she loves them dearly. She is a Washerwoman, her husband (Jo) is a Dustman and they have six children, Lily Rose (12 1/2), Kate, the twins - James (called Jim) and John, Jo (junior), Margaret Rosie (nickname Peggy to Peg), William

I love the down to earthyness of this story. They are poor but do not let that get them down, they just get on with life and not look to what other people have and regret the life they have.

Another thing I like about this story is the writing. There is soo much back information. The thoughts and think processes about why something is happening, why it is not wanted to happen, what happens if it does. These days authors are told to delete, delete, delete. Make the story short, compact and in doing so a lot of the back info that has been told to the reader in this story, I think would not be available if it was written today. It makes me wonder when I look at how many times this book has been re-printed since 1935!

I am very pleased that I have read this book and would recommend it to anyone.

I have found a few remarks other people have written about the story and thought you might be interested.
1930-1960.blogspot.com.au
A remarkable series of three books showing the lives and aspirations of an urban working class family, children (Lily Rose, Peg, Jo and Kate) of a refuse collector (Mr Ruddles) and his wife. We are introduced to the Black Hand Gang (innocent by today's standards). The first title was published before WW2. The second, Further Adventures... takes the three youngest children into the country where they experience village life and farming, staying at the Dew Drop Inn. This book was written shortly after the first, but the manuscript was damaged, presumed destroyed, in a Blitz fire but was recovered and reconstructed in 1956. The children return to the Dew Drop on holiday in the third book of the series, Holiday at Dew Drop Inn. These books are not in print, which is a shame, since the writing is of good quality. The most common versions are by Puffin, the second and third made expensive by rarity. The writer (middle class) shows this working class family in a good light, hardworking, anxious to be clean and to better themselves whilst clearly being proud of their roles in life. The story is told with humour, to some extent laughing at most of the characters.


 www.theguardian.com

The Family from One End Street marked a series of firsts for me. Perhaps most importantly, it was the first book to break the stranglehold of Enid Blyton. Much as I loved the 826 billion volumes of Famous Five et al, the day eventually dawned when I started running a speculative eye over library and shop shelves for stories about something other than the spy-catching quintet. And there, suddenly, were the Ruggles family — two parents, seven children — all rendered equally lively and interesting but all utterly different from each other, and all utterly real.
Episodically structured, it became therefore the first book I loved for its characters rather than its plot. And it was the first book not only for me, but for all of its readers when it was first published in 1937, to make urban, working-class children its heroes. Some critics detected a patronising tone towards Garnett's characters, but others praised her for avoiding both sentimentality and condescension and replacing them with what one called "a careful truthfulness" instead.
Not that I knew or cared about any of this at the time, of course. I just knew it was a relief to spend time with book-children who, like me, had more experience of a world bounded by building sites, patches of grubby parkland and knackered working parents than they did of one strewn with rolling moors, private islands and spies.
It was also the first book I owned that had been written and illustrated by the author. Garnett had been an art student and the book grew out of her walks through the back streets of London as she searched for subjects to sketch. Incidentally, the drawings are lovely — sweet, strong and deceptively simple, like the book itself.
But better even than the book was this: it had a sequel. Two, in fact: The Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street, and Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, which were, if you can believe it, even better. This gave me a wholly misguided sense of life as a process of cumulative improvement, which would take several painful years of experience to dispel, but on the plus side, Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn gave me my first understanding of just how deep the pleasures of reading could run.
It was as if, with the story of Kate Ruggles' summer-long stay at the eponymous hostelry and enthusiastic embrace of village life, Eve Garnett had peered into my mind and written down exactly what she knew would delight me most. That seemed to me magic of the highest order and I raced off to other shelves to find it again.

 shelflove.wordpress.com
The book is a wonderful, crammed-full, meandering affair, exactly like the prose you just read. Each chapter follows the adventure of one of the children (if adventure it can really be called; it’s more like day-in-the-life, but life is very full in a large family at One End Street.) Lily Rose tries to help her mother with the ironing, but the iron is too hot, and the artificial-silk petticoat shrinks to doll’s size. The calamity is enormous: how will they pay to replace it? But in this, as in every other chapter, disaster is averted, and Lily Rose goes home with nothing worse than her mother’s scolding and a slice of cake. And so it goes: Kate takes a scholarship but loses her school hat, and demonstrates intelligence and resourcefulness getting another; the twins James and John have day-long adventures for a secret society; the whole family has a Day Out to London. Every moment is both suspenseful and gloriously ordinary.
I have a colleague who is writing an article about the representation of poverty in children’s books. This is a perfect example. This family is living on the very edge of respectability, keeping everyone fed and clothed. Sixpences matter dreadfully. When Kate gets her scholarship, and it pays for tuition but not the uniform, it’s clear she won’t be able to go to school at all, because she’s required to have things like a tennis-racket and shoe bags. But there’s no misery here. Frustration, sometimes; longing for a trip to see family, certainly; sharp reminders of necessity, in almost every chapter. Mr. Ruggles has dreams of finding as much as five pounds in the trash he picks up! But the tone of this book overall is from a child’s point of view: there’s much more interest in adventure and exploration than in the ordinary world of getting enough to eat. Garnett’s skill is that we see a little of both in this book.

rarestkindofbest.com
Several episodes in the life of the Ruggles, a large working class family in a small English town. Mr. Ruggles is a dustman and Mrs. Ruggles takes in washing, and their seven children are well-meaning but occasionally disobedient, resulting in many adventures and mishaps.
The Ruggles family is quite poor but morally upstanding, hardworking, loyal and supportive of each other. A little rough around the edges, but fun-loving and lively. The book is a series of separate episodes loosely strung together: Lily Rose’s desire to do a good deed results in an ironing mishap, Kate wins a coveted scholarship but must scramble to afford the uniform, the twins James and John fall in with a gang of older boys and in an effort to impress them have two wildly different adventures, Jo schemes to sneak into the cinema to see the new colour Mickey Mouse cartoon, and baby William wins first prize at the fair. In the final chapters father Jo finds lost money in a dustbin and the reward for returning it allows him to take the whole family to London for a grand holiday.
In the 1930s in Britain it was very unusual for a children’s book to have working class characters. Eve Garnett provided ordinary children from the poorer areas of England stories which reflected their reality. And the Ruggles’ poverty is not underplayed – in every chapter the cost of things is a continual worry, and every penny scraped together is done so with great effort (and sometimes, luck).
Today the book is still charming but quite old-fashioned. Children will be amazed by the freedom which the Ruggles children enjoy, as they wander about town and countryside without adult supervision. Nothing terrible transpires, as their fellow villagers and all the strangers they meet are kindly and help them out of difficulties. In particular the rich folk they encounter are without exception generous and giving – a gentler outlook on society than later books about class warfare in Britain.
This book was, and still is, a sentimental favourite in the U.K., as it appeared in the top ten favourites of all the Carnegie winners on the 70th anniversary of the awards. Relatively unknown outside of Britain, this book is perhaps most notable for beating J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the Carnegie Medal of 1937.

Books I Have Read - Hugo Pepper

This book is rather interesting in that I didn't think I would like it but I was surprised that I did.
I found the story very clever in that it starts with a little baby being placed infront of the door step of a couple that live in the snowy mountains. Two giant foot prints are there as well. Eventually Hugo finds out that these people are not his family and descides to go looking for his real parents.

He lands in a town that has many people (each one given their own chapter to tell their story). It turns out that each of the people he meets had something to do with his parents. He finds out how his parents were killed. He grows to love all the people but descides he must return to his other parents.
Just as he is about to leave he finds that a cruel man is keeping the snow monsters (that have huge feet and tiny bodies) hostage so they can run his newspaper business. This cruel man is also buying up all the houses in the town and throwing the people out on the streets. It turns out the man is looking for the hidden treasure.
Hugo eventually saves the day by freeing the snow monsters and finding the hidden treasure so that the resisdenace of the town can save their houses.

I loved the clever way the story had so many many sides and little stories within the larger overall story but how, in the end, all the circles joined up and I always love a happy ending.

Books I Have Read - The Trouble with Wenlocks

I have just finished reading a little book titled 'The Trouble with Wenlocks a Stanley Wells Mystery" written by Joel Stewart.

It is strange little book with a strange story that turns out not to be so small but big, huge even. It is about a small boy named Stanley Wells who imagines everything and anything to the point were reality and imagination get lost.

He meets Dr E. B. Moon who is an unraveller of ravelled things. An untangler of the tangled. With his faithfully dog (I suppose you'd call him and by the way Dr Moon is NOT a person) the three of them try to solve the problem of the Wenlocks that keep eating the Sorrows (little furry creatures) that are hanging over everybodies heads.

Upon meeting Albert Lee, a man who lives on a river boat Stanley finds that his daughter Umiko is missing. She has been kidnapped by the Wenlocks.

The search begins to find Umiko and on the way people are found sitting, standing, laying down like zombies. Wenlocks are everywhere eating up the Sorrows that float over peoples heads and as the Sorrow is taken away the human becomes a zombie.

As the puzzle unfolds Umiko is found creating lots of little Sorrow creatures from her bad memories of her mother dieing of cancer when she was younger. She also created the Wenlocks to eat up the Sorrows to make people feel better. It is not until Stanley points out that we all need our sorrows to make us human that she makes them all go away except for one Sorrow, which she keeps for herself as she is not ready to give it up yet.

I found this story an amazing way of discussing the problem of sorrow, heartache and how people will try to get rid of it in anyway they can so they can feel better but in the end it doesn't work. People need their hate, their sorrow, their sadness to know what love, kindness, happiness is. We are all made up of the experiences we have had in the past and no matter how much we would like to get rid of the pain it is with us until the day we die. We just have to come to terms with it and change it into something positive or else it will eat us up like the Wenlocks.

Books I Have Read - Pond Magic

I have just finished reading for the second time Pond Magic by Angela Sunde.
Now I have known Angela for three years and I find her nothing but inspirational.
When I first read Pond Magic in its infansay as a manuscript I was amazed at the magic, the cleverness and wonder of the story. Now that it is finished, tidied up and squished down into the number of words that are required to be an Aussie Chomps author it is just great!

As you know everything is beholdent to the viewer (or reader as in this case) and I am a person (if you couldn't tell that likes MAGIC! WONDER! and CLEVERNESS! and that is what I see and read when I read this book.)

By the way the story behind Angela being picked up by Penguin Publishers deserves a story all of its own but I am not here to talk about that.

Here Angela has written a mesmerising tale about the trials and tribulations of a girl - Lily Pond- of 12 living nextdoor to a witch! When Lily starts burping and her feet become webbed and her skin turns green she realises that she is turning into a frog! Something has to be done! I mean to say she nearly eats a fly for crying out loud!

As Lily struggles with this dissaster and the kids at school teasing her another one comes to live with her in the form of an exchange student from France - Rainier le Dauphin. She finds this person who she refers to as Rain Gauge or Rainy (just pick one) irratating beyond dispare. Lily's mother on the other hand is delighted as she is with all things French but wouldn't you know it in the end Lily needs Rainier to save her from ending her days living the back yard pond.

I have found this a delightful story and as I know there is a second story about the adventures of Lily Pond in the winds I, for one, just can't wait.

Below is a list of places that you are able to purchase a copy of Pond Magic. Also if any one would like to have a signed copy then please contact Angela through her web site. Angela Sunde's web site.

A local Gold Coast bookstore;
Network Educational 4/498 Scottsdale Dr, Varsity Lakes, Gold Coast. Network Educational
and
Love That Book bookstore, Southport Park Shopping Centre, Southport Park, Gold Coast. Love That Book Store

Pond Magic can be ordered from any bookstore in Australia and New Zealand.

It can also be ordered from any online store such as: these are all facebook sites. Just click on the continue button there is no need to log in if you are just looking.

Fishpond: Fishpond
Borders online: Borders Online
Mighty Ape online: Mighty Ape
Seek Books online: Seek Books
Booktopia: Booktopia

The book retails for approx $12.99.

Books I Have Read-The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden is an amazing story. I have always wondered about it. It has been mentioned over the years and created into one film that I know of but I wouldn't be surprised to find it had been made into more and even plays.
Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote the story in 1911 and even though it is a simple plot I found myself not caring.

I wondered if she wrote it not just because of her love of gardens but because she had suffered the same type of thing or saw what dark thoughts can do to people. The terrible life she and her family led after her father died (1853) and the family was plunged into indescribable poverty in the Victorian slums of Manchester must of had an effect on her and everyone she saw. Fortunately the family moved to the USA in 1865.

I do not know if I enjoyed the story because I like gardens or if the mind of Mary, Colin and his father remind me of my mind. What it used to be like.

I had suffered with depression for twenty years and the theme of the story is -
"Two things cannot be in one place.

Where you tend the rose, my lad,

A thistle cannot grow."

She is talking of thoughts.

"Much more surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable, determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot ...."

"While the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming alive with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away beautiful places in the Norwegian fjords, and the valleys and mountains of Switzerland, and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind filled with dark and heartbroken thinking. He had not been courageous; he had never tried to put any other thoughts is the place of the dark ones."

later in the story

"He sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things growing at its edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots growing so close to the stream and its leaves were wet and at these he found himself looking as he remembered he had looked at such things years ago. He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind - filling and filling it until other things were softly pushed aside. It was as if a sweet, clear spring had begun to rise in a stagnant pool and had risen and risen until at last it swept the dark water away."

I can tell you from experience that it is VERY hard to keep that one beautiful thought in your mind. It is like a tiny speck of light in a huge room filled with dark smothering gloom. The only way the speck can survive is if it is fed another beautiful thought and another and another so that it can grow. Eventually pushing out the darkness that seeps into every part of a persons body and makes them sick. This, for me took years as it is VERY difficult to remember, to wish, to believe that your life can be any different from what it is. It is as if you are lost in a deep dark hole. You can not see the bottom, the sides, the edge and you do not know how you will EVER get out but in the end I did it and here I am. You can to if you just believe in yourslef.

The Secret Garden, written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Published by Puffin Classics

Books I Have Read -Antonis S and the Mystery of Theodoe Guzman

Learning from other writers is something I am always attempting to do. I read every night. It gives my mind something else to think of. I have just finished reading

This is the first one that he wrote in 1997. In 1998 it was short listed for the 1998 National Children's Literature Award at the Festival Awards for Literature, was an Honour Book in the 1998 Children's Book Council Book of the Year - Younger Readers Awards and won the inaugural Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature in the 1999 NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

He was born in Australia were he studied medicine and worked as a doctor. He now lives in London.

I collect Odo Hirsch books and found the beginning of this story was not written in the same style as the other books I have of his work. By the time I got through half of the book I could see his style come out in his work and by the end of it I was really pleased I had found the book at the recent Life Line Bookfest held on the Gold Coast. 

The book is about a young boy (Antonia S) obsessed with finding out why an old man (Mr Guzman) in an apartment of The Duke's House (were they and other people live) why he hardly ever comes out of his apartment. When he does it is not for long.

Through various means and hows he finds out that the old man was a very famous actor.

Antonio S decides to put on a play. It eventually has the desired effect and he meets this old man and learns from him what it is to be an actor.

The last part of this book is very stirring. I could 'feel' the sense of loss for the actor and sense of wonder for the boy.

When it comes to writing. There is a section in the book that I feel every writer could use to help to understand their characters.

(Mr Guzman speaking) 'The very first day I spoke to you, Antonio. You asked me a question. You asked whether I knew the words of every character I had played. Do you remember? What did I say?'

     Antonio thought. 'You said all you had to do was think about what they were like.'

     'Yes. All you have to do is to remember who is the character that you are playing. If you know what he is like, what he is really like, if you have that in your head, the words will come.'

     'Is that all?'

     'Is that all? Isn't that enough?' Mr Guzman laughed. He stood up. 'It is more than it sounds. Wait here, Antonio.'

     Mr Guzman walked slowly out of the room. When he came back, he was carrying the carved figure of Paul Snee in his hand. He put it on the table beside the sketch pad and sat down again.

     'Look at him, Antonio.'

     Antonio looked. Paul Snee gazed angrily back.

     'Think of who he is. What he feels, what he thinks, what he sees. He sees you! He is looking at you. Now see yourself, Antonio, through his eyes.'

     Antonio glanced sharply at Mr Guzman. Mr Guzman nodded.

     'You are now a boy who is trying to tell jokes and can't remember them. You see another boy looking at you. You are frustrated. You are angry. Can you feel it?' Antonio stared at Paul Snee's figure, trying to feel his anger.

     'Forget the words, understand the character. When you come back to the theatre, you will see the figures on the stage. Do not simply look at them. Use them. They can help you. Put yourself inside them and look out. Feel the wood of the stage under your feet, The stage is now your world. The figures are your fellows. You walk amongst them.' Mr Guzman paused. (end of passage)

Didn't I tell you it was something worth reading, something worth knowing.

Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman written by Odo Hirsch and published by Allen & Unwin.