11 NOVEMBER 1966, Page 26

The Goblin Club

IT is hard for writers like K. G. Lethbridge, who writes a kind of fantasy which automatically sounds echoes of Alice and Pooh, and makes us look for the qualities of a classic. But in this group of books for children from about eight to eleven years she comes after these, and after Tolkien also; none the less, In Search of Thunder (Faber, 21s.) has great charm, imagination and originality, even if that greater, indefinable magic is lacking. It is a sequel to The Rout of the 011afubs, but all gaps in the story are painstakingly filled in. The girl Littleflame, seeking her dog Thunder, is captured by wicked goblins Thrum-eye and Pin-eye, who try to marry her off to Nabilac, a gone-to-seed member of the 011afub family 1:4 monsters. Her brother- Skyboy comes to the rescue aided by the bear-cub Tob, distinguished by an engaging Mummerset accent. Sometimes the allegory obtrudes, but the story is recom- mended for its elaborate adventures, charming songs and beautiful writing.

The last applies also to Jack of Dover, by Richard Garnett (Hart-Davis,18s.), which is more an avowed pastiche, written because the author and his ten-year-old son both like traditional folk tales about fools and tricksters, but find there are not enough real ones. Jack, a typical youngest son, believes (wrongly) that he is the biggest fool in Christendom, and sets out in traditional fashion to seek his fortune. He un- wittingly outwits the charlatans he meets and is eventually saved by Portia-like sophistry on the part of his true love from making a disas- trous marriage. This is very entertaining, though a shade involved, for slower children, who may feel like Jack himself, who 'wasn't really clear in his own mind exactly what had happened.'

In Erich Kastner's delightful fantasy The Little Man (Cape, 16s.), his two-inch hero, Maxie, sleeps in a matchbox, which he prefers even when presented with a suite of dolls' furni- ture. As assistant to a full-sized conjurer, Pro- fessor Hocus von Pocus, he suffers all the penalties of fame and ballyhoo, and is kidnapped. Full of character and humour, and excellent for reading aloud, this has been well translated from German by James Kirkup. The White Horse Rider, by Theodor Storm (Blackie, 12s. 6d.), is another fantasy from Germany, but no bed- time story. It is a ghost story for older children, set on the North German coast where the in- habitants wage constant battle with the sea. They eventually suffer a tidal wave, due to a fatal error of judgment -caused by the pride of the young dike reeve. It has an interesting back- ground and is well told in Stella Humphries's translation. A third German book, The Most Beautiful Place, by Gina Ruck-Pauquet (Mac- donald, 13s. 6d.), has a slight foreign flavour in Edelgard von Heydekampf Bruehl's transla- tion, but this does not diminish its poetic quality. It is a picaresque novel on the favourite children's book theme of growing up, in which fourteen-year-old Joschko runs away from his home in the remote fishing village of Igrane only to find at the end that Igrane is the most beautiful place he has been seeking.

The loss of an animal friend is also the theme of Helen Griffiths's novel of Spain, The Wild Horse of Santander (Hutchinson, 16a.), in which Linda, the beloved mare belonging to a blind boy, Joaquin, represents his childhood dream world, shed when he recovers his sight. Miss Griffiths does this sort of thing supremely well, though I thought the harrowing ending a little strained. In The River Kings, by Max Fatchen (Methuen, 15s.), a dingy old river-boat plying on the Murray River in Australia, is the scene of a young boy's entry into manhood, and also of his dreams, from which, again, awakening comes, this time with fire on board. This vivid, comic and sometimes touching boys' story is set at the turn of the century, and has first-class background. Background is also the salient quality of Naomi Mitchison's Friends and Enemies (Collins, 13s. 6d.), in which Petrus, a small Mokgatla boy, runs as a fugitive from South Africa to relatives in Bechuanaland, where he finds freedom but also poverty and discom- fort. Miss Mitchison's sense of identity with the problems of black Africans, a feature also of her adult books, causes some forcing of the issue, but she always writes well and gives a very interesting picture of conditions.

The last group are all engaging domestic tales, mainly about children coming to terms with temporary separation from their parents. In We Shall Have Snow (Brockhampton, 15s.), Lettice Copper writes with charm of a lonely little girl who befriends a robin and helps to free her small boy-friend from a bully. 'Next-doorers' are routed also in Chimneytop Lane, by Gunnel Linde (Hart-Davis, 21s.), a Swedish story about the games and fantasies of a lonely child of about seven. Twelve People are not a Dozen, by Vera Ferra-Mikura (Macdonald, 13s. 6d.), and Toppen and I at the Croft, by Edith Unnderstand (Michael Joseph, 18s.), are both dis- tinguished in their way, though I suspect children will find this particular kind of serio-comic slap- stick more hilarious than I do.

STELLA RODWAY