A fiction miscellany

Mary James

Poverty, real or threatened, is a theme common to Bertie and May (Hamish Hamilton E1.25) and The Button Boat (Heinemann £1.25), both of which are set in rural America, the one in the 1880's and the other in the Depression. Bertie and May was begun as an autobiographical narrative by Bertha Stemm Norton and finished by her daughter, Andre Norton, a distinguished and prolific writer of children's science fiction novels. The Button Boat is by an American couple, Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout — and most effectively illustrated by Suzanne Verrier.

Bertie and May are little girls preoccupied with dolls and dresses, sugar and spice and all things nice, seen and heard only when they should be. (No boy is going to read beyond the discussion about sprigged muslins in the eighth paragraph.) Pa is pious and proud, forced through loss of business to sell up his grain mill, to accept with reluctance the financial help of flush Uncle Harris and move his family to the town where he can work in the new, efficient rolling mill. It is a time of retrenchment and Ragged Dick, the poor boy in a school story who sells newspapers to survive, is the spectre of the poverty that Bertie fears. Financial independence. charitableness and education are the great goods of the book, emphasised by homely homilies: Keep out of the way of temptation, We are bound for an education,

Dicksie in The Button Boat would undoubtedly find this a useful slogan in her campaign to teach her brother Auston to be virtuous and to want an education. Auston is suspicious of the values taught in school (" Is spitting accurately and loudly through gaps in your teeth considered by teachers as important as arithmetic?") and contemptuous of the Pretend School organised by Dicksie where thirtyone of the thirty-two pupils are beer bottles placed upright in even rows. The memory of his dear dead mother is his only real moral impetus. Dicksie and Auston are as Ragged as Dick and hungrier; the only newspapers they ever see are the ones they fish out of the river while working in their drunken stepfather's clam boat — the clam shells are sold to make buttons.

The graphic portrayal of violence and fear make some of the incidents shocking and the overall effect of the book is searing in its sadness. But maybe the children of a generation brought up on Oliver Twist and The Water Babies can cope with the picture of the stepfather tangled among clam lines sinking below the surface of the river and later returning, "a monstrous thing of tangled hair and yellow fangs and red, red eyes, reaching for Dicksie with its hairy, bloody, fishhook arms." The only hope for a different, better life for the two children lies in the fulfillment at the end of the book of Dicksie's dreams of going to school. "Now, instead of being nameless, useless clams ourselves, we'll be turned into bright, shiny buttons." It is a sad dream.

Two books written around old buildings which children might like to visit are The Adventures of Odd and Elsewhere by James Roose-Evans (Andre Deutsch E1.10) and The Pedlar of Swaffham by Kevin Crossley-Holland (Macmillan E1.50).

The Pedlar of Swaffham is based on an old East Anglian folk tale about how Swaffham Church comes to be built on the proceeds of a pedlar's treasure hunt. The story, about the compelling power of dreams, is logically told, without fuss or frivolity but with plenty of detail. The pedlar is told in his dream to go to London Bridge for good will come of his journey; when he gets there a shop-keeper tells him of his dream of a pot of gold lying buried by a hawthorn tree in 'a garden belonging to some pedlar in a place called Swaffham.' The pleasing twist in the tale goes to show that in order to appreciate the full value of home you have first to journey away from it. The clink of coins found in the back garden is comforting. Well illustrated in good, clear colours by Margaret Gordon, the book will make a sophisticated present for children of eight or nine.

Fenton House in Hampstead, where there is a fine collection of old musical instruments, is also the home, although you may, not yet know it, of Odd the bear whose nose runs sawdust, Elsewhere, the entertaining acrobatic world-famous clown, Hallelujah Jones the singing Welsh policeman, and his daughter Collander Moll whose mind is like a sieve with large holes.

Odd and Elsewhere set out from Fenton House by umbrella-parachute and odyssey all over London. They cause chaos at the open-air theatre in Regent's Park, busk in St Martin's Lane and visit the Lost Property Office to recover Odd's arm which has been torn off by a tube train.

A lovely fantasy with plenty of detail of London life — of infuriatingly empty chocolate machines, unorthodox officials and sandwich-board men — to delight children of the metropolis; illustrated with nice squiggly drawings and an inventive cover by Brian Robb.

Sprout's Window Cleaner by Jenifer Wayne (Heinemann E1.10) is as good as its predecessor, Sprout. Apart perhaps from the burglar-catching, the story is entirely plausible; the people spring straight from everyday life, but are • observed with that blend of caricature and actual detail in which one remembers the 'characters' in one's own childhood.

Sprout has to decide what plant to groW for the school pot-plant competition; " yoU could grow what you liked as long as it wasn't poisonous." He gets advice from the elephant lady (" thousands of wrinkles, small eyes and big teeth that stuck out at the sides almost like tusks ") whom he meets during his investigation, with the help of the local police, of a burglary in his friend Raymond's flat. He decides to grow

an onion — as, undoubtedly, will any child who reads this book. And the book ends, of course, with a satisfied Sprout eating Fried First Prize.

The insight that J. B. Priestley's book, Snoggle (Heinemann £1.40), offers into the nature of a species from another planet is tantalisingly brief. A spaceship lands on earth and becomes invisible. Three teenagers discover a small, round and exhausted creature with enormous and brilliant eyes at the bottom of their garden; they call it Snoggle and hide it from the aggressive Inspector Crope dnd Major Rodpath, characters full of sound and fury who take it upon themselves to rid Wiltshire and the world of the alien visitors. The efforts of the children to understand Snoggle lead them to realise that he is a space pet from a planet where sound is a meaningless concept and where transference of thought and feeling is the means of communication.

Human beings of the story are somewhat stereotyped and too much time is spent in rather inane human conversation, but the book's worth buying for Snoggle, a really original creation. Margaret Palmer's drawings of him are as appealing as Priestley's verbal picture.

Captain Pamphile's Adventures by Alexandre Dumas (Oxford University Press El) will Make a superb present for anyone of about eleven on; the book is most attractively produced with a fine illustration by William Papas of the rascally Captain on the cover, and the translation, by Douglas Munro, reads well. The story is absorbing, and covers the history of the American Indian, the flora and fauna of tropical jungles, the operation of the slave trade, the whaling industry and international finance.

The world is Captain Pamphile's oyster and he invariably sails off with the pearl. He is a most gentlemanly swindler whose final triumph is, as His Highness the Cazique Don Guzman y Pamphilos. to bamboozle Samuel, a London banker, out of a sum not unadjacent to 12 million pounds. Alexandre Dumas and Captain Pamphile both know well how to tell a tall story and how to tell it with style.

Beyond The Burning Lands (Hamish Hamilton £1.25) follows The Prince in Waiting as the second book in John Christopher's new trilogy. Luke, destined to become a prince in fact at the end of the book, journeys away from his own land where machines, after the holocaust, have become mystical, forbidden things and knowledge the preserve of the Seers, the shadowy figures who work behind the scenes to restore order in society. (For science-fiction readers parallels with Asimov's Foundation Trilogy will be apparent.) In the land beyond the burning mountains, he discovers a peaceable and cultured people with ideas which challenge his preconceptions about the organisation of society, a kingdom where dwarfs are men and ladies are liberated.

Highly recommended, especially since the book does not require a reading of its predecessor to make sense. Supernatural symbolism is also used in Thursday by Catherine Storr (Faber £1.40). Thursday (boy) has lost touch with reality, or as the old Welsh lady interprets his abstracted condition, he has been beguiled by the fairies. With her advice Bee (girl) struggles to bring Thursday back to reality; she, the only person who cares about him, succeeds where mental hospital has failed by holding him to her all Midsummer's night, by naming and identifying him as an individual and by declaring her love for him.

The story works well and doesn't quite become corny. But there is a tendency to sentimentality throughout: to see events and relationships so entirely from an adolescent girl's point of view is a ready invitation to it, especially since there is almost no sense of humour.

Three volumes of stories, finally, which will be excellent for older children to read alone and entertaining for parents to read to younger ones: The Animal Ship (Methuen), is incredibly inexpensive at £1.50 since it is a big fat collection of animal stories as vatied in style, subject and size as the countries from which they come. It is edited by Franz Fuhmann and delightfully illustrated, with great wit, by Eva Johanna Rubin. West of Widdershins (Collins £1.05) is a collection of animal stories as varied in Sleigh about such fascinating characters as Minching and Munching Mouseling, Paradiddle Pete and Mrs Scruby and the Spanish Spider. If you don't know what you would do if you got a fairy 'in your eye or if the train you were in started to moo, read this.

The Phantom Cyclist and "other stories (Deutsch £1.25) is by Ruth Ainsworth and will be ideal for 'any child who occasionally asks, like a friend of mine, for a story 'that will make me frightened, please . . . but not very.' The ghosts are usually friendly and a little bit lonely.