Nine to Fourteen

THE MUG'S GAME. By Veronica Westlake. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 10s. 6d.) THE BIG WAVE. By Pearl S. Buck. (Methuen, 1 Is. 6d.)

'WHAT I want,' said an emphatic voice, 'is a book that I can read twice.'

There was a sound of approval from the others, some of whom were older than the nine-year-old who had spoken.

One of the books in this batch (all meant for the nine-to- fourteens) definitely comes into this child's select category. Miss Noel Streatfeild had the excellent idea of getting impressions and recollections from a number of people who remember their youth In a close but now very different past, and—this is most important

—she has been well served by her illustrator who not only has a sympathetic line but also an excellent period-sense. In The Day Before Yesterday Miss Streatfeild has assembled the recollections

of an apprentice on Cutty Sark, a Militant Suffragette, a game- keeper-, a lady balloonist, a canal-boat legger, a debutante and Many more representative persons.

She knows too that children, openly or covertly, always, when a contrast is offered, want an answer to the question, 'What was best?' and, in her selection of witnesses she has played admirably fair. The immediate past she shows was neither golden nor pitch black. The reader soon sees where working-class life was terribly hard, but what it was that gave it zest, where changes have been

greatest and where least. Above all—and this makes it a book that grown-up readers will also like—authentic voices speak.

There's lots of new-fangled ways with canal boats today— public baths at one and six a time, ambulances, we had to walk or be carried to hospital in my day, privies on the boats, and a hostel where the canal boat children can live so they can attend school regular—but there's a lot belongs to the old ways. You won't never see a canal boat not without there are castles, roses and diamonds. They are for fancyness, same as a picture is for them as live in houses. Another thing, though canal people will see the doctor and go to hospital, same as other people, they still believe in the old cures. It would be strange canal boat woman who didn't put a pinch of hayriff in every pot of tea she brews, for that keeps rheumatism away, and at the same time often enough she'll add a pinch of feverfew, for the liver and kid- neys. . . . Nor are these cures so foolish neither, most canal boat people live to be ninety. I reckon to myself.

I was sorry that she has called no witness from any scientific or technical field, where not only have changes during her chosen

Period been spectacular, but have commonly lain behind the other Changes that she registers so well.

Mrs. Peter Waite's adventure story has several agreeable twists to it. For example the horsey little girl and her mount (of whose

appearances and vicissitudes reviewers, though not little girls, are so tired) duly appears, but only to be mildly mocked. The 'Wanted

Mart' himself, too, having contributed some excellent and sinister thrills, is seen at last to be indeed an 'enemy of society,' but as a troublesome 'problem grown-up' and not that simpler Phenomenon, an out-and-out villain. Other problems which are bound to crop up in all children's adventure fiction (such as what

to do about the grown-up people who occur in real life) are equally freshly and amusingly handled.

Knight's Castle belongs to a category (modern characters in- volved in comic knightly adventures) against which this reviewer

admits a prejudice, lately inflamed by other transatlantic offerings

:shims such as The Court Jester, for example. Also the tale depends for its effects partly on a previous acquaintance with Scott's Ivanhoe. Do the British young still read Ivanhoe? I had it read to me, and didn't much like it. Mr. Eager seems to assume that the American young know it pretty well. But then—reading conscientiously—I perceived two things: one, that Mr. Eager honours E. Nesbit's books, and is proud to carry on some of her tradition, and further—and this is indeed a bond—that he likes Scott's Rebecca and shares my loathing of that intolerable blonde Rowena. In spite of some heavy facetiousness, this is really rather a funny book.

In The Cuckoo at Coolnean, we are involved with quite a dif- ferent kind of magic. Birds and cats talk, there are excellent caverns, complete with hidden treasure, not of the kind expected by the children. The scene here is more or less present-day Ireland, the children are well characterised, especially a Swiss girl—and the tale is, in general, enjoyable.

Patricia Lynch is a storyteller with a long list of successes. The best known of her children's tales is The Turf-Cutter's Donkey. This time she has also written about Ireland but for rather older children, and mostly in a more realistic way (I deprecated a dream sequence in which Dean Swift appears). The details of the hit- and-miss business methods of the small Dublin bookshop itself are fresh, endearing and never priggish. I have lately been sampling the opinions of 'Junior Librarians' in a dozen industrial cities and rural places. They report their clients as increasingly book-conscious, and excellent browsers. Her back- ground should thus prove popular. I hope it does.

Two more books, Maddy Again (a little girl on television) and The Mug's Game (horsey girls), come into the category of what, in an eighteenth-century survey of current adult fiction, were classed as 'Reading novels.' These two could be a solace for the female young with influenza or measles, but would probably not be deemed to come into the category of books that can be read twice.

Miss Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. wrote a 'Reading novel' for grown-up people, which sold a million copies. Her work has, in a high degree, that sometimes unjustly denigrated quality—readability. Now I do not yearn to fill my house with large dogs and devote most of my time and income to their care, nor do I worship puppies. I also find it hard to believe that dogs can, or would even wish to, organise a mass escape of dozens of threatened members of their kind. And yet, as I read, I found myself following my author like the best Dalmatian of them all, not even feeling revolt when her other dogs alluded to their humans as their 'pets.' By the end I was only registering a mild protest when obliged to swallow some slightly repellent snob-whimsy. What about any sinister effects of such spell-binding? None, 1 think. The young reader will have a good time while 'under the influence,' and only the very literal will afterwards demand a hundred large dogs, or become exces- sively anthropomorphic about existing quadrupeds. The two illustrators are much to be congratulated.

The Big Wave—a tidal wave in Japan—would, if it were for adults, come into the category of come: a short story whose plot has a single thread and which is not quite allegorical. Miss Pearl Buck is always a writer with a message. Here she shows us fortitude and courage, and the way in which quite ordinary human beings can, and do, recover from disaster, and the remarkable fashion in which life and gaiety reassert themselves. In the present state of the world no message could be more timely. It is conveyed with inevitability and without a hint of preaching. Astrid Wal- ford's illustrations are distinguished and yet really illustrate.

AMADEI. WILLIAMS-ELLIS

THOUGH no Black Beauty or even .Skewbald, Dark Fury is 9, fine figure of a horse. He is the last of the wild stallions and his break for freedom from a circus company carries him across some of the wildest and grandest country in America. Villains are ,out to recapture him and the hero is out to prevent them. The story flags a little but the writing of Joseph E. Chipperfield is extra- ordinarily good, and the silence of the wide, lonely spaces really catches the breath and the imagination. This book (Hutchinson, 12s. 6d.) is a very good buy. J. P.