Chapter Books

Anne of Green Gables

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Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

1908

Anne of Green Gables. There is no other character remotely like her. She is irrepressible, dramatic, talkative, imaginative, high-spirited, headstrong, passionate, ebullient, lively, impulsive, heedless. She is also sensitive, self-conscious, insecure, loving, generous, well-intentioned.

She first appears, waiting expectantly in a train station, as a skinny, freckled, green-eyed, redhead – a homely child. She enters the lives of Matthew and Marilla, an elderly brother and sister who had sent away for an orphan boy to help with the chores and haplessly ended up with an unlikely girl instead. She is a dreamer, bursting with imagination, exhilarated by the world. Matthew, a quiet shy gentle unpretentious and altogether good man, is quietly delighted by her. Anne recognizes immediately that though they could not be outwardly more different, they are really kindred spirits. Marilla is slower to warm. But over the course of five years, she responds to Anne’s hunger for love and eagerness to please, and comes to value Anne’s fundamental goodness and creative spirit. Anne is transformed by the undemonstrative love of Matthew and Marilla and their lives, in turn, are transformed by their act of selflessness.

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Lucy Maud Montgomery came from Prince Edward Island and her love of place is evidenced in the Anne books. She had an emotionally charged communion with nature that she bestows upon her fictional creation. Anne does not simply appreciate the natural world, she is intoxicated by it. The plot points are set pieces (Anne inadvertently dies her hair green instead of black, she unintentionally serves her bosom friend currant wine instead of raspberry cordial), but the descriptions of the Avonlea farmstead in the twilight, the apple tree allee in full blossom, the woodland flowers by the brook, as seen through Anne’s enraptured eyes, are always genuine. The setting is beautifully rendered, by author and character alike.

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Aside:

“Do you never imagine things different from what they really are?” asked Anne wide-eyed.

“No.”

“Oh!” Anne drew a long breath. “Oh, Miss – Marilla, how much you miss!”

 

Rabbit Hill

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Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson

1944

Illustrated by Robert Lawson

New Folks coming. New Folks coming. This refrain is passed from animal to animal, from Little Georgie to his Father and Mother, to Pokey the Woodchuck, Willie Fieldmouse, the Mole, Phewie the Skunk. After a period of privation, the animals are excited that the Big House on Rabbit Hill will be occupied once again. They watch as the Man, the Lady, and their old Cat, Mr. Muldoon, take up residence, plant a lush vegetable garden, and generate a bounty of kitchen scraps. (“’You will find, Phewie,’ said Father with some heat, ‘that good breeding and good garbage go hand in hand.’”) The Man and Lady celebrate the first harvest with a feast for the animals, with the words “There is Enough For All”.

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The plot does not seem like much, but this book has staying power. Robert Lawson created, largely through humorous dialogue, a distinct assortment of animal characters, beginning with the oratorical Father, variously viewed as eloquent or insufferably verbose (“He always continued until something stopped him.”), who constantly harkens back to his Kentucky bluegrass roots. There is the highstrung Mother in a perennial nervous state, the cheerful and enthusiastic Little Georgie, the folksy and curmudgeonly Uncle Analdas whose speech is peppered with “dingblasted” and “gumdinged”, and the loyal, courageous Willie Fieldmouse whose role it is to discover that Mr. Muldoon is just a harmless puffball.

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Robert Lawson is the only creator of children’s books to have been awarded both the Newberry Award (for Rabbit Hill in 1945) and the Caldecott Medal (for They Were Strong and Good, a chronicle of his forebears, in 1941). His preferred medium was pen and ink, but for Rabbit Hill, he created soft-washed pencil drawings with his meticulous hand, quite different from the bold thick-lined caricatures of The Story of Ferdinand or Wee Gillis.

After graduating from art school, Lawson joined a group of artists and designers in the Camouflage Corps in France. The military value of concealing patterning and coloration took hold during WWI and a large group of artists (including such talents as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Arshile Gorky) were recruited to design and paint camouflage disguises for war equipment and installations. There were no mass produced camouflage uniforms at the time, and it is remarkable that all such clothes, usually reserved for snipers, were individually hand-painted.

When the war was over, Lawson married and settled in Westport, Connecticut. He and his artist wife committed to each designing one Christmas card a day until the mortgage was paid off. It took three years. Their home, Rabbit Hill, was the inspiration for the book.

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Aside: “The warm sun had loosened his muscles: the air was invigorating; Little Georgie’s leaps grew longer and longer. Never had he felt so young and strong. His legs were like coiled springs of steel that released themselves of their own accord. He was hardly conscious of any effort, only of his hind feet pounding the ground, and each time they hit, those wonderful springs released and shot him through the air. He sailed over fences and stone walls as though they were mole runs. Why, this was almost like flying!”

Big Tiger and Christian

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Big Tiger and Christian by Fritz Muhlenweg

1950

Illustrated by Rafaello Busoni

 

Out of print for many years, this is a book that happens into hands by chance. It is read in appreciation and amazement and continues to haunt the reader for decades more. It is a book that has inspired travels and changed lives. Yet it is almost completely unknown.

 

The story begins, in part, with Sven Hedin, a renowned Swedish explorer in the grand tradition, who did much to fill in the white patches on the map of Central Asia. In the 20’s and 30’s, he lead the Sino-Swedish Expedition to Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and Xinjiang, accompanied by an international bevy of archeologists, geologists, meteorologists, geographers, astronomers, botanists, zoologists. He was honored along the way by having a glacier, a lunar crater, and a butterfly (among other things) named after him.  My Life as an Explorer is a riveting travelogue.

The story continues, in part, with Fritz Muhlenweg. He was working as a young accountant with the new German airline, Lufthansa, when he was posted to Hedin’s expedition (Lufthansa’s interest was a proposed Peking-Berlin air route). He made three trips to Mongolia before settling into a career as a painter and writer.

Muhlenweg’s reverence for Mongolian culture is palpable in the tale that was inspired by his travels, and few books provide a deeper sense of place.  There are yurts, camel caravans, dunes, tamarisk trees, roasted barley, and language (try “zook, zook” if you want your camel to kneel). This is the backdrop that gives texture and depth to an adventure story that quietly enthralls. Two 12-year old boys, one European and one Chinese, go kite-flying in Peking and end up as secret couriers for General Wu. They embark on a 1,500 mile mission to Urumchi, on the far side of the Gobi Desert, by train, truck, horse, camel, and foot.  They encounter lamas, honorable bandits, dishonorable thieves, shepherds, traders, soldiers, warlords, wild monks, a nomadic girl, and a black poodle who have names like Dog, Sevenstars, Good Fortune, Affliction, Moonlight, and Thunderbolt. There is an evil villain named Greencoat and his nemesis, an outlaw king referred to as The Venerable Chief, a kind of Mongolian Robin Hood, and there is a hidden treasure in an abandoned desert city. Apart from the villain, who is irredeemably wicked, the characters are nuanced. Muhlenweg is sympathetic to even the roughest scallywags and in his hands they tend to rise to the occasion to reveal a hidden goodness.

 

 

 

 

Great Expectations

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

1861

We first encounter Pip in a desolate churchyard in the marshes, visiting the tombstones of his parents and five infant brothers, grasping that he is truly an orphan and alone in the world. Out of the bleakness, he is violently accosted by Magwitch, the escaped convict, who demands a file for his shackles and wittles for his stomach. The marshlands – wild, mysterious, apocalyptic – their silence broken only, on occasion, by the mournful horn announcing the escape of a prisoner from a convict ship, are an apposite setting to join two figures, forever thereafter intertwined, each with a moral compass more nuanced than would be initially expected. Few books begin with a first chapter as haunting as this.

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Dickens was a master at creating memorable characters, many of whom have become household fixtures – Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Little Nell. And then there were others, less well-known, whose names alone should buy them immortality – Wackford Squeers, the Reverand Septimus Crisparkle, Uriah Heep, Uncle Pumblechook. Scoundrel and angel, miser and spendthrift, judge and beggar, orphan and whore – Dickens could paint them all, some as comic caricatures, some as nuanced characters of profound complexity. Arguably, his crowning creation was Miss Havisham, the reclusive spinster, jilted on her wedding day, whose life is a memorial to that betrayal, timepieces frozen to that moment. She wanders her cobwebbed mansion in her moldering bridal gown, past the desiccated wedding cake on the dusty banquet table, plotting her misandristic revenge by grooming the icy Estella, her beautiful ward, to break the hearts of men (beginning, most notably, with Pip’s).

Dickens was also a master story-teller. His books were serialized in weekly literary magazines, each installment being eagerly awaited by his enthusiastic audience. Great Expectations came towards the end of his illustrious career, by which time his craft was finely honed. Unlike some of his novels (“loose baggy monsters” according to the disdainful Henry James), Great Expectations is tightly structured. It melds all the Dickensian ingredients – gothic shadows and Victorian sentimentality, scathing satire and sympathy for the working poor, humorous parody and anguished tragedy, plot twists and social commentary, psychological depth and melodrama – into a really great story.

Given a chance, children love Dickens, a chapter at a time, ideally read before a blazing hearth. Great Expectations is a perfect place to start. A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield are good to follow.

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The Borrowers

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The Borrowers by Mary Norton

1952

Illustrated by Diana Stanley

Whether the toy is a twig doll with a hollyhock skirt and an acorn cup or a Lego figure from a Star Wars set, children like to enact their fantasies in a miniature world. Whatever the era, diminutive has always held fascination. There is a long chain of authors who have fed this interest in a parallel world of small, anchored at one end by Jonathan Swift. No one much remembers the giant Brobdingnagians, but the image of the tiny Lilliputians staking the sleeping Gulliver to the ground is one that stays. T.H White continued the Lilliput story in his imaginative Mistress Masham’s Repose. There have been a slew of other books of variable quality. But the queen of small people was clearly Mary Norton, the brilliant English writer who created The Borrowers.

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Pod is the hardworking straightforward father, Homily the anxious harassed mother, and Arriety the spirited and curious 13 year old girl. They live under the kitchen floorboards of an old Georgian house in the English countryside, home to Great Aunt Sophie, a bedridden invalid who enjoys a decanter of Fine Old Pale Madeira every evening between 6:00 and midnight. There was a time when the house was full of borrowers, but the shrinking of the human household was accompanied by the emigration of the borrower families until only one remains. They live by quietly garnering from their human hosts – tea, sugar cubes, and biscuits, silver coins for plates, a lace handkerchief for a bedspread, a Queen Victoria postage stamp to hang as a portrait, discarded letters to wallpaper the sitting room with the writing running up and down in vertical stripes. Arriety’s bedroom is made from cigar boxes, so her view is of feathery palm trees and chiffon swirled ladies.

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Their survival depends on their invisibility – only Pod leaves their home for his borrowing forays and the only human being who sees him is Great Aunt Sophy, who assumes their long conversations are a figment of her Madeira-soaked imagination. Their routine is upset when a young boy arrives, sent from India to convalesce from rheumatic fever. Arriety encounters him on her first borrowing expedition, and the consequences of their resultant friendship threaten the existence of the borrower family. They are forced to flee, and their lives are taken up in the sequel, The Borrowers Afield.

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Mary Norton wrote six borrower books over a thirty year period – this is a rare series in which the sequels do not disappoint. The writing is light and intelligent, the characters subtly complex, the details inventive, and the stories fresh and truthful. The Borrowers was awarded the Carnegie Medal and ranks among the top children’s books ever written.

IMG_3547-629x1024The English editions of all but the last in the series were illustrated by Diana Stanley, and it is well worth hunting for them. She captured the tone of Norton’s writing and the nuances of the borrowers’ often precarious life. The same cannot be said for the illustrators of the American editions, Beth and Joe Krush, who seemed to be overly preoccupied by Victorian frippery, a style that Norton did not countenance.

Pippi Longstocking

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Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

1945

As an adult rereading Pippi Longstocking, I had an uncomfortable sense that I had encountered this character in another guise. Could it be? Lisbeth Salander, the punk, damaged, vengeance-seeking heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?

Dragon-tattoo-coverBoth superheroines who bring their superhuman powers to the defense of victims, brute strength in the case of Pippi, computer hacking in the case of Lisbeth. Both outsiders, awkward in the world, unable to read the cues of adult interaction. Both intolerant of societal norms and human hypocrisy. Both orphans, effectively. Both redheads.

As it turned out, I was right. Stieg Larsson was much influenced by his reading of Astrid Lindgren’s books during childhood. In his Millenium Trilogy, he named his alterego Michael Blomkvist after Lindgren’s boy detective series and he modeled his female feral warrior, Lisbeth Salander, after Pippi Longstocking.

Neither Lindgren nor Larsson were accomplished writing stylists. Lindgren’s prose is wooden and there is no narrative arc. Pippi is a shallow personality lacking any trace of emotional nuance. She tells us at the outset that her mother died and went to heaven, and that her father, a sea captain, was swept overboard during a storm, a catastrophe referred to thusly. “And then this annoying thing had to happen.” Even when saving small boys from a burning building, she seems largely lacking in empathy. When she disrupts the school classroom, when she explodes onto the circus ring, when she taunts the mothers at the coffee klatch with their endless complaints about servants, she is relentless and does not know when to stop. Despite the irritatingly frenetic illustrations that accompany most Pippi editions, there is nothing particularly funny about her antics – rather, they elicit the same kind of uncomfortable embarrassment that meets an off-color joke. Perhaps this is most apparent when she manhandles two burglars into submission and forces them to dance the schottische with her. Hours later, exhausted, they slink away, and I am reminded of the analogous scene when Lisbeth wreaks her revenge on her abusive guardian.

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Despite the flaws, Lindgren managed to create a compelling character whose popularity has remained intact for generations of readers. The premise is admirable – a nine year old girl who lives an unsupervised life in the Villa Villekulla, alone save for a monkey and a horse. She is resourceful, independent, irreverent, self-reliant, unconstrained. She is at her best when she shares her unfettered life with Tommy and Annika, the children next door, and it is only towards them that she shows a modicum of affection. The book is at its best when Pippi leads them into a world of imaginative play that showcases her tall tales from her former seafaring life, her transformation of the ordinary humdrum into marvels of wonder, and her 90-degrees-off quirky way of doing things. What I remember from reading Pippi Longstocking as a child was something quite simple – her conferring of treasure status on found objects (“Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, dead rats, candy snap crackers, little tiny screws, and things like that”) and her secreting her worthless valuables in a hollow tree.

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(Illustration of Pippi with horse and monkey by Abby Haddican.)

 

The Black Stallion

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The Black Stallion by Walter Farley

1941

Illustrated by Keith Ward

Obsessions with horses are stereotypically the domain of young girls. So Walter Farley was probably wise to create a boy protagonist for his exciting horse story, thus ensuring that his book would appeal to both genders.

The adventure opens with Alec Ramsey on board a tramp steamer, returning from India where he has spent two months visiting his missionary uncle. At an Arabian port, a magnificent black stallion, wild and unbroken, is loaded on to the ship. In an ensuing storm and shipwreck, the stallion swims with Alec to a deserted island, thus saving both from drowning. As the two struggle to survive, a bond forms between boy and horse which persists through their rescue and subsequent life outside New York City.   A retired jockey sees Black‘s potential as a racehorse and arranges for surreptitious midnight training sessions at the Belmont track. The story culminates with a special match race which pits Black against the two fastest horses in the country.

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Farley began writing The Black Stallion while in high school and published it while an undergraduate at Columbia: he was not much older than his young protagonist. The book is imbued with a delightful youthful naivete. What it lacks in deathless prose, it makes up for in spirited adventure. Farley grew up in the world of horse racing and he writes convincingly about the exhilaration of being on the back of a galloping horse, whether it be while skimming over the sandy beach of an isolated island or thundering to the finish line of a track. He also understood the importance of character, both human and equine. It is a deft touch to portray the dependent relationship between the high strung Black and the old swaybacked cart horse, Napoleon, whose presence is so calming.

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If The Black Stallion appeals, there are twenty more in the series. The Black Stallion Returns is particularly riveting since it moves the action to Arabia. It includes a ruthless one-armed villain, murder in the desert sands, blood feuds, Bedouin intrigue, and, as always, a climactic race.

Keith Ward illustrated the original book, but many other illustrators have tried their hand.  Note especially the lurid cover art by Harold Eldridge (The Black Stallion Returns) and Milton Menasco (The Black Stallion’s Filly and The Black Stallion and Satan).

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The Box of Delights

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The Box of Delights or When the Wolves Were Running by John Masefield

1935

Illustrated by Judith Masefield

John Masefield’s upbringing reads like something out of Dickens. Orphaned at a young age (his mother died in childbirth, his father in an asylum), he was taken in by a domineering and despised aunt who quickly packed him off to a boarding school where he was miserable and then to a maritime school (on the HMS Conway) where he was more miserable still. After weathering (badly) a month-long ice storm of51Z5+yo35bL._AC_UL320_SR208,320_f Cape Horn, he landed in a Chilean hospital with sunstroke and a nervous breakdown before being deemed unfit and sent home. His aunt arranged for his next apprenticeship on a ship out of New York. Masefield failed to report for duty and, age 16, became a vagabond in America, determined to be a writer. The high point of his teen sailing years must have been the sighting of a lunar rainbow. Despite his traumatic experiences on ocean voyages, he is best known for his poems Sea-Fever (“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky….”) and Cargoes (“Quinquereme of Ninevah from distant Ophir/ Rowing home to haven in Sunny Palestine.”) He was a prolific writer – of poems, novels, and plays – and was celebrated in the U.K. where he was Poet Laureate for almost forty years. Along the way, he
wrote the two Kay Harker books for children, The Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (1935), and these are strange gems indeed.

Kay Harker, like the author, is an orphan. Returning to his home and guardian for the winter holidays, he encounters a Punch and Judy showman on a station platform. This is Cole Hawlings, who gives Kay a message to deliver (“The Wolves are Running”) and the Box of Delights for safekeeping. The Box can make Kay swift or small, as well as open doors to the past. All of which comes in handy as he grapples with the nefarious and mercurial Abner Brown and his gang – their standard disguise is in the ecclesiastical robes of seminarians, but they can also morph into wolves or pirates or dive-bombing toy airplanes. The Brotherhood scrobbles (kidnaps) the Punch and Judy man, Kay’s beloved guardian, his friends Maria and Peter, the Bishop of Tatchester, and all the cathedral staff down to the choir boys. At the denouement, as the water is rising menacingly in the dungeon cells, it is up to Kay to overcome the sinister villains. And he must do so in time for the Christmas Eve celebration at the Tatchester Cathedral to take place at midnight.

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The book is richly complex with an inspired confusion of elements. There are unicorn-drawn sleighs, stags, talking rats and mice, fairies, Roman legionnaires, jousting knights, Christmas parties, carol singers, incompetent police inspectors, and innocent diversions like building snowmen or sailing toy ships a la Christopher Columbus. It’s an unusual mix but it all combines to create an odd off-kilter universe that accommodates the real world and the fantastic. Kay is the unflappable center – good natured, matter-of-factly courageous, intrepid, honorable, decent. Masefield’s genius was to combine Magic and Crime. What other master jewel thief can you think of who could collapse his soothsaying boy assistant (his head telescoping into his chest) to punish him for insolence?

Masefield, with his poet’s eye, was a master of atmospherics. Try this.

“It was a dark, lowering afternoon, with a whine in the wind, and little dry pellets of snow blowing horizontally. In the gutters, these had begun to fall into little white layers and heaps….. Kay went on alone into the street. He thought that he had never been out in a more evil-looking afternoon. The marketplace had emptied, people had packed their booths, and wheeled away their barrows. As he went down towards Dr. Gubbinses, the carved beasts in the woodwork of the old houses seemed crouching against the weather. Darkness was already closing in. There was a kind of glare in the evil heaven. The wind moaned about the lanes. All the sky above the roofs was grim with menace, and the darkness of the afternoon gave a strangeness to the fire-light that glowed in the many windows.”

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There is an uneasy eerie undercurrent of the ominous, the sinister, the creepy that runs through the story, but there are also passages of innocent delight. When read in December, it is a book that will give the reader the fantods on a wintry evening (as Peter would say) but also be a joyful harbinger of Christmas celebrations.

The endpapers and the diminutive illustrations, provided by Masefield’s daughter, reflect this odd and original tone.

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Aside:

“Jolly good chaps, the Romans,” Kay said.

“Oh, I don’t know, said Peter. “They were rather a mouldy lot. They were lucky chaps not to have to learn Latin grammar, but to know it naturally.”

Along Came a Dog

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Along Came a Dog by Meindert Dejong

1958

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

Along Came a Dog is the unlikely story of a man, a homeless dog, and a little red hen. On the first day of spring, the man enters the hen house and greets the red hen, a bright and adventurous creature when compared to the timid bird-brained white chickens and the unimaginative rooster. The little red hen’s toes have frozen and fallen off during the cold winter and she is left with an awkward ungainly gait that makes her the target of the flock’s nastiness. The man fashions rubber flippers and sews them onto his jacket: when he plants the hen’s knuckle bones into the socket holes, she can perch on his shoulder. A black stray dog, meek and starving, appears in the barnyard and becomes the little red hen’s protector. Twice banished by the man, he twice manages to find his way back to continue his mission as the hen’s guardian. By the end, he earns himself the gratitude of the man and the home he so craves.

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Dejong’s style appears simple, deceptively so. No breathless prose here – Dejong’s Dutch Calvinist background is evidenced by straightforward plots, methodically written. Behind the plain-spokenness, however, is an uncanny ability to convey the essence of character, whether it be the stupidity and meanness of a flock of chickens or the cringing self-effacement of a miserable dog desperate for an owner. In DeJong’s books, the overriding sense is one of honesty.

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In a long and prolific career, Meindert DeJong was repeatedly acknowledged for his unusual gift as a writer for children. He was the first American (he immigrated to Michigan from Holland at the age of eight) to be honored with the Hans Christian Andersen Award. He set a record when he was awarded one Newberry Medal and four Newberry Honors in a five year stretch. The Newberry Medal went to The Wheel on the School, a story of a group of young children in a Dutch village who wonder why the storks have disappeared and carry out a plan to attract their return. The Newberry Honors went to Shadrach, Hurry Home Candy, The House of Sixty Fathers, and Along Came a Dog. A decade later, he received the National Book Award for Journey from Peppermint Street.

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The Children of Green Knowe

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The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston

1954

Illustrated by Peter Boston

“A little boy was sitting in the corner of a railway carriage looking out at the rain, which was splashing against the windows and blotching downward in an ugly dirty way. He was not the only person in the carriage, but the others were strangers to him. He was alone as usual. There were two women opposite him, a fat one and a thin one, and they talked without stopping, smacking their lips in between sentences and seeming to enjoy what they said as much as if it were something to eat. They were knitting all the time, and whenever the train stopped the click-clack of their needles was loud and clear like two clocks. It was a stopping train – more stop than go – and it had been crawling along through flat flooded country for a long time. Everywhere there was water – not sea or rivers or lakes, but just senseless flood water with the rain splashing into it. Sometimes the railway lines were covered by it, and then the train noise was quite different, softer than a boat.”

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So begins The Children of Green Knowe. And already we are witness to a rare exquisite prose and a gift for conveying character, describing nature, and creating mood. Lucy Boston penned this, her first manuscript, at the age of 62, and she proceeded to write six volumes of the Green Knowe chronicles, inspired by the 12th century Norman house that was her home.

Tolly is en route from his lonely boarding school existence to spend the Christmas holidays with his great grandmother in the ancient castle of Green Knowe. Mrs Oldknow provides the kindness, wisdom, and solace that is lacking in his life, his father and step-mother being off in remote Burma. She shares with him the stories of three children who lived at Green Knowe in the 17th century, and gradually Toby, Alexander, and Linnet come to people Tolly’s world. Lucy Boston is able to convey perfectly the palpable richness that accompanies the spirit children, even when they are invisible and silent, contrasted with the flat emptiness when they are absent.

The beautiful blend of reality and fantasy that is introduced in The Children of Green Knowe is continued in The Treasure of Green Knowe, every bit as good as the first. This time “the others”, who come from the turn of the 19th century, are Susan, a young girl blind from birth, and Jacob, a slave boy from Barbados brought to England to be her eyes. The Green Knowe chronicles, with their breathtaking writing, are a treasure of children’s literature, and it is a shame that they are so little known.

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Box:   “At one side there was a beautiful old rocking horse – not a “safety” rocking horse hanging on iron swings from a centre shaft, but a horse whose legs were stretched to full gallop, fixed to long rockers so that it could, if you rode it violently, both rear and kick.”

Box: “At school he was learning to ride real horses. They were not, alas, at all like Feste, Toby’s horse. Their coats were not shining silk but rough like railway upholstery, and when one patted them, clouds of dust came out.”

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