Not setting the intellectual bar very high this week, as you'll have guessed from my last post - but I've been really enjoying this old-fashioned children's book and galloped through it in a couple of days. I read the Persephone edition but this old Puffin cover seems rather more appropriate than Persephone's elegant dove-grey jackets which would have had zero appeal to me as a 10-year-old. Warning: it's best to switch off your critical faculties and just wallow. Once you start nit-picking about feckless parents who abandon their children (think a dry-land version of Swallows and Amazons' 'only duffers drown') and wonder why none of the children seems even mildly distressed, let alone traumatised (perhaps because Daddy is a foul-tempered crank and Mummy's a drip); and why, even though there's a master-class in hay-box cooking, nobody explains how to go to the loo when you live in a barn (or were middle-class kiddies in the 1930s too well-bred to have bottoms?) .. no, best just to wallow. Though I did long to shake Sue, the elder girl, and get her to stop washing and cleaning for her brothers - even their hankies, yuck - and making their beds! Sue, you are training up three useless husbands for the next generation!
And possibly this book should come with a warning about putting flighty ideas into parents' heads: 'Sorry, dearies, had a bang on the head, woke up half way up a mountain and forgot you brats existed' ... even today's helicopter parents might be sorely tempted!
