Beyond "Little Women": Looking for something to read

I had a secret plan to spend most of Memorial Day re-reading a beloved old book. Noel Streatfeild is best known for her "Shoe" books--"Ballet Shoes," "Theater Shoes," "Movie Shoes," novels set during World War II in England, mostly involving orphaned children growing up and figuring out their place in the world.

But her book that I love the most is "The Magic Summer,"about the four Gareth children, who are dispatched to Ireland to live with their strange old Aunt Dymphna in her big old falling-down house in the wilds of County Cork, while their mother goes off to India to tend their father, who has fallen ill.

Aunt Dymphna is a great character, a true eccentric, brilliant and strange. She's always swooping into rooms in her rusty old cape and gardening boots, and then staring at the children as though they're bizarre creatures. Which they are, to her.

One day, she grabs the earnest, overworked, nervous oldest child, Penny, who is slaving away trying to be mother to the other three, and races her across the field back to the house. When they arrive, panting and disheveled, Dymphna checks her watch and says, "I have given you a minute. Now do something with it."

Or words to that effect. I cannot quote accurately, because I ordered the book from Amazon and it has not yet arrived.

There went my Memorial Day plan.

So, a few minutes ago, I went down the basement to where I keep the books of my childhood, just to make sure that I don't somehow already own "The Magic Summer," and, sadly, I do not. I remember the book very well, though; I checked it out of the library again and again. It was fat, with a pale blue cover, slightly warped, and with wonderful pen-and-ink line drawings by Edward Ardizzone, who seems to have illustrated fully half of the most-loved books of my early years.

I learned early on to read by author, but somewhere along the line I learned also to trust illustrators. And so if a book was illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, or by Beth and Joe Krush ("The Borrowers") or by Ernest H. Shepherd ("Winnie the Pooh," "The Wind in the Willows") I knew right away the book would be good.

So what else do I have down there in the basement? In addition to the obvious, of course--the Betsy Tacy books, the Little House books, most of the Anne of Green Gables series?

"The Alley," by Eleanor Estes--another Edward Ardizzone-illustrated book, about kids who live along an alley in Brooklyn. Such a simple premise, but a whole world is captured in that alley. Strange characters, and a mystery to be solved.

"Blue Willow," and "Greenwillow," different authors, entirely different books. "Blue Willow" was a Newbery honor book, about the child of migrant workers who wanted a permanent home and fantasized about the one pictured on blue willow china. (And that book is the reason I now own a set of blue willow cups and plates.)

"Greenwillow" is a spectacular book by B.J. Chute (illustrator: Eric Blegvad, another one to be trusted) about a young woman named Dorrie, and Gideon, the man she loves. But Gideon comes from a long line of wandering men, and he refuses to marry her because he fears that he will get "the call" to wander and will end up abandoning her, as his father did his mother.

"Harriet the Spy." Forget the movie. Forget that there ever was a movie. Read the book, about a little girl who spied on people and wrote everything down. Her nanny, Ole Golly, is one of the greatest characters in children's literature.

"Friday's Tunnel" and "February's Road," by John Verney, about the Callendar family in England. A mixture of politics, adventure, intrigue, and country living, with pen-and-ink illustrations by the author.

(Note: Why was I drawn to so many English books? It's not that I was an Anglophile--I wasn't. But the books seemed calmer, wittier, more intelligent than American books for children, I think. Less slapstick. Less concerned about romance, and more concerned about great writing, and great stories about self-reliance and growing up.)

"The Princess and the Goblin," a fantasy that haunted me for months after I read it. Oh, those scary goblins, who abhorred toes. Oh, that magical grandmother, who sometimes was up in the attic, spinning by the light of the moon, and sometimes was not. (But when she was, you never knew what magic was going to take place.) Oh, Curdy, the little miner boy. Oh what a lovely lovely book.

After a few minutes I brought "The Alley" back upstairs with me. Maybe I'll sit in the back yard today, or on the front porch (see top photo) and read it again. It's a lovely sunny day. The birds are chirping. We have no obligations. It is a good day to go back in time, in a beloved old book.