You could be forgiven for thinking I have entered my second childhood. I am beginning to think so myself. In the past few weeks I've read two Noel Streatfeilds, a Ngiao Marsh first read aged 13, and now I've just finished this, which I read when I was about eight or nine. I have re-read it since, to various children, and my excuse for buying it now was that I was going to give it to my grandson George. I hope he is going to love it as much as I did and still do. My mother had loved E Nesbit when she was a child, and we happily read The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Five Children and It, The Story of the Amulet, and others too though those were the ones we liked the best. But this one always had the most special place in my heart. It is about time travel, though I wouldn't have used or even known that phrase when I was a child.
Edred Arden is ten, and his sister Elfrida two years older, when something astonishing happens -- two things, in fact. They have been living with their aunt, who runs a boarding house at the seaside -- their mother died when they were small, and their father and Uncle Jim have disappeared on a gold prospecting expedition in South America, and have been pronounced dead. Amazingly, the news comes that a distant relative has died, and that Edred has inherited his title and his property -- he is now Lord Arden, and the owner of the picturesque, though ruined, Arden Castle. Luckily the ruin has a house attached, and the two children are soon living there and being cared for by the motherly housekeeper Mrs Honeysett while their aunt sells the boarding house. The children soon discover that there is supposed to be a great treasure hidden somewhere in or around the castle, and as there is little money available they wish more than anything that they could find it. They would like to restore the castle, and also to help the poor people in the neighbourhood by mending their roofs and enabling them to feed their children.
The second astonishing thing that happens is that the children discover magic. They meet a small creature, a white mole -- the Mouldiwarp -- who gives them a wonderful gift. They learn that in a secret room in the attic -- only accessible at certain times -- there are trunks full of clothes from past periods in history. If they put on any of these clothes, they find themselves at once back in that time. So, with this great ability, they visit Napoleonic times, the eighteenth century, the England of James I, and finally the time of Henry VIII. On each visit, they have extraordinary and sometimes frightening adventures, but they also gather a little more information that may help them to find the hiding place of the treasure. Whether they find it or not I shall not tell you, as, even though you are grown up, you really should read this story. Perhaps you can already imagine how intensely exciting all this was to a small child with a fascination for history. I longed and longed so much to find those trunks and to put on those clothes!
E Nesbit was a fascinating and beautiful woman, with great socialist ideals. There is an excellent biography, A Woman of Passion, by the beautiful and brilliant Professor Julia Briggs, who sadly died last year. I was lucky enough to know her, and loved her book on Nesbit, with whom, I think, she must have felt some affinity.
