My third granddaughter (GD3), aged 9 and an avid reader, recently decided and declared that the books she likes best are about real people in real situations, although she stretches a point for Harry Potter. This gives me a very strange sense of déjà vu because I came to exactly the same conclusion at about her age and have never wavered from it although I can cope with a bit of speculative fiction occasionally. The odd thing is that I don’t think I have ever discussed this with GD3 (until now) so she has worked this out independently. Maybe it’s a genetic thing?

Unsurprisingly, therefore, she likes Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and David Walliams – coming to Chickenshed Theatre with me before Christmas for a musical version of the latter’s Mr Stink and loving every word, note and action. She is also very keen on Onjali Q Rauf whose work was unknown to me until GD3 told me about it. Well, both as a secondary English teacher and as a reviewer of books for magazines and newspapers I have never bothered to distinguish much between “adult” and “children’s” or “Young Adult” fiction. I agree with Philip Pullman that a good book is for anyone who engages with it. Ageist labels are usually unhelpful and irrelevant.

So I sat with GD3 the other day when her mother was at work and I was on essential childcare duties and – to her delight –  downloaded The Star Outside My Window. which was published in 2019. The next day I read it – almost in one sitting, swept away by its tragedy and optimism.

Aniyah and her little brother Noah have arrived in a kindly foster home. She, a first person narrator, is temporarily mute and there has clearly been some kind of catastrophic trauma which she has partly blotted out. Of course she’s the traditional unreliable narrator convinced that her mother has been transmuted and eternalised into a newly identified star. The adult reader sees quite quickly that her mother is dead and I worked out what must have happened long before the end. I suspect it would take most young readers longer although the hints are there. The truth is utterly appalling – no wonder there is a lot of information at the end for people who need help and Rauf has founded a charity called Herstory. And yet this is also a story with hope. By the end Aniyah and Noah have gained  a great deal as well as lost. And the quest and friendship story which lie at the heart of the novel as the children set off on a mission (no spoilers) is full of tension, warmth and good humour. You also glean as you go that Aniyah’s former homelife  was quite “privileged” with a hedge fund manager father, two cars and trips to Disneyland and yet … Abuse, of course, is classless.

Read it. Trust me. You really don’t need to be a primary school child to be moved and engaged by this novel. Rauf has got inside the minds of the children she writes about so convincingly that  you’ll emerge knowing a lot more about  how it must feel to be a vulnerable, troubled, damaged child.

Rumer Godden’s powerful, unsentimental 1955 novel is about children.  But, however it might have been marketed, it doesn’t feel like a children’s novel – whatever we think that is, and of course in the 66 years since it was written we’ve taken to categorising many books as “young adult” or YA. Nonetheless it used to be widely read/taught in classrooms. I first discovered and read it when I was on teaching practice at a girls’ secondary school in Worthing in 1967 where one of the classes I was assigned to teach was studying it as a class reader.

Rereading it over half a century later I’m struck by a number of things. I love the contemporary detail – Lyons Corner House, the bombed church which needs rebuilding, the old fashioned police station, the newspaper vendor, the pre-decimal money and all the rest of it. I would have been about the age the central character, Lovejoy Mason, is when this book is set and some of the setting is my childhood too although I was more fortunate than she is for most of the novel.

Lovejoy lives with a couple who run a restaurant.  They’re kind but have serious financial problems of their own including the disappearance of Loveday’s single mother and her failure to pay for her child’s keep. Loveday’s background lurks murkily in the narrative but it’s clear to the adult reader what is going on in relation to the feckless actress mother and her men.

Beneath the bravado, cockiness and independence Loveday is a sensitive child who likes beautiful things. Starting from a position of total horticultural ignorance she gradually discovers that if you plant seeds,  even in a dirty, struggling environment like Catford Street, they grow into fresh new plants. So she creates a secret garden – with help from the decent, but outwardly tough, local gang leader, Tip Malone. And to do it they need topsoil –  which they’ve seen lying about for the taking in a nearby London square garden. Then the inevitable happens.

This book is peopled by dozens of rounded, likeable people (and a few strident stirrers) including the neighbours and shopkeepers on the street, the middle class inhabitants of the square, the local catholic priest, a pair of nice people with wealth and big car and Tip’s parents who aren’t at all pleased  when Lovejoy – as they see it – gets their lad into trouble.

When I first read An Episode of Sparrows (only a decade or so after it was written) I thought what a warm, perceptive, upbeat novel it is. And I’ve come away from it with the same reaction now. These children needed understanding and kindness not judgement by people who don’t know the half of it. They’re growing up in a very challenging environment and Loveday’s situation is dire. The children’s home she may have to go to is kindly but thoughtlessly cavalier about children’s real feelings. And yet that’s how it would have been in 1956 so this was a novel ahead of its time in forcing the reader to confront these issues. Notwithstanding Eve Garnett’s ground breaking books in the late 1930s, most books about (or for) children in the mid 1950s still focused on boarding schools and middle class escapism.

Rumer Godden mercifully grants us a happy ending which is very neat and satisfying but it’s a near thing. It wouldn’t have been thus for many real children in this position.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Star Outside My Window by Onjali Q Rauf

I’ve known about the prison reform work of Elizabeth Fry since I was about 9 – thanks to The Girl, a sister comic to The Eagle, which published from 1951 to 1964 and was a significant contributor to my education. Until now, however, I did not know that she also worked to improve the lot of women being transported. Each was given a pack which included sewing materials. In 1841 The Rajah, captained by Charles Ferguson sailed from London to Tasmania with 180 women and ten children on board along with Kezia Hayter, 23, a protégé of Fry’s. She was charged with the responsibility of looking after the women on board and developing their sewing skills. The result was the Rajah Quilt – on display today in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Those are the historical facts around which Hope Adams has woven a warm, humane, respectful story. It’s a pretty wonderful tribute to human nature because, on the whole, people on board all behave decently to each other – an interesting antidote to other accounts of this period such as Carmen Callil’s Oh Happy Day which I also read recently. If crewmen at fault are whipped aboard the Rajah, Adams doesn’t tell us about it – just the barest hint that there are good reasons for obeying orders. There is filth and squalor in the women’s quarters but there are also valiant attempts to manage it, keep it as clean as possible and to spend time elsewhere on the vessel. And perhaps it really was like that because – unusually – there was only one death aboard the Rajah in the three months it took to cross the world to Van Diemens Land, as Tasmania was then known.

And it’s a single death which forms the imaginative starting point for Adams’s novel. Why is Hattie, who fights for her life after being stabbed for weeks, targeted? It’s a tense whodunit because, of course, the perpetrator has to be someone on board. So we’re treated to a patchwork (quilt reference intended) of interwoven back stories and the gradual revelation that some of these women really do have things to hide. They’re not all just people who stole to feed their children or took to prostitution in order to live. And of course there’s lot of the messiness of human life here – some of these women are lesbian which is sneered at by some of the others, one is pregnant and they nearly all, unsurprisingly, have what we would now call mental health issues. The quilt, however, goes a long way towards unifying and reclaiming the 18 women who work on it. I was reminded several times of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 play Our Country’s Good and its message about the redemptive power of art.

Many of the books I discuss here are rereads of titles I have known for decades. Published earlier this month, Dangerous Women is new and I wish Hope Adams (a pseudonym for Adèle Geras) well with it. It’s a satisfying, accessible account of something which could be – and probably often was –  unthinkably appalling told from a sensitive perspective. I found the split time narrative a bit clumsy but it didn’t detract much from my enjoyment. And there’s a real life love story subplot with a happy ending which is always a bonus.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden