The Children of Green Knowe Collection: 1 (Faber Children's Classics)

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In the beginning of Lucy M. Boston's wonderful children's book, The Children of Green Knowe (1954), seven-year-old Toseland (pet name Tolly) travels by train through the flooded British countryside to spend his Christmas holidays with his great-grandmother Mrs. Oldknow in her old castle-like house Green Noah (true name Green Knowe). Tolly is a lonely and imaginative boy, Mrs. Oldknow a solitary and imaginative old lady, and they hit it off immediately, encouraging each other's fancies and treating each other with mutual respect and affection. I really enjoy the characters here. Tolly and his grandmother make a wonderful pair. They understand one another well, without the age difference being downplayed. Tolly is a young boy, and Grandmother Oldknow is adult, but they are able to share their love of the house while she teaches him of its history and shares his joy as he finds stashes of the other children's belongings--even if she does have to caution him to "Stop putting swords through the bedclothes" at one point.

Boucher, Anthony (June 1956). "Recommended Reading". The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. p.102. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.There is so much to recommend here: a ghost story, a Christmas story, and elements of magic and the fantastic. So much of life is seemingly magical to children. Tolly's discovery of the "other" children and the mouse and so many remarkable things in the garden are appreciated as extraordinary but without a sense of incredulity.

Mrs. Oldknow and Tolly do not appear in The River at Green Knowe. It is summertime and Green Knowe has been let to two women, the archaeologist Doctor Maud Biggin and her friend, Miss Sybilla Bun. Doctor Biggin has invited her great-niece Ida and two "displaced" refugee children, Oskar and Ping, to stay with them at Green Knowe. What a warm and wonderful book this is!! I wish I had read it when I was a child but am so glad I have gotten to read it now as an adult. This book is utterly charming. Boston lived at The Manor for almost 50 years, in which time she created a romantic garden and wrote all her children’s books. The Chimneys of Green Knowe was a commended runner up for the 1958 Carnegie Medal. [7] [a] In the United States it was published within the calendar year by Harcourt, as The Treasure of Green Knowe. [2] [3]I also appreciated the unpredictable, sometimes frustrating nature of the house's magic. Tolly gradually learns to accept the fact that he never knows quite when the other children will be visible to him, but it is frustrating at first. He wants his friends to be present all the time. "I want to be with them. Why can't I be with them?" he cries at one point. It is wonderful, but sometimes frustrating. The Wood children now were all sent to school. They spent a year near her mother’s family home at Arnside, Westmorland. This move to the countryside gave the children a more free and easy life-style than had been possible in Southport. Lucy describes the "wide and inexhaustible joys of Arnside", on an estuary of the river Kent. The children were free to wander woods and fields, explore the cliffs and coves of the river. Tolly is a young boy whose mom is dead and his father and stepmother live in Burma. He has been at boarding school where they have been very kind to him but he really longs to belong somewhere with his own family. Then suddenly he does! His great-grandmother OldKnow sends for him to come to live with her at the family home Green Knowe. He takes the train there and is a little excited and a little nervous.

In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish (1979), she gives an account of her war-time experiences. After training at St Thomas's Hospital in London and Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, she was posted to a casualty clearing station at Houlgate, Normandy. It's a story from an earlier time, full of wonderful childish joys but also genuine fright. Just like childhood itself - when we're ready to believe in the tooth fairy, but far more ready to believe in the bogey-man. The descriptions of the house as a home, the appreciation of old, beautiful things, buildings, country surroundings and wildlife had a huge appeal to us. How nice if you could revisit a place and people you have loved after you die. The way the children are described in snapshots of their lives carrying on although we know they are not alive is beautiful and seems perfectly realistic and plausible The description of some singing they hear as a Grandmother of long ago sings a baby to sleep with The Coventry Carol is so beautiful, happy and sad it is hard to read aloud. Other snatches of song in the text help the story come alive, some of our favourites, Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day and Green Grow The Rushes Oh are quoted, there is much appreciation of music and singing in this story. The other element we love are the stories within this story, each night Grandmother Oldknow tells Tolly a story by the fire. These could be read alone, we saved Linnet's story to read on Christmas eve, the simple story of a stone St Christopher walking to midnight mass is beautiful and the perfect Christmas eve read.The children arrive and begin to explore the river and canals round Green Knowe by canoe. Unlike the previous two books, this book centres on the river which flows past the manor, and adjacent islands. The children's adventures here are based in their current time, though strongly fantasy-based; they meet a bus driver who's retreated from modern money-based society, see flying horses, meet a giant, and witness a Bronze Age moon ceremony. The subtext, of homeless children being protected and healed by the house and its enchantments, is particularly strong.