For young holiday dippers

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33728, 28 December 1974, Page 9

For young holiday dippers

Oxford children's paperbacks are of a high standard, and can be sure of a good audience. Some Oxford children's novels which have already become favourites in hardback are among their recent reissues. THE BEETHOVEN MEDAL, by K. M. Peyton, appears only three years after its first publication. doubtless in response to the popularity of this author’s hero, the talented and wayward Pennington, familiar of the concert platform as of the local gaol.

Another Oxford novel whose topicalitv is still its virtue — after more than' a decade — is THE LATCHKEY CHILDREN, by Eric Allen, where the main action is in a London housing estate playground. Three historical novels are among these paperbacks; Barbara Leonie Picard’s story

RANSOM FOR A KNIGHT was first published in 1956, and it is good to have the opportunity of reading it again and realising how good the story' is quite apart from the ease with which the author recreates the fourteenth-century setting.

RIFLES FOR WATIE. by Harold Keith, seems by comparison much less good, although it is useful to have a novel for a young age group which employs the less familiar (in story) historical background of the American Civil War.

The Stronghold. By Mollie Hunter. Hamish Hamilton. 205 pp.

Massive circular stone towers called brochs are found only on the north coast of Scotland or on the islands off that coast. There are about 500 of them, all built on arable land close to the sea, and all probably built in the period from the middle of the first century B.A. to the end of the first century A.D. They all followed the the same brilliantly'original yet simple design. In “The Stronghold” Mollie Hunter, already well known for her historical novels, imagines the story of the man in whose brain this concept first grew. Coll, a member of the Celtic tribe of the Boar on the Orkney Islands, was crippled as a small boy when his mother was captured by Roman slaveraiders. His inability to fight, coupled with the increasing number of raids and the decreasing strength of the tribe turn his mind to thoughts of defence, and he dreams of a stronghold. His plan is completed just as conflict between Nectan, chief of the tribe, and Domnall, the chief Druid, flares into hostility over the best way to meet the Roman threat.

It is not. however, until blood has been shed, both in anger and in sacrifice that Coil’s stronghold is given a trial and proves itself triumphantly in a battle with a raiding party of the

Roman navy. Mollie Hunter has brilliantly recreated the ancient Celtic world, has peopled it with characters who capture the imagination, and has told a story which cannot fail to hold the interest of young readers.

THE SLEEPERS ON THE HILL, by Catherine Sefton (Faber, 126 pp.) is set in a remote country district in Ireland, where local families know to treat the mound they call the Sleepers’ Hill with more respect than outsiders show it. Here the forces that threaten are less exclusively other-wordly than in the other two books: the power of greed is strongly represented. But they are nonetheless alarming, especially to the children who are at the centre of the action.

A delightful volume of verse for younger children is James K. Baxter’s THE TREE HOUSE (Price Milburn, 53 pp, illustrated). Most of the work dates to the period when Baxter was himself serving as a primary school-teacher, and uses the full rhymes and conventional forms which children seem to find most satisfying. However, even adult readers will be interested in the brief television script with which the book ends; in it. Baxter reads a simple poem of his, “The Fisherman,” and explains his technique and purposes.