Fell Farm Campers by Marjorie Lloyd

Published 1960

This is the final one of the Fell Farm books, set the Easter before the children's parents return from abroad, when they expect everything may be about to change. The holiday nearly doesn't come off - Fell Farm, which is a National Trust property, has the builders in, and there's no room. Happily, they think of camping, and the Jenks can squeeze young Sally in despite the work, so they can go ahead, which is just as well really, as there's not much room for them all in Aunt G.'s London flat either, and she's very anxious about whether the neighbours will complain when they are all there at once.

Once they get there the children set up camp by the tarn quite near the farm - far enough away to be independent, but close enough to be able to collect milk and other supplies easily, and for Sally to run messages between the two, which pleases her. They also all return to the farm once a day for a proper meal, cooked by the bountiful Mrs Jenks on oil stoves in the big barn. The rest of the day they are free to roam, whether it's just to collect wood (pig-sticking) to keep the camp fire going, or to set off on one of their mammoth hikes across the fells - they are indefatigable walkers!

Just after nine they started along the edge of the little Heron Tarn, scrambled over the wall into the narrow mountain road and turned sharply right downhill. The whole length of that rough, twisty little lane dropping steeply down to Oxenfell, gave the most tremendous views across all the ridges and deep cut valleys towards Wetherlam, Bowfell, the Langdale Pikes, and the rest, and they discussed the route as they tramped down with the whole region spread in front like a map, fullscale and gloriously coloured.

Various adventures occur - brushes with fellow campers, a hunt for a sheep-killing dog...Jan and Hyacinth set off on a birdwatching expedition which nearly ends in disaster again. The story romps along, told in the third person this time: Hyacinth is on strike and says she won't keep a journal as there will be lots of other work to do while they are camping (indeed, Kay seems to spend all her spare time darning socks!) These are certainly books to charm the adult reader, but I think that a child who enjoyed the outdoor life might find much to entertain, as well, and I well remember day-dreaming about being able to go off on camping holidays when I was a child (conveniently ignoring my dislike of midges, aversion to spiders and preference for a comfortable bed, even then). There are pleasing cat and dog characters too.

Fell Farm for Christmas

It's a little late to be writing about this, but the temperature has just dropped sharply as the sun set, so not too inappropriate!

Children just don't have holidays like this any more: the five Brownes - two pairs of twins and their younger sister - return to the Westmorland farm they had visited during the summer, ready for a winter holiday of brisk walks and birdwatching. The story starts with their train journey, via Crewe, Oxenholme and Windermere, and I was instantly nostalgic for all the times in childhood I travelled on that line (for some reason I was particularly fond of Crewe station, perhaps because it used to be such an enormous interchange that there was always plenty to look at):

We were somewhere between Hest Bank and Carnforth - the bit where the railway runs along the edge of the sea, and you usually get the first view of the fells, looking simply wonderful across the great curve of the bay.
But this time it was half past four on an afternoon in late December, and the light had gone from the sky, except for some long, dim bars of gold just above the horizon. I swore that I could just glimpse the faintest gleam of snow-caps, pale as silver. The others said that it was imagination, and maybe it was; but it really didn't matter, because we all knew that they were there.

Hyacinth, our narrator, combines a romantic imagination (she has her notebooks with her, so that she can continue writing The Mystery of the Blood-Stained Hippopotamus during the holiday) and down-to-earth practicality about things like supplies for walks, and we're plunged straight into farm life and long tramps round the fells. In one of my favourite chapters Hyacinth's twin Jan rescues a heron which has got trapped in a pond, frozen in while fishing. A few years ago I rescued a heron myself, and could share their wonder at being so close to such a remarkable bird, and their pleasure in its return to health. The sheep rustling scene, on the other hand, would make any modern parent's blood run cold, I fear! And I can't think that many children wash their own socks these days, more's the pity.

Fell Farm for Christmas is an attractively brisk romp, the sort of holiday children of my generation dreamed of, with lots of fresh air, hearty food and adventure. It was published the year I was born and the past is a golden place in these pages. My own holidays weren't so eventful (I never knowingly met a sheep rustler!), but otherwise not so very different from what is described here. I shall pass it on next to my mother, who spent the war not far from Carnforth, and still gets wistful about it.

Oh, and there are maps. I do like a map and they are suitably Wainwright-ish.

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be by Farley Mowat

Published 1957

Mutt, by Paul Galdone

I was thinking that my reading for the Canadian Book Challenge wasn’t going to progress much during my lengthy absence from home – for instance, I feel it would be cheating to count any John Buchan writing not set in Canada – but I was only able to carry a limited number of books on the train, and choices had to be made. So I was pleased to rediscover a stalwart of the Canadian canon, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, on the dining table from at least two visits ago (in my parents’ house books and newspapers adorn every possible surface, in piles); I think my mother found it in the charity shop, and she can’t resist anything with a dog in the title.

The Dog in question is Mutt, accidentally acquired by the Mowat family during a search for a hunting dog. Passed off to hunting friends as a “Prince Albert Retriever”, Mutt is initially a disaster in the field, but gradually begins to acquire his own methods, eventually becoming legendary as a dog who can retrieve even out of season. The learning process is full of incident – Mutt is enthusiastic about chasing cows – and difficulty, as Saskatoon is on the dry side for duck hunting, and Mutt’s methods eccentric: he doesn’t always wait for ducks to be shot, but retrieves a swimming bird from underneath. He’s an avid cat chaser, too, and from an early start with ladders, becomes a sure-footed mountaineer, although none of the family share his interest, and are usually to be found waiting impatiently at the foot of the precipice, anxious to continue their holiday:

This mountain climbing passion was an infernal nuisance to the rest of us, for he would sneak away whenever we stopped, and would appear high on the face of some sheer cliff, working his way steadily upward, and deaf to our commands that he return to us.

Mutt is not the only animal to share the Mowat home; the young Farley’s early interest in nature leads to an extensive collection of creatures which share his bedroom (owing to some misplaced advice by his amateur naturalist uncle that the way to learn about animals is to live with them). Two horned owls prove even more of a terror to the local cat population than Mutt.

As a British child I grew up on the writing of Gerald Durrell (there’s a feel of My Family and Other Animals to The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be – the same harassed mother and neighbours, for a start); I would have loved this book then, and would have gone on to read others by the author (and still will, I hope). I gather there is some question of the authenticity of his writing on both animal and human inhabitants of the Arctic – reading this memoir, I must admit to having doubted the total veracity of some events, but this book at least is none the worse for that. And all narrators are to some extent unreliable.