Battle of St George Without (1966) is set in a run-down city area. Noel Streatfeild’s
vicarage family move from the inner London parish of The Bell Family (1954) to a very
different kind of parish in New Town (1960).
Historical novels are often set in periods of religious conflict or at times when religious
minorities were persecuted, but there is little discussion of the issues involved in such
conflicts. Geoffrey Trease’s The Red Towers of Granada (1966) tells of the attitudes
towards Jews in medieval Europe. Barbara Willard’s The Grove of Green Holly (1967) and
Elizabeth Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1960) are both set against a background
of Puritan bigotry, one in England, the other in New England, and Meriol Trevor’s Lights
in a Dark Town (1964) is set in nineteenth-century Birmingham at the time when
Cardinal Newman was leading the Roman Catholic revival.
One of the few writers who does explore religious issues more deeply is Antonia
Forest. In her stories about the Marlow family, the Marlows themselves are Protestant,
although there is a Catholic grandmother whose rosary and bedroom furnished with an
altar and prie-Dieu fascinate one of the children, but the neighbouring friends, the
Merricks, are Catholics and Patrick, the son, frequently discusses Catholic doctrine and
ceremonial with the Marlow girls. One of Nicola’s best friends at school is Miranda, a
Jewish girl. The different beliefs permeate most of the books in the series but End of
Term (1959) has the performance of a school nativity play as its focus and this sparks
off more religious discussions than usual.
Elfrida Vipont, winner of the Carnegie Medal for The Lark on the Wing (1950), writes
about Quaker schools and Quaker families in her Larks and Springs sequence,
published between 1948 and 1969, and few readers can remain unaware of the Quaker
beliefs, which come through clearly in the books but do not dominate them. Although
children have been made more aware of Judaism through reading stories set in the
period of the Second World War, few of these describe Jewish beliefs or customs. Leila
Berg’s A Box for Benny (1958), which incorporates several Jewish customs as an integral
part of the story, is a rare find. Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family (1951) and its
sequels, with their details of Jewish food and festivals, are based on her own childhood
in New York at the turn of the century. The books in which Adèle Geras draws on her
Jewish heritage are also set in the past; Voyage (1983) describes the hardships faced by
European Jews emigrating to the USA in the early twentieth century, The Girls in the
Velvet Frame (1979) is set in Jerusalem in 1913, and the short stories which make up
Golden Windows and other Stories of Jerusalem (1993) are set in the years from 1910 to
1954.
In Britain, with the coming of a multi-ethnic society, there is more interest in religions
other than Christianity. Many of the books published for young people are information
books, some of which are presented as narratives, with emphasis on colourful feast days
and festivals such as the Jewish Chanukah, the Chinese New Year, Diwali and Eid-ul-
Fitr. Celebrations, a series published by A. and C. Black, which includes titles such as
Diwali by Chris Deshpande (1985) and Lynne Hannigan’s Sam’s Passover (1985), is
typical of this kind of publishing, aimed at 8-to 10-year-olds, focusing on one particular
child or family and illustrated by colour photographs.
At the end of the twentieth century, publishers must produce books which meet the
demands of the market place if they are to survive. In the past Christian authors wrote
RELIGIOUS WRITING FOR CHILDREN 277