Pook’s Hill (1906) is intended to educate more subtly. The setting, around Kipling’s own
house, Bateman’s in Sussex, England provides a lovingly recreated backdrop for the
author’s attempt to demonstrate that history could be as exciting as a fairy tale. Puck
brings to the children characters from Britain’s past and their presence is deftly hidden
from the adults who carry on their lives around them.
Both William Mayne and Penelope Lively select a character from a particular time;
Mayne’s Earthfasts (1967) presents a Napoleonic drummer boy and Lively’s Ghost of
Thomas Kempe (1975), a seventeenth-century alchemist. Both of these characters, out
of their familiar time of reference, continue to operate as though they were in their
respective centuries. Each interacts with a present day boy and, conventionally, for
some time, no adult will believe the young people; in the case of The Ghost of Thomas
Kempe, this disbelief provides the humour. Kempe never materialises, unlike Nellie Jack
John, the drummer boy, who, unable to return to his own time is accepted by the local
people (once he has been washed, and his skin conditions have been treated). Mayne’s
bold acceptance of the supernatural into the real world (the book also contains a house-
spirit, the Boggart) is an important variation on the normally confrontational nature of
domestic fantasy.
Linking past with present has also been achieved ingeniously in the USA. Nina, in
Eleanor Cameron’s The Court of the Stone Children (1973) also meets the physical
presence of a child from the past, Domique, who has been transported to a San
Francisco museum which has reconstructed the period rooms of her chateau.
Displacement is more common, as with Nancy Bond’s A String in the Harp (1984). An
American family mourning the unexpected death of the mother, moves to Aberystwyth in
west Wales, and the father buries himself in his work. His three children adjust to living
in a foreign country with varying degrees of success; Peter, who is most unhappy,
discovers a harp key which starts to show him life from the Arthurian period.
He had thought he’d be safe with other people around—it had always come when
he was alone before—but he was helpless to stop it... The study vanished. In its
place, Peter saw the country called the Low Hundred lying flat under the hammering
rain... The Key sang a wild and ominous song that wove through the gale
inexorably, showing Peter a series of painfully vivid images.
Bond 1984:66Bond uses the intrusion of the supernatural into everyday life as both threat and
challenge, as Susan Cooper (using similar materials) did in her ‘The Dark is Rising’
sequence (from Over Sea, Under Stone (1965)). Here, Peter’s sisters first notice that he is
drifting off, going blank; eventually, they can see some of what Peter is seeing, and the
links to the Welsh epic The Mabinogion and specifically to Taliesin, whose harp key Peter
has found, are made explicit.
Once again, the fantasy has a direct effect on reality. By the end of the book, Peter is
not reluctant to spend another year in Wales even it it means ‘another year of rain and
freezing cold houses and a language that’s got no vowels and a bunch of kids who don’t
know how to play football’ (Bond 1984:256). Because the children have had to confide in
their father and because he has taken time to re-examine his children, the newly
REAL GARDENS WITH IMAGINARY TOADS: DOMESTIC FANTASY 297