Other American writers at this time included Jean Fritz, whose Brady (1960) observes
a boy unable to keep a secret, but whose involvement in the underground railway for
slaves teaches him how. Ann Petry in Tituba of Salem village (1964) also deals with a
slave. Patricia Clapp went back to early settlers with Constance (1968), based on her
family’s history, covering the years 1620–1626 in a diary in which the young Constance
confides.
The 1960s and 1970s became known as the golden age of historical fiction for
children, in Britain, not only with specialist children’s writers working, but also writers
working across the breadth of children’s fiction. In 1960 Frederick Grice was one of the
first to use twentieth-century history when he took the northern England of the 1920s
for Bonnie Pit Laddie, an episodic tale of a pit strike which brought a community to its
knees. It tells of the ordinary working man, his poverty and hunger with a raw sense of
injustice reminiscent of Trease’s early work. Hester Burton took another form of
injustice for Time of Trial (Carnegie Medal 1963), which tells of the trial and
imprisonment of a bookseller in eighteenth-century London for his political views. It is a
deep, thoughtful book requiring maturity from the reader. No Beat of Drum (1966) is a
sombre, harsh story of a labourer deported to Australia for his part in a demonstration
to get better wages.
As with Rosemary Sutcliff, a special countryside is important in Hester Burton’s work,
in her case the Suffolk area with its vast skies. Her most vivid book is Castors Away!
(1962). Set against the battle of Trafalgar, it is above all a family story in which Tom
goes off to war and Nell is left to cope at home. Many of Hester Burton’s stories are
illustrated by Victor G.Ambrus who matches her prose superbly. A Grenville Goes to Sea
(1977) showed that she did not need to write at length to create a period exactly. Richard
Grenville, coming from a long line of seafarers, is unwilling to admit his fear of heights,
but conquers it in this brief tale full of the life of a midshipman in Nelson’s navy.
Barbara Willard made the Ashdown Forest in Sussex her own in her Mantlemass novels.
She takes women as her main characters, although as Margaret Meek states,
this is a period which seems to offer them only dependent roles. Dame Elizabeth in
the first book The Lark and the Laurel (1970), established the Mantlemass fortune
and makes a woman of Cecily who becomes a legend in her turn. Catherine insists
on choosing where her heart is. Ursula holds the family together when its fate is
doubtful, and finally Cecilia rejects the New World and stays in the ruins with the
prospect of a different kind of rebuilding. They are a formidable tribe expecting no
pity or excuses, tender and loving and much more clear-sighted than the men.
Above them towers Lilias, a Master of iron, more than a match for the men she
works with and commands.
Meek 1980:805Through all the stories the reader senses life driven on by the seasons, despite the great
events going on outside the forest which occasionally touch their lives like the ripples on
a pond.
In the 1960s Mollie Hunter wrote graphically of Scottish history in The Ghosts of
Glencoe (1966), and The Pistol in the Greenyards (1965), rearranging words to give the
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