rhythm of the Scottish tongue without the use of dialect. Her finest book is The Stronghold
(Carnegie Medal 1974), in which she went further back in time to create her idea of how
a broch, a stone fortress found only in the Orkneys, came to be built. Peter Hollindale
points out that this book covers a moment when ‘history is altered by a single original
mind’ (112). The hero, a crippled member of an early tribe finds his distinction not in the
traditional warrior field, but in the design of the stronghold which saves his tribe from
the Roman invaders. The hold of the old religion of the Druids is powerfully described
and the sacrificial scene is a high point in the story.
K.M.Peyton also began to write at this time and published three powerful stories of the
sea and the Essex coast. The sea and naval history do not seem to attract writers and
Mrs Peyton moved away from this subject to horses. She won the Carnegie Medal for The
Edge of the Cloud, the second book of her Flambards trilogy in 1969, which caused some
controversy, as the books do not have the depth of the earlier novels. Windfall (1962),
The Maplin Bird (1964), and Thunder in the Sky (1966), share a background of sailing in
coastal waters and of the hand-to-mouth existence this life meant. The third story uses
the transport of ammunition in the First World War as its backdrop.
Pioneering stories usually come from America, but in 1967 Eleanor Spence wrote the
first of three novels about Australia, The Switherby Pilgrims, in which Arabella
Braithwaite takes ten orphans from England to New South Wales in the 1820s. The
hardships of the ‘better life’ are well drawn.
Increasingly in the 1960s and 1970s the Second World War was used as a setting.
Two outstanding examples are by Jill Paton Walsh: The Dolphin Crossing (1967), an
exciting and moving story of two boys from different backgrounds brought together by
the events of Dunkirk, and Fireweed (1969), set in the Blitz again examining class
differences which, with an unhappy ring of truth, separate the young couple. Jill Paton
Walsh also wrote of other periods; memorably of the Plague in A Parcel of Patterns
(1983), in which the difficult language suits the period of the tragic story, and Grace
(1991), which speculates, as a novel, on the effect that the bravery of a nineteenth-century
heroine, Grace Darling had on the rest of her life.
The Machine Gunners (Carnegie Medal 1975) by Robert Westall showed the effect of
war on a group of youngsters in Newcastle. It is a raw, gutsy tale about a boy, Chas,
who finds a machine gun in a wrecked German aeroplane and decides to ‘have a go’ at
the Germans. Westall wrote several other stories of war, including The Kingdom by the
Sea (1990), and Blitzcat (1989), using his favourite cat theme to depict the chaos of war.
In a calm, but no less telling style, David Rees recreated a night of bombing in Exeter in
1942 in The Exeter Blitz (Carnegie Medal 1978); in it, Colin Lockwood is separated from
his family and witnesses the destruction of the city from the cathedral tower: the low-
key style makes it all the more horrific. Susan Cooper also wrote realistically of the
tension caused by bombing and its effect on three children in Dawn of Fear (1972).
Hans Peter Richter’s chilling trilogy tells of another side of the Second World War. In
Friedrich (1971) there is an episodic chart of the progress of anti-Semitism seen through
the eyes of a German boy observing his neighbour. Hans’s story, through his time in the
Hitler Youth to his army career is continued in I Was There (1973), and The Time of the
Young Soldiers (1976), in a cold, stark style which suits the subject exactly.
370 HISTORICAL FICTION