toy soldiers of the young Brontës. At the other end of the scale of size were the imagined
secondary worlds, greatly stimulated by Tolkien. The Narnia books of Tolkien’s friend
C.S.Lewis began in fact to appear before The Lord of the Rings, with The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe in 1950; but Lewis was conversant with Tolkien’s work in progress
and learned in some of the same fields. He was also learned in medieval allegory, and
the Narnia books are Christian allegory.
A form of fantasy of special interest, developed mainly in Britain since 1945, is what
might be called minimal or marginal fantasy, in which the fantasy element is so elusive
that one wonders whether anything supernatural has ‘really’ happened. In L.M.Boston’s
The Children of Green Knowe (1954) and The Chimneys of Green Knowe (1958), a
present-day small boy hears the voices of, and seems to meet, children who have lived in
the same house in the past: but do these encounters actually occur or are they
imagined? We do not know, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. In Tom’s Midnight Garden
(1958), by Philippa Pearce, Tom plays at night, in a garden that no longer exists, with a
little girl who turns out to be the old lady now living on the top floor of the house in
which he is staying. We learn that she has been dreaming him into her past life: does
this mean that he has been dreaming it too? A similar question arises in Penelope
Lively’s A Stitch in Time (1976). In Stig of the Dump (1963), by Clive King, does the cave-
boy Stig ‘really’ exist, or is he imagined by a lonely child? There is nothing to prevent the
reader from accepting either alternative, or both. The rumoured Beast in Janni Howker’s
The Nature of the Beast (1985) has a symbolic existence but probably not a real one. In
Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967), where the power of ancient myth breaks
dangerously through to the present in a Welsh valley, the possibility that nothing
abnormal actually happens can barely be entertained, and in any case it is the old myth
that powers the book; but there is an eerie sense that the fabric separating our world
from some other is thin and flimsy, and could tear. This is also a feature of Garner’s Red
Shift (1973).
Contemporary realism in the ‘let’s-face-it’ sense has been much less dominant in
Britain than in the USA, and tends to self-destruct or at best decline to the status of a
period piece when it ceases to be contemporary. Realistic fiction in the more general and
catch-all definition of fiction set in the present or recent past and not making use of the
exotic or the supernatural has been written with distinction by authors as various as
Nina Bawden, Jane Gardam and Jan Mark; Farrukh Dhondy and James Berry have
been among the (too few) writers whose work for the children’s list has been a reminder
that modern British society is multi-racial and multi-cultural.
Most of the post-war titles mentioned above are likely to appeal mainly to 11-year-olds
and upwards, with perhaps some bright 10-year-olds. As award committees discover
year after year, it is hard to find outstanding literary distinction in books for younger
readers of, say, 7 to 9. Young children’s lack of experience and, possibly, their limited
reading ability restricts what can be done in writing for them, and many authors find it
difficult. But they are not a less valuable audience. Most of the writers mentioned above
have written for them, and often very well, although the titles are not the authors’ best-
known books. The age-group is one to which humanised-animal stories often appeal,
ranging from Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington (1958) and its successors to the
farmyard dramas of Dick King-Smith in The Sheep-Pig (1983) and other titles. And then
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