The Midnight Folk

Product Information

He also hears about other hidden things through his animal friends, the black cat Nibbins, Bitem the fox, Blinky the owl: the secret pas­sageways of the house, the secret ways of a coven of witches, the secret lives of the animals themselves.

The Midnight Folk - BBC Fairytale Drama : John Masefield The Midnight Folk - BBC Fairytale Drama : John Masefield

The subsequent history of the treasure turns out to involve several more mutinies and maroonings with the same motivation. It is difficult for me to describe the ecstatic bliss of my earliest childhood,’ he wrote in a late memoir, So Long to Learn: All that I looked upon was beautiful, and known by me to be beautiful, but also known by me to be, as it were, only the shadow of something much more beautiful, very, very near, and almost to be reached, where there was nothing but beauty itself in ecstasy, undying, inexhaustible . John Masefield threaded a number of common themes through a series of his books; even those novels aimed at children shared places, people and storylines with some of his adult novels. These range from rick burners and smugglers to the highwayman Benjamin, who lived in the stables long ago; from the murder victim surely buried under the hearth in Kay’s bedroom to the man, known only as The Tailor, found killed in one of the outhouses, ‘stabbed right through the skull,’ Ellen says with relish, ‘which shows you the force that must have been used’.We are even invited to empathize with the book’s chief villains, the three generations of Americans all known as Abner Brown. Time’s lost, done with, but must be paid for,’ one of Kay’s grandmothers, another of the dead woken from the sleep of portraiture, tells him.

The Midnight Folk - Springer John Masefield and The Midnight Folk - Springer

Two Aliases, One Character: Kay's governess Sylvia Daisy and the wicked witch Mrs Pouncer are revealed to be one and the same. In its playful inventiveness and eventfulness, this fantasy is the grandparent of Mary Poppins, of Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite books, and even of Eleanor Farjeon’s short story collections…Names such as Brassy Cop, Pimply Whatto and young Roper Bilges – or Sir Hassle Gassle – can still amuse, even after 80 years, and there are only a few moments when attitudes grate on modern sensibilities. Blue cloth boards, bumped, clean, light shelf wear, 327 pages, lightest use wear and marks, binding tight and square.The loss of Kay’s parents is barely alluded to, but his situation is reinforced on almost every page: adrift without family, he is trapped in every kind of past, in everyone else’s stories, with an unreachable future ahead of him. He has written a book which will be a source of delight to children of future generations well as his own, one that ranks with such masterpieces in this genre The Water Babies, Alice in Wonderland and Sylvie and Bruno. Interestingly, early on in the book, Kay reads the names of his long-lost toys ('The Guards') and among them are the names Jemima, Maria, Susan and Peter which of course are the names of the Jones children in The Box of Delights written years later. Gossipy Hens: Kay's governess's social circle includes a flock of them, with names like Mrs Gossip, Mrs Tattle, and Mrs Scatternews.