A prize book from childhood which I much enjoyed then, and once again when I reread it in what I call the dog days, when I had to look after the puppies before the New Year, was Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease. He sounds a fascinating character, with distinct left wing sympathies, who wrote a great many books, of which this is the best known.

This was the form prize for Lower IV A, which I was in in 1965 so I would have got this in 1966, two years after The Fair to Middling. Gone were the days of Mr Prins and his beautiful handwriting, for the form and my name are typed.

The book was very exciting, telling the tale of a boy from Cumberland who had to flee his home when he was identified – and only he – as being amongst a group of farmers who broke down a wall the local landowner had built up to enclose what had previously been common land. I had not realized that this practice had begun so early, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, which is when the story is set, for it became a greater problem a century later, as to which Oliver Goldsmith wrote in ‘The Deserted Village’

One only master grasps the whole domain,

And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;

The vllain of Trease’s book is the landowner Sir Philip Morton who wants to increase his holding. He also wants to marry an orphaned heiress so as to get her lands too.

The hero Peter flees, since to be caught means he might be forced to identify his family and the friends who had broken down the wall. He is nearly caught but hides in the coffin of a group of strolling players, and goes with them to London, along with another boy, called Kit, who turns out to be the heiress who had fled the betrothal to Sir Philip her guardian was forcing upon her.

In London they get an introduction to Richard Burbage who runs the Chamberlain’s men, but he refuses to test them out. However they come across a sympathetic youngster, who turns out to be Shakespeare, and he notes how brilliantly Kit can portray women, and persuades Burbage to take them on. Those were days in which women did not appear on stage, and Shakespeare, who soon realizes that Kit is a girl, relishes the idea of her playing Juliet when the play is first put on the stage. Peter, whom he sees is a good mimic, is cast as the nurse.

But on the first night Sir Philip appears in the audience, and Kit flees, and Peter who has learnt the role when he and Kit were rehearsing, is thrust into it and does not do too badly. And Shakespeare stops Burbage from thrashing Kit, since the two boys are his apprentices.

All interesting stuff, but then the character of the tale changes wholly, when treason rears its head.