Dating from before the days of John Masefield and Alan Garner was yet another book I had loved in childhood, Alison Uttley’s Magic in my pocket. It has no date – unlike the two sequels in the sets mentioned here which were prizebooks in 1965 – but it was my mother who wrote my name on the flyleaf first, and when I added to this, it was a shorter version along with a nickname, which soon afterwards I determined should not be use.
So it would have been in the second or third year of the sixties that I read this magical book. It is a collection of stories drawn from several of Uttley’s books, many of them from her collections about Sam Pig, who lives with his sister and two brothers and Brock the Badger, who is infinitely wise. Sam gets into all sorts of scrapes, but has great fun, including at a visit to the circus when he joins in the activities in the ring, and on Guy Fawkes Night when he is mistaken for a guy and nearly put on a bonfire.
He is a delightful character, who does a lot of good, including helping a hurdy gurdy man whose instrument Brock repairs so that he makes a lot of money thereafter since Brock ‘put the music of the woods’ into the hurdy gurdy which made ‘all the world’ want to hear it.
There are other wonderful characters, the crooked man whose crooked cat cleared the stables of mice for a farmer who then gave him a crooked house to live in; a little fiddler who helped animals which came to the rescue of his troupe when their driver tried to make off with their takings; Orion Hardy who whistled away the grey shadows that disturbed the sleep of the farmhouse which had given him work and shelter; and animals such as the little red hen who looks after the old woman who rescued her from a nasty owner, horses on a merry-go-round which came to life and took two little boys for a gallop over the countryside one night, Mr Bumble who plays his fiddle to his friend Mimble Mouse who had found for him the honey spoon he had lost.
All this would have seemed wide enough a range, but there is more, stories of sheer lyricism as when three animals walk through a cornfield at night, when a Tom Tit led the birds in a Christmas Carol to the delectation of his friend the Fir Tree, the trees that open with the keys little John Bunting finds, to reveal the joy in their hearts.
Alison Uttley had celebrated her own childhood on a farm in a book called The Country Child, from which there are two extracts in this collection. One is a tone poem type of description of ‘Christmas in coming’ when ‘every little berry, every leaf, every pretty ball and apple had a tiny yellow flame reflected in its heart’. The other was ‘The Easter Egg’ about a special blue egg which Susan, the Alison Uttley character in the book, thought so special that she invited all her friends to see it, so that her mother had to host a whole host of little girls.
At the end of that exercise, Susan had forgotten to show off her egg. But what struck me while reading the story was that I had a vivid memory of that ‘pake blue velvet egg lined with golden starry paper’. It was one of a set of six her godmother had sent her, and the memory of that blue egg had stayed with me over six decades.