Hetty Feather: Diamond

Diamond, by Jacqueline Wilson, is a Victorian story for 9 year olds told by a girl who can bend backwards like a crab and cannot write her own name.

What happens

Diamond was Ellen-Jane Potts first. She is telling her life to her friend Hetty, who does the actual writing, and every so often Hetty gets a cheeky aside about how she does not know everything after all.

The Potts family live in two rooms with the rats. Pa sells religious tracts and plaster angels and drinks most of what he earns. Ma paints the angels, one for each child along the mantelpiece, and wants a sixth baby so badly that it hollows her out.

Ellen-Jane is the disappointment. Ma wanted a boy called John, got a small dark girl instead, and could not be bothered to name her.

What she can do is tumble. She could stand on her hands before she could properly walk. One night Pa takes her to the alehouse to wait out a birth, she runs out of songs, so she arches over backwards and stands upside down in the spilled beer. The men cheer. The barmaid says she ought to be a circus girl.

That line is the hinge of the whole book. Someone else will watch her perform, buy her from her father, and put her in a travelling circus as an acrobat.

Reading it feels like being handed a diary and told to look after it. Diamond is very funny about her awful brothers and shy about the things that hurt. She notices her ruined white shoes while her mother is dying upstairs, which is exactly how a small child's attention works, and it is quietly devastating.

This one needs a proper warning. Ma dies giving birth, early on, bleeding to death while Diamond is out at the alehouse with Pa. Diamond decides it was her fault, lists the reasons, and goes on believing it. There is a caning, a great deal of drunkenness, and children handed out as apprentices like spare furniture. If your child worries about losing a parent, this will sit on their chest. If they already love these books and their hard edges, this is the same world and one of the better stories in it.

It also sits well into the Hetty Feather run, which the book makes no secret of. Hetty has already been three different people by the time she picks up the pen.

What to read next

If Diamond's story grips them, Little Stars carries straight on, with the two girls fleeing the circus on a stolen penny-farthing and trying to talk their way into a music hall.