Hetty Feather’s Christmas

Hetty Feather's Christmas by Jacqueline Wilson is a Victorian Christmas story for 9 year olds, and it is a great deal fiercer than the title lets on.

What happens

Hetty is thirteen and back at the Foundling Hospital. Eighteen months of it so far, under a matron who has taken against her.

It's the small hours of Christmas morning and she is wide awake, with a parcel tucked under her pillow.

Her mama sent it in secret, and Hetty has held out all night rather than open it. The waiting and the wondering are half the joy of a present, she reckons. What a very true thing for a child to think.

Inside is a tiny house. Whitewashed driftwood walls, a roof tiled with painted shells, gingham at two of the windows and red velvet at the third. Her mother made every bit of it by hand. It's the little home the two of them haven't got.

Then Sheila snatches it, the whole dormitory gawps, and Christmas Day goes off like a rocket.

Hetty tells you all of it herself and she is wonderful company. Withering about Sheila's snoring. More withering still about Matron Bottomly's two plump pillows and piled quilts while the girls get one thin blanket each and frozen pipes.

Then in the next breath she's aching over her brother Gideon, who she only really gets to look at once a year, when he's hoisted up on ropes as the Angel Gabriel in the chapel.

Here's what to know before this one goes in a stocking. Hetty is dragged out of the dormitory by her hair on Christmas morning and shut in the attic punishment cupboard, and she has clearly been put in there before. Matron flattens her present under a boot on the way. There's a fight with Sheila that draws blood. Hetty also mentions, very early and quite matter of factly, that one of her foster brothers is buried behind the chapel, and there's some cold Victorian talk about her being born out of wedlock.

None of it is lingered over, and Hetty gives as good as she gets all the way through. But this is not a cosy Christmas read and it never pretends to be. If your child finds grown-ups being cruel to children hard going, keep this one for later.

If they can take it, they get a narrator with a proper temper and a very big heart, who refuses to let a single unfairness pass without comment.

What to read next

Hetty spends this story dreading the day she has to leave the hospital and go out to work. Sapphire Battersea is the book where that happens. She's sent off to be a maid, still raging about her foundling name, still writing down absolutely everything.