The Country Child

Alison Uttley's The Country Child is a farmhouse story for 9 year olds about a girl who walks through a wood she's terrified of, twice a day, every day.

What happens

Susan Garland lives at Windystone Hall, up on a hilltop, and her school is four miles off. Part of the way home runs through the Dark Wood, and Susan is quite certain something is in there.

She never names it. It's just Them. Giants, or dwarfs behind the trees, or bears, or the trees themselves coming down the path at her. She knows perfectly well there are no giants in England. It makes no difference at all.

So she has rules. She never runs, because running would tell Them she's afraid. She walks only on the bare soil between the stones so her iron heels don't ring. She touches one particular nut tree on the way past because that one's friendly. She's sure eyes are watching through the chinks of a walled field, and there's an oak at the crossroads where she once saw a pair of them looking back. At the top of the hill she shuts the big white gate with a clang, on purpose, to tell Them she got home.

Anyone who was ever frightened of a particular bit of the walk home will know exactly what all this is.

She bribes the other girls to come part of the way with a story, stopping it at the best bit. In summer they follow her into the trees. In winter they won't go near.

Then there's the other half of the book, which is home. Pig-cotes older than the house with roses all over them, an elder tree dropping petals into the stone troughs, the yard dog Roger on his chain, whitewashed dairies and hay chambers full of broken cradles and worm-eaten boxes.

This is a slow one, and it's worth saying so. The sentences are long and beautiful and thick with plants and weather, and the story ambles. A reader who wants things to happen will bounce off it. A dreamy one, or a child who reads the descriptions rather than skipping them, could love it.

It's also from an older world in ways a parent might want to know about. Susan comes home and her mother asks, quite routinely, whether she's had the cane today. The publisher's own description promises favourite farm animals being slaughtered further on.

What to read next

If that world feels too far away, The Primrose Railway Children puts a girl the same age in a run-down cottage in the middle of nowhere, telling her own story, with a family she can't quite read.