The Midnight Folk

The Midnight Folk by John Masefield is a treasure hunt for 9 year olds, and none of the hunting happens in daylight.

What happens

Kay Harker is having a rotten day. It is Latin, and the adjective is acer, acris, acre, and he keeps looking out of the window at the pigeons instead.

He gets it wrong. He loses his biscuit. Then the cat drinks most of his milk, so he goes out into the garden with nothing at all.

Home is a big old house run by his governess, Sylvia Daisy, who is handsome and flouncy and never on his side. His guardian, Sir Theopompus, turns up for lunch and asks him what latitude he thinks he is in.

Then Sir Theopompus gets on to great-grandpapa Harker, who was a sea captain. He was trusted with the Santa Barbara treasure, worth about a million pounds. His crew mutinied and put him ashore, and the treasure vanished, and some people say he hid it himself.

Kay says he was a good man. He is sent to bed without his bread and milk for saying it.

This is where the book turns into something else entirely. Bedtime in that house is already frightening, with tigers waiting under the bed and a hearthstone the cook says somebody is buried under. Then the door in the wainscot that was never there opens, and Nibbins the black cat puts his head round it and says come on.

What follows is glorious. Secret passages behind the panelling. Eye holes cut in the old portraits. The ivory chessmen out of their box, playing a game by themselves in the moonlight and arguing about it. And in the dining room, seven witches in tall black hats eating the cold goose that was hot at lunchtime, and calling for a song.

It feels like being let into a house at night when everyone thinks you are asleep. Very strange, very funny, and quite hard to predict.

Now the honest bit. This was written in 1927 and it sounds it. The sentences run long, the governess speaks in whole paragraphs, and there is a good deal about Latin grammar before any cat talks. A confident reader will gallop through. A child who wants to be thrown straight into the action may need you to read the first chapter with them.

What to read next

If your reader takes to Kay, he grows up a little and gets a much bigger adventure in The Box of Delights, where a strange old man hands him something the villains want badly and the wolves are running by Christmas.