The Secret of Platform 13

Eva Ibbotson's The Secret of Platform 13 is a magical adventure for 9 year olds built on a door that only opens for nine days in every nine years.

What happens

The door is in a gump. Every country has one, and ours is the one below platform thirteen, King's Cross, behind the wall of the old Gentlemen's Cloakroom with its chipped benches and its rusty chocolate machine that goes "Harrumph" and keeps your money.

Behind it there's a long misty tunnel, then a ship, then an Island.

Ibbotson takes her time over the Island and it's the best part of the opening. Ogres with one eye. Trolls with beards so long they tread on them as they walk. Ellerwomen with hollow backs who hate being looked at on a Saturday. A mermaid who is certain she could look after a baby if somebody would just wheel her around in a bath.

Best of all are the mistmakers, small white furry creatures with big puppyish feet who adore music. Play to them and they sigh, and mist comes out of them. So whenever a ship or an aeroplane appears, all the children run out of school with their recorders and their trumpets and hide the whole Island in fog.

Then the Queen has a baby. His three nurses get homesick for north London, and they ask to take him on the ship as far as the Secret Cove, just to look at England from a distance. She says no. Then she talks herself round. Then she runs down to the harbour to stop it and the ship is already a speck.

That's the bit that gets you. The King tells her adventures are good for people even when they're very young, and he isn't exactly wrong.

Nine years on, four figures come through the gump to fetch the prince home. A hag barely out of childhood. A fey. A one-eyed ogre. A wizard. What they find, the cover promises, is Raymond Trottle, whose mother has gold taps on her bath, and who does not want rescuing at all.

One thing to have in mind. The engine of this book is a baby taken from his mother, and Ibbotson doesn't rush past what it does to the Queen. There's also a passing line about the three nurses being beaten by their own father when they were girls. If you've got a reader who feels strongly about parents and children being split up, they will feel this one properly.

What to read next

If daft magical creatures colliding with horrible rich humans is the appeal here, Dial a Ghost does it again, with a bombed-out family of ghosts hired out by an agency.