The Stones of Green Knowe

Lucy M Boston's The Stones of Green Knowe is a time-slip story for 8 year olds about a boy who watches his own house being built.

What happens

Roger is eleven. His father holds the manor for a Norman earl, and what Roger cares about most in the world is the stone house going up in their fields. He has never seen a house with an upstairs. He can't quite picture it.

So he hangs about the builders. The master mason lets him try his hand, and teaches him that stone has a grain like wood, and that some stone is loyal and will last for ever. One block came out of a church the Vikings burned down. It's going in the upper room.

That's the sort of book this is. The hearthstone goes down with silver under it for wealth, iron to keep the Little People away, and a live toad, because toads are supposed to live for hundreds of years. Nobody thinks any of that is strange.

Roger is on his own a lot. His big brother is away fighting, his sisters are shut indoors with their needles, and the pages are too old for him. He fills the days minding sheep.

Then he finds two stone seats on a scrubby little island, chipped out with stone rather than iron and far too small for a bishop. He clears the brambles and calls them the King and Queen.

One midday he sits on one, looks at his new house far off in the valley and thinks how much he'd like to know it's still standing a long way ahead. He blows a dandelion clock to pick the number. Five hundred and forty years.

And then he's walking up the river bank, and the ferry has turned into a bridge, and two men stroll past in ribbons, high heels and enormous feathered hats, talking a very silly sort of English.

It's a quiet book, and it asks your reader to enjoy mud, weather and birdsong as much as magic. Nothing gets explained. (There's a proper dog fight early on, and that toad under the hearth, if either of those lands badly with your child.)

What to read next

If they like the idea of a boy loose in a house far older than he is, The Haunting of Falcon House is in the library too. A young prince arrives alone at his family's estate in Saint Petersburg and keeps seeing a boy nobody else can see.