Wolves Chronicles 11 – The Witch of Clatteringshaws

Joan Aiken's The Witch of Clatteringshaws is a wild northern adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who goes hunting for someone to take over from her friend as King.

What happens

Simon is King now, and he's not enjoying it one bit. The palace is damp and chilly and full of mice. Every meal is spent with a table of old gentlemen who talk in sentences so long that Dido loses the start before the end arrives.

One of them asks for the marmalade in about fifty words. Dido slides the jar six feet down the table and it ends up all over his velvet jacket (she does offer to wash it).

So when she hears there might be somebody else with a claim to the throne, a royal baby that went missing after a battle fifteen years ago, she's off. She takes the train north with her friend Piers, better known as the Woodlouse, and a pistol each.

In between the chapters come letters from Malise, the witch of the title. She lives in an old public toilet (the book calls it a Ladies' Convenience) at the far end of an empty coach park by a loch. Her best friend is an otter-worm called Tatzen. And after dark the Hobyahs come out of their burrows, and you REALLY don't want to be in the coach park then.

Dido's voice is half the fun. "Holy spikes!" "Blister my toes!" "Rabbit me!" It takes a few pages to tune in, and then you can hear her. Dido has clearly been through a LOT before this book starts (her shoes came from Nantucket), but you're told who everyone is as they turn up.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The opening is properly dark. A woman in a stranded coach goes into labour while a battle rages nearby, and she's later found dead. A baby is almost pushed into a clothes bin. Malise's sister flees into the mist where the Hobyahs are waking, and nobody hears from her again. A little boy at a guesthouse has a black eye and is clearly frightened of the family he lives with.

For a reader who's upset by children being hurt or left alone, that's a lot for the first few chapters. If they like their adventures strange and funny with a real edge of danger, it's a treat.

What to read next

Dido stops off on the way north to collect the Woodlouse from the Green family, who have been looking after him. If you'd like to meet Bonnie and Sylvia Green properly, their own story is The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, where a new governess arrives and things go very wrong at the big house.