Lucy M. Boston

Before the visit with her mother's friend had ended, Libby saw the dryads and water nymphs that lived near the house.

An English girl, a Polish refugee, and a displaced boy from the Orient explore an island-strewn river flowing past the ancient manor house of Green Knowe.

Yew Hall, built at the time of the Crusades, is a house to which most things have happened during the last eight hundred years. It is as important a character in this unusual story as the beautiful young woman, Arabella, her husband, Mark, and his twin brother, who play out a passionate tragedy under the eyes of the narrator, the owner of the house. Arabella, with her red-gold hair and elegant clothes, is self-centred and spoilt, greedy for attention and constant entertainment. Mark is more outward-looking with an open friendliness and an intense interest in the house and its history. Roger, his brother, is an actor, whose health is frail and whose nerves are strained by the wretched uncertainty of his career. These three come together and finally destroy each other, while the house, within whose walls such dramas have been going on for centuries, remains.

The inhabitants of Green Knowe become involved with black magic when a modern-day witch attempts to find books of witchcraft supposedly hidden in the old house by a mad seventeenth-century alchemist.

While eagerly following each stage of the new stone manor house his father is building to replace their old wooden Saxon hall, a young boy, part Saxon and part Norman, becomes involved with ancient magic that carries him through time.

A sea triton hatches from a special egg-shaped stone, to both the expectation and amazement of two little English school boys on holiday at the coast.

A young boy listens to his great-grandmother's tales of Green Knowe as it used to be and, gradually, as past and present blend, he shares the strange adventures of the former inhabitants.

Introduction by Robert Lloyd Parry " . . . his eye sockets were appallingly hollow, and he lifted his chin as the blind do when they seek." — from "Curfew" Lucy M. Boston is best remembered today as the Carnegie Medal-winning author of a series of children's novels set in Green Knowe, an ancient, haunted house based on Hemingford Grey Manor near Huntingdon, Cambridge. She began writing these chilling tales when she was already in her sixties, but they were not her first attempts at fiction. A handful of supernatural tales dating from the early 1930s exist among her papers, and these are here published together for the first time, along with her only play, The Horned Man, which has been out of print since 1970. An introduction by Robert Lloyd Parry considers the literary influences on these works and looks at them in the context of Boston's personal life. Of the short stories in this volume only three have been published before — "Curfew", "The Tiger-Skin Rug" and "Many Coloured Glass" — all having appeared originally in long out of print anthologies for children. Children play pivotal roles in the first two of these stories, but there is nothing specifically juvenile about their language or themes, nothing to exclude them from a mature bookshelf. Indeed in her use of children as witnesses and victims of the supernatural, Boston was — consciously or otherwise — emulating that other great East Anglian supernaturalist, M. R. James. Boston's debt to James, in fact, runs deep. The stories collected here offer the same unmistakeable, inexplicable malice that we find in James, and the same lurking feeling of terror: what Boston calls in Curfew the "thrill, or chill, of expectation". And like James's most celebrated stories, most of those collected here centre around antiquarian objects — an old bell, a rug bought at auction, an intricately carved desk left in a house by a previous occupant — curious trouvés, artefacts of the past that carry more than memories with them.

> When Joseph decided to visit the magic garden he did not expect to find himself inside a tree shaped like a castle, nor did he expect to shrink so small that a cat seemed like a fierce tiger.

Thomas slips into an eccentric old lady's house while she is out and finds a number of carved faces that lead him into a series of frightening adventures.

When Rob puts the rare fossil of a coiled snake he has discovered under the warm radiator in his room, a wonderful thing happens.

Tolly comes to live with his great-grandmother at the ancient house of Green Knowe and becomes friends with three children who lived there in the seventeenth century.

A strange friendship develops between a young Chinese refugee who is spending the summer at Green Knowe and a gorilla who has escaped from the London Zoo.