THE WITCH OF CLATTERINGSHAWS
By Joan Aiken
Jonathan Cape, £10.99; 160pp
ISBN 0 224 07029 0
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Children, as Dr Johnson sagely observed, want stories about giants and castles, not about other children. The dream of being royal, to boot, dies particularly hard. Yet every great children’s author, from E. Nesbit to Philip Pullman, has explored the pains, as well as the pleasures, of what is essentially a fantasy about being more powerful than your parents.

John Dickinson’s The Widow and the King is the sequel to his debut, The Cup of the World, and has one of the most compelling openings I’ve read: “A man came along the mountains, hunting his son with a sword.” He is a knight, entrusted with a book in which an evil spirit is imprisoned. Unable to read, he is safe — but his son, Raymonde, is not, and has murdered his own brother in consequence. Now Raymonde is liberating the evil Prince Paigan whom the widowed Queen Phaedra has kept imprisoned in a circle of standing stones, and Paigan will kill her 12-year-old son. How the young Ambrose escapes over the mountains, finding refuge as a page in the castle of another widowed queen and her daughter Sophia is a tale of adversity and betrayal in which a crown scarcely seems worth the trouble it puts people to.

These are the strangest novels I’ve come across since William Morris’s fairytales; gripping yet dreamlike, frustrating yet marvellously suggestive. What is particularly pleasing is the theological richness of the author’s imagination, which raises the stories high above the usual level of fantasy. Himself the son of one of our grand old men of children’s fiction, Peter Dickinson, he knows precisely what makes an imagined world believable. This one is ruled by seven kings, descendants of Wulfram the Seafarer, and created by Beyah, a spirit whose bitter tears fill the Cup of the World and dooms its inhabitants to grief and murder. Yet what protects them from annihilation is the fortitude of the dragon, Capuu, who lies round the rim of the world and suffers in order to bind it together. Dickinson’s fusion of Viking and Christian myth becomes particularly powerful when Ambrose and his raggedy band of knights cross into the spirit world in order to defeat Paigan, and the lessons he learns concerning power and responsibility are grimly adult ones. Teenagers should love it.

The great Joan Aiken died a year ago, but has left us with the twelfth and last of the series of books she began in 1963 with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. The Witch of Clatteringshaws is a novella, written when she felt her energies fading but no less valuable for all that. These books are among the glories of modern children’s literature, set in an 18th-century England in which the Stuarts, not the Hanoverians, got the crown, told in vigorous, exuberant prose and peopled by Dickensian villains and heroes. Children of 9+ generally need to have Aiken’s stories read to them. The world they describe needs a good king. The dawning Industrial Revolution is marred by a wall between North and South, and the heroine, Dido, is a sort of cockney child Odysseus, struggling to get home to England, and to Simon, the orphaned goose-boy who turns out to be heir to the throne.

Aiken knew that children are aware of evil, and met that knowledge head-on in gorgeously wicked creations such as Miss Slighcarp and Dido’s own Pa. Reading her epic sequence is like being in a terrifying yet exhilarating coach ride, dashing madly along Gothic precipices and over raging torrents. It seems incredible that Dido and Simon should survive, let alone be free to marry each other in the teeth of vicious Hobyahs, a loch monster and the unutterable tedium of monarchical duties. If they do, it’s thanks to the Witch of Clatteringshaws — who, typically, lives in a remote public lavatory. Even royalty is dependent on such humble conveniences, and the child who will be transfixed by these two wonderful books will need to be reminded of that, too.

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