REVIEW: Barbed Wire - Keep Out!
Dec. 13th, 2015 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllBarbed Wire—Keep Out!: Agnes M. Miall Brock Press 1950
Isn’t this one of the most brilliant titles for a children’s book ever? It demands that the reader dives in, just like the barbed wire and the injunction to keep out has no influence on the main characters of this adventure.
They are Perry (really Perilla, poor thing) and her sister Prue and their chums Hump and Noel. They have appeared in other books, one of which, Snowed Up With a Secret, I own and had read years and years ago, but don’t remember a thing about. Perry and Hump are aged about sixteen, Prue’s about fourteen and Noel about eleven. So, if you like books about gangs of children bringing down gangs of criminals, you’ll like this.
Perry and Prue’s half term holiday is extended by a lightning strike on their school (original), and thanks to those usefully complicated family arrangements you get in these types of holiday adventures, they are back staying at Ye Olde Swan Taverne with their Uncle, where Hump is the garden boy. He’s also the son of the local police constable, has ambitions to be a detective – Noel hero worships him – and has just inherited Plum Tree Cottage. When the unpopular newish owner of the nearby Blackdene manor, one Mr Belper, offers him ridiculous sums for a cottage that is not picturesque, Hump thinks it a bit strange and, enjoying his newly gained status and on the advice of his father, refuses.
Hump and his friends’ curiosity is roused when Belper puts up barbed wire and a shed in short order around where the cottage boundary meets Blackdene land. The cottage’s previous owner, Hump’s great-aunt, was an elderly woman, hard of hearing and partially sighted. The youngsters wonder what Belper and his seemingly charming wife are hiding, especially as neighbours have little that’s nice to say about them...
This is a decent spin on the subgenre, with mild to medium peril, some slight tensions among our heroes as young Noel tries to prove his mettle, Prue has moments of resenting big sister Perry being slightly more grown-up than her and showing occasional signs of growing away from her, while Hump finds that the others can play the detective as well as he can. They are not too unbelievably clever (like Blyton’s Fatty in the Five Find Outers), but ingenious enough when allowed to be. That is to say, it’s no Lone Pine story, but it’s better than Marsden’s attempts in this field.)
Admittedly, life got in the way of me reading this in a concentrated period as I’d prefer. I’m quite interested in rereading Snowed-Up With a Secret now. I mostly associate Miall with The Schoolgirl Fugitives, because it’s a book I had since I was very young – it’s the story of English schoolgirls trying to escape from France just as it was being occupied by the Germans in 1940, although Barbed Wire is the fifth book by her that I own. On the back of the dust jacket, there’s a photograph of the writer alongside two clowns...
Isn’t this one of the most brilliant titles for a children’s book ever? It demands that the reader dives in, just like the barbed wire and the injunction to keep out has no influence on the main characters of this adventure.
They are Perry (really Perilla, poor thing) and her sister Prue and their chums Hump and Noel. They have appeared in other books, one of which, Snowed Up With a Secret, I own and had read years and years ago, but don’t remember a thing about. Perry and Hump are aged about sixteen, Prue’s about fourteen and Noel about eleven. So, if you like books about gangs of children bringing down gangs of criminals, you’ll like this.
Perry and Prue’s half term holiday is extended by a lightning strike on their school (original), and thanks to those usefully complicated family arrangements you get in these types of holiday adventures, they are back staying at Ye Olde Swan Taverne with their Uncle, where Hump is the garden boy. He’s also the son of the local police constable, has ambitions to be a detective – Noel hero worships him – and has just inherited Plum Tree Cottage. When the unpopular newish owner of the nearby Blackdene manor, one Mr Belper, offers him ridiculous sums for a cottage that is not picturesque, Hump thinks it a bit strange and, enjoying his newly gained status and on the advice of his father, refuses.
Hump and his friends’ curiosity is roused when Belper puts up barbed wire and a shed in short order around where the cottage boundary meets Blackdene land. The cottage’s previous owner, Hump’s great-aunt, was an elderly woman, hard of hearing and partially sighted. The youngsters wonder what Belper and his seemingly charming wife are hiding, especially as neighbours have little that’s nice to say about them...
This is a decent spin on the subgenre, with mild to medium peril, some slight tensions among our heroes as young Noel tries to prove his mettle, Prue has moments of resenting big sister Perry being slightly more grown-up than her and showing occasional signs of growing away from her, while Hump finds that the others can play the detective as well as he can. They are not too unbelievably clever (like Blyton’s Fatty in the Five Find Outers), but ingenious enough when allowed to be. That is to say, it’s no Lone Pine story, but it’s better than Marsden’s attempts in this field.)
Admittedly, life got in the way of me reading this in a concentrated period as I’d prefer. I’m quite interested in rereading Snowed-Up With a Secret now. I mostly associate Miall with The Schoolgirl Fugitives, because it’s a book I had since I was very young – it’s the story of English schoolgirls trying to escape from France just as it was being occupied by the Germans in 1940, although Barbed Wire is the fifth book by her that I own. On the back of the dust jacket, there’s a photograph of the writer alongside two clowns...
