Monica Edwards - a Personal Appreciation

[jacey]

sartorias  recently did a Book View Cafe blog on what kids like, and what was the first book that made you into a reader? and having thought about it for... oooh... minutes, I realised that the standout author from my early years of independent reading was Monica Edwards (1912 - 1998).

From my earliest days of graduating from picture books to 'chapter books' I gravitated towards (mainly) pony stories. I read them indiscriminately, working my way through the local library's supply of books by the likes of Ruby Ferguson, Judith M Berrisford or the Pullein-Thompson sisters. Mostly they were about English girls with ponies having improbable but exciting adventures and winning gymkhanas. Occasionally they might have the horses as central characters (such as Elyne Mitchell's Silver Brumby books). Always they had equines. (How I got into Narnia stories via The Horse and His Boy is maybe too obvious to tell.)

But the books I came back to time and time again were by Monica Edwards.

By some random chance (thanks, Mum), ‘Wish for a Pony’ by Monica Edwards was in my Christmas stocking when I was eight. Yes it was a pony book, but it was so much more besides and it instantly broadened my horizons. It introduced me to multi-layered characters who felt like friends. Characters who had a continuing life even when I wasn't opening my book as a window on their world.

Monica Edwards wrote two series of children's books, one set in Romney Marsh and based on the fictional village of Westling where her main heroine, Tamzin Grey, is the vicar's daughter. Westling is recognisably Rye Harbour in Sussex where Monica (Newton) grew up, the daughter of the vicar. Monica's other series is set on and around Punchbowl Farm  in Surrey, a fictionalised version of the farmhouse which she and her husband Bill Edwards bought in the 1930s. The two series are interconnected with characters from one appearing in the other occasionally. My personal favourites are the Romney Marsh books, and I've managed to collect the whole set over the years, finding titles that I recalled reading from the library but never owned.

I don't honestly know how I would judge them against today's crop of children's books if I came to them fresh, but they stand up well to re-reading even though they are from a much more innocent time.

Wish for a Pony instantly became my favourite book, to be read and re-read. It's the first Romney Marsh book and introduces Tamzin Grey and her best friend Rissa Birnie, two likeable main characters. It also includes a richly populated geographical background, detailed and ‘real’ with interesting grown up characters, too. She drew on characters from Rye Harbour to populate her books. Who can say whether they were real individuals or amalgams of local characters. Apart from Tamzin's ever present but not overbearing parents, and her little brother, Diccon, (whose age unfortunately shifts part way through the series) recurring characters include Old Jim Decks the rogueish but intrinsically good ferryman, and Old Jim’s son, Young Jim and the slightly sinister Hookey Galley who is always Up To No Good. Even the minor characters, like Butterbeans Pope who is always hanging around the harbour mast, the inappropriately named Lillycrop children, and the curmudgeonly grocer, Smiling Morn, are all succinctly drawn. Yes there are horses, and yes, Tamzin's wish for a pony does come true, though not via the obvious route.

The second book, Summer of the Great Secret, sees Tamzin and Rissa trying to reform Old Jim Decks when he is suspected of smuggling - a recurring theme and a semi-respectable profession for a Sussex fisherman when it involved brandy from Fance rather than boatloads of narcotics (Dr-Syn-for-kids?). In the third book two boy characters duly arrive, Rissa’s cousin Roger and his piratical and dashing young friend, Meryon Fairbrass, and the four children become the core cast for the rest of the series which includes stories of the local farm struggling through a foot-and-mouth epidemic, or fake ‘hauntings’ to scare off developers, or of rescuing seabirds from an oil-slick or saving a dolphin from exploitation. The ponies are ever present, but not always the focus. Rissa eventually gets her own pony, but the boys have their own interests. Meryon, despite a swashbuckling pirate ancestor, always aspires to a career in medicine.

It says a lot for the impression these books left on me that I can write this now without referring to the volumes on my bookshelves. The characters lived for me then and still live for me now. I remember them not just as paper characters, but as friends I once knew well and still remember with fondness. I grew up with Tamzin, Rissa, Meryon and Roger – absurdly delighted when, as they grew up, Tamzin and Meryon ended up with an ‘understanding'.

Monica Edwards writing was never flashy, but it had an intense quality of realism, albeit not gritty as is currently the fashion. Her characters still faced physical trials and moral dilemmas and saved the day by extreme courage, steadfast loyalty to each other and intelligent reasoning. She was thoroughly grounded in the geography and history of her specific locations, never more upfront than when she wrote Storm Ahead, which featured a lifeboat disaster based on the loss of the Mary Stanford of Rye in 1928 when the whole of the seventeen man crew of the Mary Stanford Lifeboat drowned. Monica (age 16) was witness as the lifeboat capsized while coming into harbour, and it was her father who officiated at the mass funeral for the seventeen drowned sailors. Rooted in fact and bitter experience, Monica's writing was never more realistic than when describing that storm and its consequences with chilling intensity.

I recently read the  The Monica Edwards Romney Marsh Companion by Brian Parks and was interested to find out that Meryon was based on a boy she knew in real life. When I discovered that he died while at Oxford University, I was gutted. It was as if one of my favourite childhood characters had been killed off without fulfilling his potential of growing up to be a doctor and marrying his Tamzin. Those characters grabbed me so much as a child that over four deecades later I still care.

It  behooves us as writers to understand that the very best books are about people who feel real. A good book is a combination of plot, characterisation and style, but just as architects will debate whether form follows function or function follows form, readers will debate the relative importance of the three major criteria. For me, there's no contest. Without great characterisation a book doesn't live. Tamzin, Rissa, Meryon and Roger never stopped living when I closed my book and they're still living now.

Thank you. Monica Edwards.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I agree with every word of this, though I am fonder of some of the later books than Wish for a Pony to which I came too to late - and far too late for No Mistaking Corker, but I digress.

There was a very acute observation by one critical work I read; it pointed out that it was one of the most difficult things in writing to make a truly good person interesting, and Edwards succeeded in doing this with Tamzin. I agree entirely - and have always preferred the Romney Marsh characters, though I really do think Meryon is too good to be true for my personal taste.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Meryon is too good to be true, I agree, but he also has a sense of humour which, I think, redeems him. He is also quite pig-headed and fairly un-Meryonish in 'A Wind is Blowing'. It's obvious that ME really fancied him and reading her biog she seems to have been pretty devastated by his death. There's no inklng of who he was - I guess they want to protect the family's privacy which is fair enough.

I banged on about Wish for a Pony because it was the first one, and my first introduction to the series, but I do prefer some of the others. I'd be hard pressed to say which was my favourite, though No Going Back would be very near the top of my list. I also really like The Nightbird, though I only have the Armada paperback which is an abridged text.

I'd love to see the difference between the abridged and the original. I presume the abridgement was just for word count. I hardly think it clould be for content.

Tamzin is certainly a-good-person-made-interesting, but part of her appeal is that she doesn't think of herself as a good person and often takes time out to examine her motives for doing things, especially with regard to protecting Jim Decks in his various nefarious activities, even when she knows he's breaking the law. She has her own moral compass and the law always comes second to her loyalty to friends.

Have you seen the prices some of the volumes are going for on Amazon these days. I feel like putting a note into the books in my collection should my kids ever clear out my house when I'm gone.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I believe Meryon's 'real' identity is actually known - I'm sure I was discussing it somewhere on LJ with someone where they mentioned his real name.

The prices, the prices! I was looking to replace my very tatty paperback of Cargo of Horses and the first one I saw was going for over £150, and that was at a book fair! I am still looking. Missed one a few weeks ago by a whisker.

I have bought-at-the-time editions of The Outsider, The Wild One and A Wind is Blowing and I, also, cannot believe the prices they are listed at, both in the book shops and on Amazon or e-Bay.

I have taken several fans on tours of the Rye Port area (and, oddly enough, my OS map for A-level geography covered it), though we generally insist on Winchelsea first. I love that town. On a summer's day it feels like something out of an episode of The Avengers in its Steed/Peel heyday.

Book prices

[morphlet.livejournal.com]

I know what you are saying. I've been looking to replace my Pullein-Thomson and Monica Dickens childhood books and £20+ for a tatty paperback no thank you.