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jaceyMonica Edwards: The White Riders
A Romney Marsh Story
This is a book form my childhood re-read after a gap of maybe forty years. Monica Edwards was writing from the late forties to the late sixties and her two most popular series for children, the Romney Marsh and the Punchbowl Farm stories ran parallel and occasionally overlapped. This is one of the earlier Romney Marsh stories featuring Tamzin Grey, daughter if the Vicar of Westling (a thinly disguised Rye Harbour in Sussex), her best friend Rissa, Rissa's cousin Roger and his friend, the dashing and roguish Meryon Fairbrass, descendent of pirates. Originally published In 1950, this is a gentle tale of derring-do.
When a property developer buys Cloudsley Castle with intent to turn it into a holiday camp and evict the Merrow family from Castle Farm in the process, Tamzin hatches a plan to resurrect the White Riders, ghostly horsemen who traditionally galloped over the Marsh, screeching like banshees, to scare off the Excise Men in times gone by. The plan is to haunt the castle so that the night shift workers will be scared off and the building work abandoned.
There's enough adventure and jeopardy in this to keep any child enthralled, yet it's a product of it's time. There is danger, but no one gets seriously hurt. There's risk taking, but it's not stupidly reckless. And despite the fact that the premise is a bit far-fetched – somehow it all works out in the end.
The joy of Monica Edwards' Romney Marsh books lies in the characters and the community as much as the escapades and adventures. Westling and the Marsh are as much recurring characters as the population of the village itself. No Romney Marsh book would be complete without Jim Decks, for instance, the disreputable but delightful old ferryman whose schemes are often central to the plot, and indeed it's Jim who remembers tales of the White Riders and kicks of Tamzin's idea to haunt the castle.
I have no idea whether anyone, child or adult, coming to these for the first time over sixty years since they were first written would find them relevant. They are certainly far removed from the children's books published today, but I've always loved them, and always will.
A Romney Marsh Story
This is a book form my childhood re-read after a gap of maybe forty years. Monica Edwards was writing from the late forties to the late sixties and her two most popular series for children, the Romney Marsh and the Punchbowl Farm stories ran parallel and occasionally overlapped. This is one of the earlier Romney Marsh stories featuring Tamzin Grey, daughter if the Vicar of Westling (a thinly disguised Rye Harbour in Sussex), her best friend Rissa, Rissa's cousin Roger and his friend, the dashing and roguish Meryon Fairbrass, descendent of pirates. Originally published In 1950, this is a gentle tale of derring-do.
When a property developer buys Cloudsley Castle with intent to turn it into a holiday camp and evict the Merrow family from Castle Farm in the process, Tamzin hatches a plan to resurrect the White Riders, ghostly horsemen who traditionally galloped over the Marsh, screeching like banshees, to scare off the Excise Men in times gone by. The plan is to haunt the castle so that the night shift workers will be scared off and the building work abandoned.
There's enough adventure and jeopardy in this to keep any child enthralled, yet it's a product of it's time. There is danger, but no one gets seriously hurt. There's risk taking, but it's not stupidly reckless. And despite the fact that the premise is a bit far-fetched – somehow it all works out in the end.
The joy of Monica Edwards' Romney Marsh books lies in the characters and the community as much as the escapades and adventures. Westling and the Marsh are as much recurring characters as the population of the village itself. No Romney Marsh book would be complete without Jim Decks, for instance, the disreputable but delightful old ferryman whose schemes are often central to the plot, and indeed it's Jim who remembers tales of the White Riders and kicks of Tamzin's idea to haunt the castle.
I have no idea whether anyone, child or adult, coming to these for the first time over sixty years since they were first written would find them relevant. They are certainly far removed from the children's books published today, but I've always loved them, and always will.
