How Joan Aiken fought to defend the wolves of Willoughby Chase

For years the children's books magazine Books for Keeps published a series of interviews with authors – there was one of these 'authorgraphs' in each issue.

Here is the wonderful Joan Aiken from issue 39 (July 1986):

"The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first book to make money for me. I’d actually done two chapters just before my husband was ill but had put it away. Abelard Schuman, who’d published some short stories in America, accepted it (called 'Bonnie Green' then) but said it was too scary – could I prune it, take out the wolves? I said Never! 

My agent literally forgot it for a year, then apologised and sent it to Cape. It did quite well here, but after a lovely, whole-page review in Time it sold like mad in America, and so confirmed me in my mad resolution to freelance.

"Doubleday, who published Wolves, asked me (amazingly conveniently) about crime novels, so I interspersed children’s books with thrillers. ...

"Margery Allingham spoke of left- and right-hand writing, what you do for yourself and what you do to satisfy others: I suppose Wolves was for myself, and the Dido books – in fact, they’re probably too self-indulgent, full of dialect and adult word-play. But children’s books should be written on different levels, or there will be nothing for them if they read it again at a later age."

I blogged about the magazine's interview with Malcolm Saville a couple of years ago.

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"Yet again, we’re all caught up with the fame-encrusted stories of rich, powerful men. The women and their reported life-scarring encounters with Epstein and his set are an afterthought. At best, they’re treated as a salacious backdrop to the fortunes of men whom society has lionised and – with epic irony – thought better than the rest of us." Michelle Cook says the reaction to the Epstein files spotlights how badly we are still failing women and girls.

"As DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] expands its footprint, it’s making its cruelty manifest in suburban areas like Roxbury – towns that might have once felt insulated from the brutality and chaos that immigration agents have unleashed in US cities." Schuyler Mitchell reports that the suburbs are fighting back against ICE's plans to turn warehouses into detention centers.

Peter Kellner writes an open letter to Labour's next prime minister: "It will be crucial to learn from Starmer's mistakes. Listing them is the easy bit. The crisis that has engulfed him deserves an explanation. How did he end up disliked by so many voters and alienating so many of his own MPs?"

Martha Gill argues that enthusiasts for apprenticeships haven’t worked out they fit into a modern economy: "The story of apprenticeships is a long struggle to make a scheme built for a time of trades and manufacturing fit into a modern flexible service economy – a wobbly journey of correction and overcorrection."

"One of the biggest barriers he sees for aspiring cricketers is that their parents often struggle to afford the prohibitive cost of kit, which can quickly spiral into hundreds of pounds." The former England bowler Saj Mahmood talks about making cricket to all with Chris Britt-Searle.

Chris Lovegrove has a site devoted to the world of Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles.

Southern Television's Midnight is a Place from 1977

The whole of the Southern Television adaptation of Joan Aiken's Midnight is a Place from 1977 has turned up on YouTube.

Aiken was a wonderful writer for children – her gothic tales were at once funny and scary. Often there's an element of pastiche of 19th-century writers in her work. If she's pastiching anyone here, it's the Charles Dickens of Hard Times.

Because this adaptation dates from the Seventies, it runs to 13 episodes and stars Simon Gipps-Kent ("Master Bell"). You can play a short extract from episode 1 above.

If I remember the book correctly, the steam press was used to stamp the pattern into carpets because it was cheaper than weaving it.

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"Almost all workers (98 per cent) at SOSE [South of Scotland Enterprise] believed the four-day week trial improved motivation and morale, while there was a decrease in workers taking time off sick and a 25 per cent fall in those taking sick days for psychological reasons." A Scottish government trial of a four-day working week finds that it improves productivity and staff wellbeing, reports Joanna Partridge.

Sam Whewall, Avril Keating and Emily Clark say young people in seaside towns are being left behind and set out what could be done to help them: "Our professionals made two key suggestions for improving the lives of the young people they work with. The first is to invest in safe spaces and leisure activities that are available outside of the short summer season. ... The second suggestion is to invest in and rebuild youth services."

Jonquilyn Hill on the rise of the wellness industry: "Nowadays, in many parts of North America, wellness is everywhere and anywhere, and the definition has really ballooned to include anything and everything. If we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we’ll hear a different answer from another one."

"There has been a rise in privately operated tournaments set up as little more than vehicles for illegal betting. Organisers are theoretically expected to monitor betting markets for signs of suspicious movements, but problems with manipulation have been manifest." Steve Menary reveals that cricket has been flooded with betting sponsorship since the Covid pandemic.

Adrian Teal examines the eccentricities of the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough.

"'The Wolves are running…' is the mysterious message the boy Kay Harker is given by the old Punch and Judy man in Masefield’s The Box of Delights; it was a potent image from Joan Aiken’s childhood reading, complete with snow… and re-reading the book became one of the Christmas traditions that remained with her until she was able 'to write the wolves out of her  subconscious' and into her own story many years later." Lizza Aiken traces the links between The Box of Delights and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

A Puffin Books profile of Joan Aiken

On holiday in Shropshire last summer, I picked up a secondhand copy of Joan Aiken's The Cuckoo Tree and was reminded how enjoyable her children's books are.

The Cuckoo Tree was the fifth of the Wolves Chronicles. This film, made by Puffin Books to promote Aiken's work, talks about the genesis of the first four and also shows you Aiken's home.

There's lots more about the writer and her books on The Wonderful World of Joan Aiken.

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Josh Self has some good news - Reform UK’s civil war will be a protracted farce: "[Rupert] Lowe’s substantial online presence will ensure every aspect of this row is played out in public. That means recurrent poor headlines for Reform - as an array of significant political milestones await."

"As of 1900, about 18 per cent, or nearly one in five, American children died before their fifth birthday. The most common causes were infectious diseases - pneumonia, diphtheria, dysentery, measles, and other illnesses ran rampant through households, and children were especially at risk." Anna North reminds us of what life was like before vaccines.

"The four-part docudrama follows a group of mothers in Corby as they fight for justice after 19 of their children were born with birth defects caused by exposure to toxic waste – the result of the botched regeneration of the town’s former steelworks site." Lee Barron, the town's Labour MP, reviews Toxic Town.

Victoria Guida argues that crypto may be its own worse enemy: "Factions within the industry are battling with each other for strategic, commercial and ideological reasons."

"The film’s title is aptly overdetermined. Reclusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) is obviously one kind of performer. But performer, in British slang, also refers to mobsters like Chas (James Fox). In the film, the worlds that these two men inhabit collide and entwine in fascinating fashion." Bud Wilkins reviews of a new Blu-Ray release of Performance.

Lizza Aiken praises the sequels to Jane Austen's novels that Joan Aiken wrote.

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"The safety net once provided by the social security system and council services has been outsourced to a patchwork of grassroots groups, to the point where meeting basic human needs – being fed, clothed and housed – relies on fundraising in December as well as taxation in April." Frances Ryan welcomes us to Britain’s Victorian Christmas, where volunteers in Santa hats fulfil the basic functions of the state.

Keith Edwards argues that the US Democrats need to give youth its head: "Americans are some of the youngest people in the rich world. Yet our elected leaders are easily the world’s oldest."

Patrick Barkham reports that water voles continue to decline in their distribution across Britain, but there are signs of recovery in 11 key areas.

"A few years ago, on social media, I posted the architectural critic Jonathan Meades' description of Birmingham as 'an almost excessively sylvan place' with 'lavishly green' suburbs. It was laughed at in some corners, so at odds was it with many outsiders’ image of the city as a concrete jungle." Jon Neale says that Birmingham's 19th-century 'guinea gardens' gave the city a split personality that it retains to this day.

"I used to know Mary Norton. I played with her daughter. One day I asked her 'What’s this story you have written about little people who live under the floorboards?' and Mary replied 'It's not about little people who live under the floorboards, it’s about Czechoslovakia.'" Chris Wallis asks if The Borrowers is a children’s fantasy classic or a political allegory.

Amanda Craig celebrates the genius of Joan Aiken: "Darkness, injustice and cruelty underlie Aiken’s stories; packed with vivid characters, each can be read as a critique of capitalism, industrialisation and the class system. Her aristocrats are often villains of the deepest dye, never more so than in The Whispering Mountain ... with its cold, murderous, gold-obsessed Marquess of Malyn, searching for a lost tribe of goldsmiths living inside a Welsh volcano."

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"One gets the impression from the book that the Liberal Democrats is currently less a vehicle of ideology or social change and more an artefact of Britain’s electoral system. Indeed, the authors conclude with several reasonable goals - deduced from their empirical findings - for the party: "re-empowering the local", "a socially liberal party", "future proofing the party", and "the Liberal Democrats as a movement?" each of which would put the party on firmer ground." James Dennison reviews a new study of the party.

"We already have the Bob Willis Test at Edgbaston (prostate cancer) and the Ruth Strauss Foundation Test at Lord's, so why not the Graham Thorpe Test at The Oval? An event around the Test that raise awareness of mental health issues and money for mental health charities." James Buttler on the reaction to Graham Thorpe's death and his own mental health struggles.

Jacqueline Garget reports on the harnessing of technology to combat the invasion of American mink: "At the start of 2024, the team announced that it had cleared East Anglia - its 'core area' accounting for almost 5 per cent of England - of mink. The work had started in earnest in 2020, and for the last two years there was no evidence of mink reproduction following extensive trapping."

Dave Osland has been reading a study of the socialist journalist Paul Foot's career. 

"In Coalbrookdale at Night (1801), coke hearths above blast furnaces release giant plumes of yellow and orange smoke into the sky. The ironworks have cast the rest of the landscape in shadow, with a portion of the moon visible on the right. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon travels along metal rails that had been installed in 1767 to facilitate the transport of materials across the site." Stephanie O'Rourke looks at the way British landscape painting reacted to the Industrial Revolution: 

Brian Phillips celebrates the children's writer Joan Aiken, whose "favorite literary terrain was the blurred border where nineteenth-century realism begins to slip into folklore and fantasy. This is a realm of absurd stock characters and hoary narrative devices: cruel governesses, kindhearted orphans, counterfeit wills, hidden passageways, long-lost relations, doppelgängers, clues hidden in paintings, castaways, coincidences, sudden returns from the dead."

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"If the introduction of proportional representation is a Lib Dem red line, then the party needs to work out now how it would secure the political commitment to change, and the process for achieving it." Jess Sargeant says the Liberal Democrats must learn from their failure to achieve constitutional reform during the Coalition years.

Daniel Dennett is interviewed by Taylor McNeil about his career as a philosopher and his hopes and fears for the future: "AI systems, like all software, are replicable with high fidelity and unbelievably fast mutations. If you have high fidelity replication and mutations, then you have evolution, and evolution can get out of hand, as it has in the past many times."

"It isn’t brave to say you hate classical music so much as bog-standard normal. State publicly that you don’t like classical music, and you’re cool, funny and 'relatable'. State publicly that you don’t like popular music, and you’re a weirdo or a snob." Alexandra Wilson dissects a Twitter row.

Christopher Hilton on Benjamin Britten as a campaigner against railway branch line closures.

PsychoNottingham investigates one of the city's lost cinemas.

"An emerging leitmotif in much of Aiken’s subsequent work for children makes its appearance here — the resourcefulness of its young protagonists against the machinations of adults who wish them ill. It’s not surprising that Wolves has shown itself a popular choice with younger readers: it has the right amount of jeopardy, a bit of safe distance is created by its being set in the 19th century, and expectations are high that, like a fairy tale, all will come right in the end." Calmgrove offers an appreciation of Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

Joan Aiken on American orphans

I recently came across a website devoted to the work of the children's writer Joan Aiken (1924-2004).

Here she is writing in the London Review of Books in 1980:

American orphans, on the whole, did have to work extremely hard. The log-cabin-to-White-House fable was implicit in all their stories: if only you chopped up enough kindling and shooed the chickens off the porch with sufficient vigour, you would end up putting yourself through college and at least become a teacher, if not President. 

My comfortable family-buttressed childhood was cheered by comparison with the hardships of a whole series of American orphan sagas. There was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, who had to slave for her harsh aunt Miranda Sawyer in order to pay off the mortgage on her home. Fleda, in Queechy, had the same problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. 

There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. 

Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the Orphan that Got Away. That is his charm. No one can harness Huck, or put him to work: "No one is going to sivilise me. I been there before."

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"Increasingly people in work cannot afford to provide the necessities of life for themselves and their families. Increasingly, they are having to resort to one of the 2200 food banks in the country to keep going, at least to keep their kids fed to the end of the month." Richard Kemp says we need to share the wealth of the nation more fairly if we are to keep society going,

Tanya Gold reported from Tiverton and Honiton on the eve of polling, saying the Conservatives deserved to lose: "This is not raging North Shropshire, where former Conservatives would denounce Johnson on street-corners, or Chesham and Amersham, where the atmosphere was a kind of gleeful transgression in sunlight. It feels sadder than that: splintered, tetchy, defeated, as if Johnson’s corruption is settling over everything like dust, leaving people bewildered and exhausted."

The government's levelling up agenda is in danger of failing rural areas, argues Graham Biggs.

Sam Ghibaldan remembers Bob Maclennan.

"I hope I do Edward Thomas no disservice in observing that it is as much because of circumstance as the poem's beauty in itself that this poem is so fondly and firmly remembered.  Within three months of that afternoon Britain was at war; three years later Thomas was dead, killed by a shell at Arras.  In March 1963 they came for the station as well.": Dominic N. goes to Adlestrop.

Gordon Askew goes back to Joan Aiken's Midnight is a Place: "For all its lack of originality this is a gripping story, grippingly told. As a historical piece it has not dated in the way of some writing from this era, and remains wonderfully accessible for young readers. I think they will get far more out of this than trying to read Dickens himself whilst still too young."

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"What happened on that Friday and in the days after, when police rounded up even more kids, would expose an ugly and unsettling culture in Rutherford County, one spanning decades. In the wake of these mass arrests, lawyers would see inside a secretive legal system that’s supposed to protect kids, but in this county did the opposite. Officials flouted the law by wrongfully arresting and jailing children." Meribah Knight and Ken Armstrong report a horrifying case from the US.

Jonathan Jones on the government's reliance on secondary legislation to drive Brexit and efforts to curb the Covid pandemic. He calls for a rethink on how such important laws on created.

Hadley Hall Meares detects his mother's influence in Prince Harry's exit from the royal spotlight.

"On the one hand, the old footage and the raw tapes were the closest we ever got to watching the Beatles work in the studio, meaning they’ve been pored over with Talmudic precision; on the other hand, so much of it is sloppy and half-assed, and it’s so tightly wound up in the group’s demise, it’s been hard to find much pleasure in listening or watching." Alan Light reviews Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary Get Back.

"I keep being drawn back to Derby. It’s a city where, for all the boarded-up retail premises and the shocking waste of the moribund Civic Centre, manufacture is at centre stage and new ideas take root – as they have done for centuries." Gillian Darley visits Derby's Museum of Making.

"Both of them wrote books that I hung on to, cherished, re-read, and both of them used history to tell stories for children of now." Fleur Hitchcock pays tribute to her "writing gods" Joan Aiken and Leon Garfield.

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"Are they hiding something, or is it simply that they are so confused and divided by the outcome of the referendum that they daren’t doubt its legality?" Paul Tyler asks why Labour is silent on the possibility that Russia interfered with the 2016 EU referendum.

Judges in Canada are sentencing youth offenders to chess with promising results, report Monique Sedgwick, Jeffrey MacCormack and Lance Grigg. Chess joke: After 37 consecutive Berlins they break down in tears and promise to go straight.

Talking of Chess, Sarah Hurst looks at the Kremlin's plans to maintain control of world chess.

Ian Visits on the revival of London's pedways.

"The character of Dido was the embodiment of many of that small girl’s dreams, as, when Joan grew up to be a writer she was able to give her all the wonderful adventures she had imagined for herself, and encourage others to be bold and follow their dreams as well." Her daughter Lizza Aiken celebrates Joan Aiken's heroine Dido Twite.

Paul Steele takes us on a walk through some of this blog's sacred places, including White Grit and the Stiperstones Inn.

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The government should stop dismantling historical gains made in equalities legislation, argues Issan Ghazni.

On Liberator's blog Simon Titley discusses reports that the Liberal Democrats' most generous donor, Rumi Verjee, is to be nominated for a peerage.

Community Land Trusts have helped local people take control of land and develop housing solutions in rural areas across the UK. Now for the first time this model is being used to help tackle London’s dysfunctional housing market, as Kate MacTiernan explains on New Start.

"In the past three years there has been a rapid growth of interest in community shares - a form of finance that allows many small investors to club together to buy community assets. They have been used to buy shops, pubs and other community buildings, to fund green energy projects and even to help supporters buy a football club." David Ainsworth examines an encouraging development for Third Sector.

"The Wolves of Willoughby Chase can be mistaken for a parody Victorian—country houses with secret passages, orphans, evil governesses, railroad-train compartments—but it is a rarer thing than that. It’s never coy or arch (which Aiken said books for children should never be), but it is heard differently by an adult reader, who greets the arrival of common plot turns, descriptive tropes, and matched good-evil characters with pleasure, like old friends showing up suddenly at the door, even as the young reader wants to know only what happens next." John Crowley in the Boston Review says grown ups should read Joan Aiken, not J.K. Bleeding Rowling.

Adrift hunts for the remains of tide mills on the Sussex coast.