The Captain Hook Affair by Humphrey Carpenter

Well, it was exactly the book I remembered borrowing from Newton Aycliffe library several times in 1979, and it was just as fantastic as I remembered it being.

Last week I mentioned on this blog that a real childhood favourite of mine was a novel in which kids got hold of a magic silver pencil which, when it touched the pages of fictional books or comics, brought the characters to life. Because I remembered neither title nor author I thought I stood no chance whatsoever of finding the book again. But then Nick from 'A Pile of Leaves' came up with the exact title I was trying to remember and just a couple of days later a Puffin copy was in my hands, thanks to Amazon's Used and New Service. (I LOVE that service! Books for 1p! I imagine the system working like some kind of Steampunk internet thing, with all the secondhand bookshops in the world being connected by brass tubes and firing on hydraulic pistons... sending bubblewrapped novels shooting through intricate networks all over the world...)

It's Puffin's anniversary this year, isn't it? Seventy years? They should get their fingers out and reprint some of the ABSOLUTE CLASSICS they have let go out of print. 'The Captain Hook Affair' first, I think.

Lizzy is a girl who lives with her mother and grandmother, both ailing and she finds herself, as the book begins, about to be shipped off to a children's home. The only thing that cheers her is the mysterious silver propeller pencil her grandmother gives her. Once she is is in the confusing, alarming Home it isn't long before Lizzy discovers the fact that the pencil can take you into fictional worlds. We get some lovely cameos by the Mad Hatter, Merlin, Samuel Whiskers, and the Giant up the Beanstalk. The 'real world' that Lizzy has to return to is gritty 1979 vintage: she is surrounded by well-meaning teachers and professionals who fear for her safety. There is a very friendly social worker, Jane Jones who comes to believe in the magic and a crazy psychiatrist, Dr Max Smeethe (who dresses more like a film director than a doctor) - who furiously disbelieves the magic that happens all around him. Even when he is almost eaten by the Giant or baked into a pie by Samuel Whiskers.

Lizzy is accompanied on her adventures by Jack, who is clever and, as things go on, increasingly amoral. When the ruling regime at Riverside House children's home gets too awful, it's Jack who elects to fight fire with fire. He summons up the cast of pirates from Peter Pan, and that's how Captain Hook and his cronies come to take over the whole place. The adults are sent packing in a gloriously anarchic chapter, and all the kids become pirates. Captain Hook goes round swigging incredibly sweet 'British Sherry-Type Wine' and smoking two cigars at once, and getting the former head of the school into terrible trouble by making him look like a drinker. It's all fantastically good fun.

I was really interested to revisit and find darker shades in this fantasy, too. When Jack gets carried away with his ideas of revenge upon the adult world, he turns to science fiction novels and tries to arm himself with weapons of the future. He tells Hook that he wants 'certain things which could... kill people or paralyse them for as long as we wanted just at the touch of a button...' It's a chilling moment. As is the sequence in which the two heroes get banished to the 'Crooked Land' of the old nursey rhyme and are put into a grey prisonlike establishment for weeks on end, to be conditioned into accepting the 'crookedness' of the world. They slowly start to forget their own world and learn to live with the terrible world that wants them to conform...

The book is a lovely fable about the imagination and freedom. Of course they escape from the world of grey conditioning and come back to a happy ending that seems utterly and completely earned. The book finishes in the grounds of the Children's Home on a perfect summer's day - with everyhthing restored not just to order - but better than it ever was before.

I hope Posy Simmonds won't mind my using one of the illustrations above. There are dozens of wonderful drawings by her, throughout the book. They're casual, unfussy and perfectly characterful. They, plus Carpenter's casual, avuncular, slightly fussily old-fashioned tone, makes you long to wield a silver pencil of your own - and vanish into this story more than any other. That's what it does for me, anyway. Just as it did when I was ten, in 1979.

Oh! Final thing - I had misremembered the book as being set in a brownstone apartment building in New York. At one point Lizzy tells her teacher that she has been to New York, via the magic of the pencil. I wonder if I extrapolated my own story there?

But then yesterday Nick emailed to say maybe I was thinking of a book by Mary Rodgers, who wrote 'Freaky Friday'? A bit of googling - and I find a book from the Seventies set in a New York apartment building - about kids who find a TV that plays tomorrow's programmes today. Now, I'm sure I read that. It's ringing bells madly... So, my NYC novel is on its way...)