More Armada

Here are another couple of Armada Monster Book covers! Specially for those who never knew the series went beyond the first couple. I was glad to stir a few memories yesterday, with mention of this late Seventies paperback anthology series. And it was good, too, to be reminded of the companion set - the much longer running 'Armada Ghost Books', which were mostly edited by the brilliant Mary Danby. I remember tales of haunted ponies and ghostly gymnasts from those books.

On our day out yesterday - a fantastically wintry drive into the snowbound Derbyshire hills - I was reading Armada books all the way. We went swerving through deep forested valleys where every branch was coated with snow and the waterfalls were like bronze. Peggy Lee's Latin LP's playing on the car stereo and me reading R. Chetwynd-Hayes' intro to Monster Book 6:

'...alas we have all grown up too sophisticated in recent years and have had a surfeit of giant apes, and dinosaurs, pterodactyls, golems, things from outer space, and nameless horrible wriggly things...'

He must have had his young audience agog. No! We haven't had enough of monsters!

The book is full of wonderfully gruesome beasts. The best is probably the animated cadaver in the first story - the Mudadora - the living corpse held together by slimy mud. Angus Campbell seemed to be a regular contributor, as was Terry Tapp, who here contributes a strange Mexican story about a giant jumping bean that one day disgorges a colossal deadly butterfly with sapphire wings. A strangely benign monster story in the end. It must have seemed impossibly exotic to the young me.

So these things were churning round in my head all day yesterday. The monstrous and the sepulchral. As we braved the snowbound hills - flask of tea and blankets and shovel at the ready on the backseat, of course. J. wanted to visit Bakewell - for closing down sales in his favourite DIY store and a fancy chinaware shop he likes. I was keener on a visit to Barnham Broom - which is a warehouse-sized remainder bookshop in the middle of a field on the Buxton Road. We got there for the last half hour it was open. And I fell off the wagon - I'm sorry! - and bought a batch of reduced kids' books. One of those great Kingfisher anthologies of stories from a few years back; a novel by Sherryl Jordan (who wrote the magnificent 'Raging Quiet' - anyone know that?); and a curious fantasy trilogy by a Canadian kids' writer called J.C Mills. And a great-looking thing in which Holmes and Watson are dogs and the villains are cats.

What can I say? I slipped up. All those new shiny books swayed me madly.

We need someone to gather up a batch of these spooky writers of the 70s into a new anthology. I've said it before about the horror stories for adults, but what about these kids books? Terry Tapp, Sorche Nic Leodhas, Roger Malisson, Daphne Froome, Pamela Vincent. Where did they go? And it strikes me now that these might have been pseudonyms? Were they all R Chetwynd-Hayes, perhaps? Does anyone know?

Quiet day today with more reading. Unwinding completely. It looks like more snow coming. Teaching term starts tomorrow!