Mortimer the Raven – an unexpected hero – for Primary School Teachers!

Famous for munching up flights of stairs, and even escalators (where do you think the word ‘ravenous’ comes from!?) Mortimer the raven is best known as the hilarious troublemaker who first appeared in Joan Aiken’s Arabel’s Raven stories on Jackanory – and of course in Quentin Blake’s wonderful pictures!

But his adventures with the Jones family and his beloved friend Arabel,  have surprisingly also made him a HERO with teachers of reluctant readers. Here’s a letter from one of them –  (thank you, Anne!)

    “I had a class of 10 and 11 year olds, one of whom was having great difficulty in learning to read. Well, let’s be blunt about this, he couldn’t even read his name. He and I worked long and hard on this problem, mainly with the help of his brother’s motorbike manual, and eventually he began to make sense of the words on the page and I began to understand how to strip a bike engine. (All the best teaching goes two ways!) But, at last, the day I knew he’d really made it as an independent reader was all down to Joan Aiken. 

Every afternoon in that class began with us all putting our feet up with a good book and reading silently for twenty minutes or so. (How else does a hard pressed teacher get time to read?) On this particular afternoon we were all well into our books when there comes a suppressed snigger from the general direction of this lad’s desk. I decide to ignore it. Then there is another, rather less well suppressed, and finally an outright chortle. He was almost unaware of what he was doing so engrossed was he in the book that he could now read well enough to really enjoy. And the book?   Aiken’s ‘Arabel’s Raven’. I bless her regularly for turning him into a real reader.”

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The BBC TV series (as above) was produced with puppets based on the

wonderful illustrations by

Quentin Blake

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Read more about  the Arabel and Mortimer stories here

Two New Puffin Bumper Collections out now!

and you can even do the jigsaw!

Arabel Meets Mortimer – Riotous Raven of Rumbury Town…!

It was a dark and stormy night (of course!) when Mortimer entered the life of Arabel and the Jones family – and Rumbury Town N.W.3 and-a-half would never be the same again.  Arabel’s Raven is the first of the many tales of his adventures with the Jones Family told by Joan Aiken and masterfully characterised by Quentin Blake’s illustrations.  The devoted pair appeared on a series of Jackanory readings, and then in books and a puppet series for the BBC which earned them a following of fans of all ages.

It was love at first sight – and forever – for the pair who Joan Aiken rather wickedly described as her version of the relationship between the ego and the id – Arabel never does anything wrong, and Mortimer does what he likes:

Before too long chaos reigns in Rumbury Town, and Mortimer (through no fault of his own of course!) is in the thick of it:

Amazingly he does, with the evil squirrel strapped to his back, and is soon holed up in the gangsters’ hideout – while Arabel goes into a decline, wondering where her friend can be?  But soon everyone is on his trail…  and now strange things are happening at Rumbury Tube station, but no one can solve the mystery?Pretty soon everyone is going round the bend, and it is up to Arabel to keep her wits about her and unravel the hilarious trail of chaos that leads her back to Mortimer…will she ever be parted from him again? 

“Nevermore!” says Mortimer.

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Read more about Arabel & Mortimer and the BBC Puppet Series

on the Joan Aiken Website

NEW EDITIONS  now out from Puffin Books

 Bumper edition with Six Hilarious Stories!

A Joan Aiken Story – about Bob Dylan!

Bob Dylan first appeared and sang in the UK on a BBC Sunday Night play in January 1963 which made a big impression on Joan Aiken. Called Madhouse on Castle Street, it included a strange and sinister song called The Swan on the River, which reminded her of the often grim and lurid folk ballads her Canadian mother used to sing, such as Lord Rendall, about a young nobleman who was poisoned by his lover. At the time Dylan was relatively unknown, having only brought out one album, and this was his first visit to England, but his performance, and that song were unforgettable, and she didn’t forget the singer.

That year, in 1963, Joan Aiken visited America for the first time to celebrate the publication of her now classic children’s novel The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, where she also visited  her writer father in his home country for the first time, and met Charles Schlessiger, the man who was to be her literary agent and undying supporter for the next fifty years. This publication also catapulted Joan Aiken to fame in America with a stunning review in Time magazine which began:

‘This year can boast one genuine small masterpiece, called The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.  Written, as any children’s book should be, with obvious fond delight by Poet Conrad Aiken’s daughter Joan…it is almost a copybook lesson in those virtues that a classic children’s book must possess: charm, a style of its own, and the skill and authority to create a small world without writing down to small readers.’

Back home in Petworth, Sussex Joan Aiken’s two teenage children (and their Beatnik, guitar playing babysitter) like characters from a folk tale, or one of her own stories, had requested a particular gift to be brought back from New York – a Bob Dylan album.

She came back with two, Bob Dylan, and The Freewheelin Bob Dylan. These records made us the stars of our small town, and started a lifelong passion in the family. Joan Aiken went on to write many songs for her own plays, which were set to music by her guitar playing son, perhaps prophetically named John Sebastian, and Dylan’s words and music continued to entertain and inspire her. Sadly she died before Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” I am sure she would have applauded.

But a combination of Bob Dylan and our own equally influential guitar playing Beatnik, gave birth to a character from Joan Aiken’s much loved Arabel’s Raven stories – the baby sitter Chris Cross whose singing totally entranced Arabel, as seen above in Quentin Blake’s picture, from a story that appeared a few years later – Arabel & Mortimer and the Escaped Black Mamba.

Having run out of milk (after an unfortunate accident!) while he is minding the pair one evening, Chris takes Mortimer and Arabel down to the station where there are all kinds of amazing automatic machines to get some more, and while there (after various adventures!) they make their own record of one of Chris’s songs to bring back home.

Chris Cross remained an integral part of the Jones’ family life, and Bob Dylan’s songs went on to influence Joan’s own compositions, here for instance from a Shakespearean parody called Mooncusser’s Daughter, with music by her son..

Joan Aiken went on to marry an American painter and take up residence in Greenwich Village, New York.

I like to think of them walking the same streets.

The recording of  Bob Dylan’s Gliding Swan song can still be heard here

Happy 80th Birthday Bob, with all best wishes

from Joan Aiken (and family!)

More Mortimer… Joan Aiken’s hilarious hero is back for Christmas!

Perfect for Christmas, and for (N)evermore?

 First seen on Jackanory read by the wonderful Bernard Cribbins, these stories have not lost any of their hilarity over the years… Joan Aiken couldn’t resist giving the Jones Family some of the 70’s craziest gadgets  for Mortimer to wreak havoc with in their house in Rumbury town London NW3-and-a-half…

If you aren’t able to see your family this year, maybe these stories will remind you of some of the (un-missed!) joys of Christmases past…

Arabel’s cousin Annie comes to stay, bringing alarming gifts – radio-controlled tiddlywinks, a solar powered skateboard and a computer guitar that makes up its own music – Joan Aiken’s powers of invention were ahead of her time, but not by very much…

Terrifying Toys!

Struggling with Christmas baking?

While Mrs Jones is in the kitchen frantically trying to make an enormous number of prawn fancies and iced macaroons, she is disturbed by a mouse!!! And not just any mouse, but the Advance guard and A.A. Scout for an army of starving mice from Cantilever Green who are seeking pastures new, and who has been lured into the Jones kitchen by the delightful smell of all those macaroons:

Unwanted visitors?

Ever helpful, Arabel goes to Mrs Catchpenny’s shop to borrow Archibald the cat, known locally as a former cracksman’s mog, and of course Mortimer goes along for the ride. The combination in Mrs Jones’s kitchen of Archibald, Scout F stroke B7, a fantastic amount of ill-fated ‘cordon-blue’ cookery (made with the help of all the Jones household’s trouble saving electrical equipment) and Mortimer, makes for a great tale…

When Mortimer confronts Archibald – who is happily well fed having opened the larder door and found the prawns, and then slept on the trays of warm macaroons in the airing cupboard and is now covered in crushed macaroon, clotted cream and feathers –  Mortimer is of course entranced!

Fun & Games

Did we know Mortimer had a mother?

Nevermore!

This is a mere taster of the delights on offer in these wonderful long lost collections, which also includes Mortimer’s Cross and the fantastic Mortimer’s Portrait on Glass, where Mortimer meets an ancient ancestor in Ireland. These stories still make me laugh  out loud, but just now, something we absolutely need is a bit of real craziness….

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Puffin editions also have added Extras –  Like Do You Remember…?

and Much more!

Find the Bernard Cribbins Jackanory Episodes on the Joan Aiken You Tube page

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Find  Both the Puffin collections here