Books of Delight: Joan Aiken & John Masefield

Childhood favourites and Christmas memories are often inextricably linked, Joan Aiken shares hers here – this is the story of John Masefield and Joan Aiken.

“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.

The poet John Masefield with his wandering, seafaring life had been a powerful influence on Joan’s father, the poet Conrad Aiken, who had started writing himself from the early 1900’s; the first Masefield novel Joan came across was lent to her in the 1920’s by an old sailor in the village where she lived.  As a small girl she was utterly gripped by the mysterious and terrifying tale of The Bird of Dawning, but Masefield’s books for children – The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights – didn’t appear until some  years later, and she first discovered them in 1936 in her school library.

In a piece for the John Masefield Society about her love of his books Joan wrote:

So although readers may associate the two ‘Wolves‘ books, John Masefield’s and Joan Aiken’s, with their stories of heart-stopping chases across snowy wooded landscapes, it was the first of his Kay Harker books, The Midnight Folk, that was to have the most lasting influence on Joan Aiken.  And rather than her ‘Wolves’ title, it is another story of Joan’s that owes most to John Masefield – the one she made up at age 17, at the height of the Second World war, to comfort and distract her small brother. Aiken’s real first novel,  which was actually published two years before The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, was called The Kingdom and The Cave. It was a pure, pleasurable homage to the Masefield books she and her brother knew and loved, and Joan Aiken, fully recognising her debt, never imagined that one day it would actually be published.

But years later, at a time when when she desperately needed to support a sick husband and two small children, she took out the old exercise book where she had written it down, typed it out and found a publisher who agreed to take it after a complete revision and some very substantial cuts, which finally made the story  her own. As she said later:

      ‘All young writers learn by imitation…and certainly I could not have chosen a better model.’

It seemed absolutely fitting that Virago Modern Classics should agree to republish this book,  Joan Aiken’s real first novel – written many years before The Wolves of Willoughby Chase – and that it should get one of its best reviews from a young reader who found as much delight in her story as she and her young brother had found in Masefield’s, so many years before.

He wrote:

The ongoing influence of great writing on young readers, and future writers is discussed in a review by Piers Torday who adapted The Box of Delights for Christmas Theatre productions. He describes the influence that John Masefield has had on many other writers for children, including Susan Cooper and C.S.Lewis; and we can all share their enthusiasm for Masefield’s wild imagination and skill in crafting an enduring fantasy, and their wish to create books like the ones that so delighted them as children.

Here is Joan Aiken’s own tribute to the master:

The Virago edition of The Kingdom and The Cave can be found here

and you can read more about it here

Excerpts above are taken from an article Joan Aiken originally wrote for

The Journal of the John Masefield Society

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Joan Aiken, Favourite Stories…Miss Samphire.

When I was young, our family went through a series of disasters; we lost our father, and our home, spent a period as very small children at a boarding school, and then posted around living with various elderly relatives, where my mother Joan Aiken discovered the real blessing of being able to invent stories at the drop of a hat…she could keep us quiet, or out of doors even on rainy days, walking on Wimbledon Common or on the Sussex Downs, by telling us our favourite stories.

Remembering this period later as a crash course in learning the art of storytelling she wrote:

  “I had to tell them stories, one after another, one after another, as fast as I could make them up. And on my holidays from the office, when we used to go and stay with friends on a farm, it was the same: every spare minute had to be filled with stories. The stories were like a kind of bandage for the children; as if their own life was so sad that they needed something else to take their minds off it, to protect their pain from the cold air.”

And although these favourite stories appeared in her books, for me they are often completely tied up with the time and the place where we first heard them, and then the stories themselves became favourite places that we could always go back to.  Some of them almost seemed to be magical, the ones with invisible friends one could call upon in times of trouble, or magical places where you could disappear… and one of these was called Pigeon Cake for Miss Samphire.

As a storyteller, Joan Aiken had a wonderful gift for taking a familiar, often sad or difficult situation, and then transforming it with her own magic into something not just more hopeful, but often an extraordinary and unexpected escape.

   “A SALESMAN was walking along a lonely coast road in the west of England. He carried a wicker suitcase, which he swung lightly in one hand, and a heavy bag hanging over his shoulder. In his pockets were a toothbrush, a razor, and some nylon webbing. He travelled in eggs, which sounds a risky proceeding, but was really very easy. When he came to a house he knocked at the door and asked the housewife:
‘Any delicious new-laid eggs today, Madam?’
If she said yes, or asked if the eggs really were fresh, he put down the suitcase on the step and opened it. It was empty. While the housewife laughed scornfully, or looked annoyed, he called:
‘Pauline, Madeleine, Estelle, Annette, Louise, Sophie, Caroline, Odette, Marguerite, Josephine, Suzanne, Lily!’
At once twelve beautiful white pigeons would come wheeling down and each lay an egg in the suitcase. Then the salesman would hold it out to the astonished housewife and say:
‘There you are, Madam. New laid, as you can see for yourself.”

He arrives at a lonely seaside cafe, hoping for a meal, but everything, in every sense, is OFF:

Oyster Tea. Off.
Whelk Tea. Off.
Shrimp Tea. Off.
Prawns, Cockles, Mussels. Off.
Scones. Off.
Bread and Butter.
Cakes. Off.
Mustard and Cress. Off.
Salad. Off.
Devonshire Tea. Off.

    For me this is so utterly familiar,it makes me shiver; I can taste the salt spray in the air, and the unassuaged hunger in my stomach. And then we discover there is an unhappy bullied child in need of rescue, and then…. there is Miss Samphire.

Four collections of these transformative stories are coming out this year to celebrate Joan Aiken’s upcoming Centenary, with what she considered to be some of her greatest works. She acknowledged the magic of them herself, and admitted she often didn’t know where it came from, but it seems so important to pass them on in whatever way I can, even if only as EBooks for now, because that makes me think that anyone with a phone could keep them in their pocket, and save them for a rainy day of their own.

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Miss Samphire is in Fantastic Fables – find the contents of all Four Books on the Joan Aiken website, and maybe re-discover some old favourites of your own?

Centenary Collections

The covers of the collections are taken from Illustrations for the stories by Joan Aiken’s lifelong friend and collaborator, Pat Marriott, and from the very beginning have been an inextricable part of their familiarity.

Joan Aiken and the Magic of Stories…

   Joan Aiken wrote novels for both adults and children, but towards the end of her life increasingly relished the pleasure of writing stories for an audience of all ages; she recognised the power of reading aloud, and the lasting pleasure of this shared experience. She often talked about memories of her own childhood and the many books that were read to her and her siblings, and how this helped when she came to be a writer herself.

   “It is not so much a matter of plot, or characters, or language; the more books I write these frontiers seem to melt away, and to matter less and less. Perhaps young readers are growing more adult in their tastes. Or perhaps their parents who grew up on C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are harking back more to the kind of reading they enjoyed in their teens. I get letters sometimes from families who say they all enjoy my books together, which makes me very happy, because some of the best memories of my childhood are connected with the way we all used to read aloud to each other, sharing the things that we ourselves enjoyed.”

   Often this shared process plays a powerful part in her own stories, together with the idea of a voice that remains through a book that has now become a bond with someone long after childhood, or even after they themselves are gone.

   In her story The Boy Who Read Aloud, Seb escapes from his cruel step-family, taking with him his last possession, the book of stories that his dying mother had left him:

   “The book of stories was what he prized most, for when she was alive his mother had read them aloud to him every day and as soon as he grew old enough to learn his letters he read them back to her while she did the ironing or peeled potatoes or rolled out the pastry. So, now, when he opened the book, it was as if his mother were back with him, telling him a story, and for a little he could forget how things had changed with him.”

   So, Seb sets out to seek his fortune, because, as Joan Aiken discovered, for a story to be really universal, it does well to draw on the accepted references and rules of the folk or fairy tale, the patterns and forms of the stories that have been told through the generations. Then with the addition of modern ingredients, and new or humorous twists that confound the expectation, and perhaps a dash of her own magic, she takes the listeners or readers into new territory. 

Joan Aiken was certainly able to do this, as John Rowe Townsend wrote:

  “Her imagination was so endlessly fertile that she could afford to pour her ideas recklessly into her stories at a rate that would bankrupt other writers in a matter of weeks.”

   She would take the conventions of the classic story — boy sets out to seek his fortune, girl helps wounded creature and is granted three wishes — and turn the pattern on its head. Her characters seem to have heard the stories too, as they certainly know better than to push the ugly old crone out of their path – worst mistake ever! Or to neglect a sadly squeaking gate, fail to share a last crust with an unpromising looking stranger, or give away someone’s secret – every child can learn to understand these rules. But Joan Aiken’s modern heroes can tell their own story – add their own twist – by refusing the third wish, or deciding to take their fortune into their own hands, to leave their parents’ kingdoms or cottages and become a cook, a train driver, a scientist – or even a reader of stories, like the boy Seb, who decides to spend his days reading to the sea.

   In a guide she was asked to put together, The Way to Write for Children, full of heartfelt advice useful for all writers, she famously said:

      “Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to while away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used by priests, by bards, by medicine men as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities.”

   Readers over the years have acknowledged that Joan Aiken does have a gift for telling this kind of magical story. But what is the storyteller’s gift? Perhaps it is the gentle authority of a voice which slips easily between the world of everyday and the world of fantasy, addressed not to child or adult, but to the memory of that fantasy world we all used to know; a voice which allows the suspension of disbelief by taking us away on a magical ride before we even know it is happening. Reading aloud, is now recognised as an important part of school and family life, and so if books for children are to flourish, they must appeal to the older reader too, helping to create a bond through shared stories.

The four classic collections of Aiken stories that have been re-published in the Autumn of 2023, ready to celebrate what would have been Joan Aiken’s 100th birthday next year are taken from her entire writing career, and give just a sampler of the hundreds of stories she produced in her lifetime.

The collections – Siren Stories, A Ghostly Gallery, Weather Witches & Wise Women and Fantastic Fables, some new, some old, are taken from earlier classic collections, which were also illustrated by her long time collaborator Pat Marriott, from anthologies, or from the short story magazine Argosy where she said she got her best training for her life as a storyteller. All are intended for the ear of anyone who happens to be passing…

“Favourite stories, like unexpected presents, are things that you can keep and cherish all your life, carry with you, in memory, in your mind’s ear, and bring out, at any time, when you are feeling lonely or need cheering up, or, like friends, just because you are fond of them. That is the way I feel about some of the stories in this collection . . .”

Read more and see contents of all collections on the Joan Aiken Website:

Centenary Collections

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The Practical Magic of Joan Aiken, the Greatest Children’s Writer You’ve Likely Never Read

Joan Aiken with her family on their bus, circa 1951.

By Brian Phillips for The New Yorker

Aiken, a children’s-book author, treated her fanciful premises with deadpan seriousness, creating an atmosphere that’s ironic and enchanted all at once.In the early nineteen-fifties, before she published any of the novels that established her as one of the twentieth century’s great children’s-book writers, Joan Aiken lived on a bus. Aiken and her husband, the journalist Ronald Brown, had acquired a piece of land on which they meant to build a house. But building licenses in England could take years to be approved. To continue renting an apartment seemed wasteful, and since food was still being rationed—this was only a few years after the war—they wanted to start a garden right away. The obvious solution was some sort of temporary residence, a structure that could be brought onto their new plot and then dismantled or moved away once the house was done. But where could they find a home like that?

“We wanted something roomy enough to accommodate two adults, a typewriter, wireless, gramophone and records, sewing machine, a mass of books, a cat and an extremely lively eighteen-month-old baby,” Aiken wrote. “A bus seemed to answer those requirements. The one which we got was a lucky buy—a single-decker (some local authorities object to double-deckers), recently overhauled. We bought it for less than a hundred pounds, complete.”

They outfitted it with water and electricity. They put in a stove for heat. Brown, who worked at Reuters, commuted to London, by train. Aiken painted furniture, worked in the garden, and wrote stories and poems on the typewriter. Her first book, a collection of short fiction called “All You’ve Ever Wanted,” included material written during the bus phase; it was published in 1953.

Aiken wrote a brief essay, probably in 1952, about her unconventional living arrangements. She published it in Housewife magazine. The piece is called, with cheerful straightforwardness, “Our Home Is a One-Decker Bus.” What’s remarkable about it is how Aiken treats her (intimately personal, yet also odd and whimsical) material. That is, she doesn’t “treat” it at all—she reports, with brisk efficiency. Living on a bus comes across as a practical problem, to be managed without fuss. Here is where we built our airing cupboard, above the hot-water tank. Near the clothes horse we keep the baby’s folding bath.

As the article moves along, though, something strange starts to occur. Aiken’s unsentimental accounting begins to acquire a glow of magic. A slow accumulation of increasingly fanciful detail deposits us, almost without our noticing, on the threshold of a fairy tale:

  “Space is certainly confined. We have to be tidy, which comes hard, and our visitors must sleep in a tin hut which also contains gardening equipment and tea-chests full of papers. But the bus is our own. We can hammer in nails or saw holes wherever we want to, paint the walls red and green, and draw pictures on the doors. We have done all these things, and we add some new embellishment every week.”

Aiken wrote more than a hundred novels over the course of her long career, and many of them manage something like this transformation. An absurd premise (we live on a bus; the Glorious Revolution never happened; a queen claims that her lake has been stolen) is treated with deadpan seriousness, allowing its latent magical possibilities to emerge in an atmosphere that’s half ironic, half enchanted—or, rather, in an atmosphere that’s entirely ironic and entirely enchanted, at the same time.

Aiken’s 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. But instead of abashedly sneaking in one or two of these elements, as another writer might do, Aiken piled them one atop the other, in the same teetering plots. One wrongly disinherited orphan might be irritating, but two wrongly disinherited orphans in the same novel is something else—and it’s in exploring that something else, its silliness and its surprising depth, that Aiken’s novels become so rich and so strangely moving.

Consider “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase,” Aiken’s best-known novel, which she published in 1962. The book, the first in her Wolves Chronicles series, take place in an alternate historical timeline in which James II was never deposed; in the eighteen-thirties of the books, James III is the King of England and the target of Hanoverian conspirators’ countless plots to overthrow him. A tunnel has been dug under the English Channel, between Dover and Calais, and as a result—and here is the magic sneaking in through the bizarre premise—England has been overrun by wolves, thousands of which have migrated through the tunnel after a string of brutal winters in Europe and Russia.

In the deep winter, the river in the woods surrounding Willoughby Chase, the enormous, rambling manor of Sir Willoughby Green, has frozen solid. Lady Green, Sir Willoughby’s wife, has mysteriously taken ill, so the couple have departed on a long ocean voyage that they hope will restore her to health. (That’s three literary clichés—a manor in the woods, a mysterious illness, a sailing voyage—before the novel has even really begun.) They have left their young daughter, Bonnie Green, in the care of a governess (four), Letitia Slighcarp, who also claims to be Sir Willoughby’s estranged fourth cousin (five). To keep Bonnie company, her cousin Sylvia, an orphan (six) being raised in London by their kindly but impoverished Aunt Jane (seven), has made the dangerous train journey north to Willoughby Chase. The little girls have never met before, and their temperaments are opposite—Bonnie is robust and headstrong; Sylvia is modest and delicate—but they immediately become fast friends (eight).

The scene I am thinking of is one in which the girls decide to go ice skating. The forest is full of wolves, but the wolves won’t venture onto the ice, Bonnie says, so as long as the girls stick to the river they will be safe. While they’re skating, they see Miss Slighcarp making her way through the woods. She is clearly up to no good (they can spy on her through a secret compartment in a wall—I’ll stop counting, but you get the idea), and they attempt to follow her, but in doing so they skate farther than they had intended. Now night is approaching, and they are a long way from the house. Bonnie isn’t tired, but Sylvia, who has never skated before, can’t go on any longer. As they try to decide what to do, they begin to hear, from somewhere in the distance, the baying of wolves.

In the book, this scene only takes a few pages, but it contains many of the hallmarks of Aiken’s writing. It’s funny (the absurdly over-layered plot, the notion that ice-skating in a forest full of wolves could be a perfectly logical course of behavior for two young children), but it’s also scary (the encroaching darkness, the distant howls). It’s made up almost entirely of clichés, but it’s also lyrically beautiful (the image of the two girls gliding down the river while the wolves awaken on the banks). These qualities should be contradictory, but instead they reinforce each other. The more we delight in the book’s silliness, the more seriously we find ourselves taking it. Many great novels recruit the reader into some version of this paradox, but few writers are as confidently transparent about it as Aiken:

“Now we must climb this little hill,” Bonnie said. “Here, I’ll take your hand. Can you run? Famous! Sylvia, you are the bravest creature in the world, and when we get home I shall give you my little ivory workbox to show how sorry I am for having led you into such a scrape.”

Sylvia did her best to smile at her cousin, having no breath to answer, and tried to stifle all doubts that they ever would get home.

Aiken was born in 1924, in Rye, a small town in Sussex. Her mother, Jessie McDonald, was a writer from Canada. Her father was the American poet Conrad Aiken, who won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1930. Through her father, Aiken’s family history contained a note of the genuine gothic: her paternal grandfather, William Aiken, a socially prominent ophthalmological surgeon in Savannah, Georgia, murdered his wife (Joan’s grandmother) and then killed himself, in 1901. Her parents’ marriage ended when she was four or five, and she grew up in the commotion of a scattered intellectual family. Her mother married the English poet and novelist Martin Armstrong, a close friend of Conrad Aiken’s; her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge, also became a writer, and her brother, John Aiken, became a well-known chemist (and also did some writing). Almost inevitably, Joan, too, began writing at a young age. She was still in her teens when her stories were first published.

Soon after Aiken’s first book—the one written partly on the bus—was finished, she began working on the novel that became “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.” But Ronald, her husband, died, of cancer, in 1955, and Aiken, who was in her early thirties, had to take a job to support herself and her children. She found work at the short-story magazine Argosy; her daughter has written that the pain of those years, when Aiken’s job and family left her with no time to work on her novel, deepened her writing, so “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase,” which she had initially imagined as a comical nineteenth-century pastiche, became something more.

In the book, when Sylvia is about to leave London, her Aunt Jane wants to make her a travelling cloak, but Jane is too poor to afford the fabric. Then she remembers a green velvet shawl, “which they sometimes used as an extra bedcover when it was very cold and they slept together on the ottoman.” Aunt Jane tells Sylvia, “I can use my jet-trimmed mantle instead. After all, one person cannot be as cold as two.”

The success of “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” made it possible for Aiken to write full time, and so she did, publishing a book or two or three almost every year until she died, in 2004. She wrote about hot-air balloons and secret railways. She wrote about ghosts. She invented a mynah bird that, because it once belonged to a lord, continually squawks things like “Ho, there, a chair for Lady Fothergill!,” and dropped it on a ship on the high seas. She invented a moody Nantucket captain obsessed with chasing a fabled whale, only the whale is pink and he wants to find it because they are dear friends. She invented characters named Lady Tegleaze, Dido Twite, and Sir Randolph Grimsby. She wrote novels for adults, including one in which Lady Catherine de Bourgh, from “Pride and Prejudice,” is kidnapped.

I have the impression that her books are still read in England, where the 1989 film adaptation of “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” occasionally airs on television. In America, I hardly ever meet anyone who knows who she is; when I do, we feel like members of a secret club. (She wrote about secret clubs.) Yet her imitators, conscious or not, are everywhere. Any children’s book with a cover that either looks like or is an Edward Gorey drawing is probably Aikenesque. (In fact, Gorey illustrated the first American editions of the Wolves Chronicles.) Lemony Snicket, for instance, is working squarely in the vein that Aiken perfected, but A Series of Unfortunate Events is smug and predictable in all the places where Aiken’s work is surprising and alive.

Her novels are a gift, for children and adults. She harnessed her wild imagination to her marvelously pragmatic intelligence. The result was books that revel in both the fundamental insanity of fiction and the mysterious sanity that sometimes results from reading it.

• Brian Phillips is the author of “Impossible Owls: Essays,” which will be published on October 2nd. He is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former senior writer for MTV News. He lives in Los Angeles.

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   Short stories taken from Joan Aiken’s earliest writng days while living on that bus, up until her most recent are being published in Four New Collections to celebrate her 100th Anniversary in 2024.

   Read more about them on the Orion SFGate website

https://www.sfgateway.com/contributor/joan-aiken-4/