Review of 'Kallee and Other Stories' by F G Turnbull

     Does anybody else have this book? Has anyone ever heard of

it? 'Kallee and Other Stories' by F. G. Turnbull, and illustrated rather beautifully by Lunt Roberts. (An unfortunate name, but beautiful drawings.)
          I ask because I've just found this old friend during the great turning out of my parents' house before selling it. I seized it with a cry of rage at having found it in a box intended to be given away to charity, and carried it away to the safety of my own overcrowded bookcases.
          'Kallee' was a great favourite of my Dad's, became a favourite of mine almost in infancy, and yet I've never seen it mentioned anywhere, or heard of the writer in any other context.
          I searched on Google, and found out nothing.
          The publisher is given as 'London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co, Ltd.' I've just a Google search on this firm, and came on this rather interesting site.
          The book itself can be found on sale online, for £14 or $21, used, but not a word about the author, or any reviews.
          My copy doesn't give much away. The copyright page is blank, except for this: 'This book is produced in complete conformity with the Authorised Economy Standards. Made and printed in Great Britain by Purnell and Sons, Ltd., Paulton (Somerset) and London.'
          My Dad loved it because all the stories are about animals and birds, and he loved them. He began reading me the stories when I was quite small - certainly not much older than seven. He used to read me a story and then put the book away in the bookcase. I would sneak it out, feeling I was doing something very daring in filching one of my Dad's books, and read it for myself.
           This is how the title story, KALLEE, begins:

          I will never shoot a partridge again; that is a vow I have sworn. I still hope to use my gun through many years to come; but when the coveys rise before me in root or stubble field hereafter, I will keep my weapon at 'trail' and let them go. My spaniel, Roy, will gaze at me, with wonder in his dear old eyes, but he will soon understand that the brown birds are not our game - now that we have known Kallee, that great cock partridge.

          They're not really children's stories, as you can see; and yet, over several years, I read them all, returning to the book again and again. Looking through them now, I wonder how I coped with the Scots dialect of the keepers, and with phrases such as, 'As the stoat continued to haunt the field day after day...' Did I think the story meant the ghost of a stoat?
          I know I used to guess at the meaning of a lot of words, and also that, if completely defeated, I used to trail off to the nearest of my parents and ask them, 'What does this mean?' Once they'd explained, I'd take the book away again and continue reading.
          My Dad often read me the story 'Grumphie' which is about three boys entering their pet pig into a competition. Grumphie has a straight tail, and therefore no chance of winning - but as they're trying to spruce him up, he eats the cake of perfumed soap they're washing him with - and his tail curls! So now they know how to win. 'Wullie; bolt oot an' get a cake o' scented soap.' All the stories are set in Scotland: I wonder if that has anything to do with my tendency to head north whenever possible?
          Dad was probably trying to find the lighter, funnier stories, as being more suitable to my age - but when I started reading them for myself, the harsher stories quickly became my favourites. I particularly loved 'Crossed Trails'. This tells of a fox and a stag. The fox, as a cub, is charged and trampled by the stag, and his hind-leg shattered. The story tells how the lame fox grows up and struggles to survive in a hard Highland winter. During a blizzard, the fox and stag find themselves on the same trail, struggling through heavy snow and strong winds. The fox cringes away whenever he glimpses the stag - what he doesn't realise is that the stag is terrified of the fox on his trail. The stag  races away in panic, falls into a

crevasse and is killed. Shortly afterwards, the snow-blinded fox falls into the same hole - and finds himself lying on top of all the food he'll need to survive the winter.
          Another great favourite was 'The Rebel of Glenlee.' This tells of, as Monty Python might have put it, 'that most dangerous of all things, an intelligent, rebellious sheep.' She's a trial to her owners, is Birkie, the black-faced ewe. She was a spoilt, pet lamb, but felt herself thrown out of paradise when she was demoted to a mere sheep, and from that day hated all men and collies. She charges the dogs, refuses to return quietly to the home meadows, and leads the other sheep astray.
          But she redeems herself one terrible winter, when the flock is lost in the deep snow. Birkie is harried by a fox, but deals with it as she does with collies. Then, as she struggles in deep snow, ravens blind her. In such dire trouble, Birkie starts to hanker for the safety of home, and makes tracks for it, regardless of any obstacles in her way. She happens on the rest of the flock, and they follow her. She guides them all home - and becomes the farmer's pet once again.

          
          How I loved this book! I'm going to enjoy reading it again. My guess is that the stories originally appeared in a newspaper or magazine, as they're all the same length. But I really know nothing about F G Turnbull at all. Do the initials, perhaps, disguise a woman writer?
          Does anybody out there know anything more, about writer or artist?

The Salt-stained Book by Julia Jones

Review by Bill Kirton

The references to Swallows and Amazons and Treasure Island, as well as the fact that the protagonist, Donny, is a 13 year old boy, mark this as a book for young adults but its appeal is much wider. In fact, it will delight any reader who enjoys a good story, well told, a cast of characters with humour, energy (and sometimes malice), and a central mystery that keeps you turning the pages. If, on top of that, you like sailing, this is one you mustn’t miss.

It has the feel of a Ransome adventure but goes further than that. Some of the children are troubled by very modern dilemmas which are hinted at with compassion and concern, and the adults who oversee their ‘welfare’ are conveyed with tongue-in-cheek awareness and a subtle humour. Their foster mother, for example, is the reverent Wendy whose tendency is to stand ‘beside the table being Understanding’ and her husband talks to their charges as if he were reading from a social work pamphlet. ‘Why don't you go and make some social contact with Luke and Liam?’ he says at one point. Then, later, his suggestion is ‘You could spend quality time with Luke’.

The social worker herself is even worse. She tells Donny, ‘Research confirms that your unsupported background will have left you seriously deficient in social integration skills’, and she introduces herself by ‘flashing an official identity card and a synthetic smile’ and giving her title as ‘multi-authority leader worker, S. L. A. G., School Liaison and Guidance’. (In case you didn’t know, the term ‘slag’ is a derogatory term applied – usually by men – to women.) She wears a frilly blouse, short leather skirt and pointy shoes which have ‘criss-cross thongs that went right up to her knees. After that there was so much bare leg that Donny had to look away’.

Asides such as this are carefully crafted and scattered through the narrative. The moods and changes of rivers, lakes and the sea envelop the whole adventure and even the boats used by the characters have their own identities and personalities. It’s a richly textured story with many complex depths and a highly enjoyable and thoroughly absorbing read.

The Ghost Drum by Susan Price

Most of the things one would like to say about The Ghost Drum have already been said. When a book has won the Carnegie Medal, been admired and loved on both sides of the Atlantic and included in reference guides such as Julia Eccleshare’s 1001 Books to Read Before You Grow Up it has surely become part of the children’s literature canon. In which case all one might reasonably want to know is why on earth did Faber allow it to go out of print?

But of course that isn’t all. The list of Carnegie Medal winners begins with Arthur Ransome’s Pigeon Post in 1936 and runs to Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon, the 2013 winner. To read solidly through the list would be a literary education. I began The Ghost Drum expecting something good but being prepared to glean at least part of my pleasure from seeing it in its 1980s context. Secretly I was just a little anxious that the brilliant complexities of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (Carnegie Medal winner 1996) might cast a backwards shadow over The Ghost Drum.  It didn’t. There are points of comparison (the shaman’s drum / the alethiometer, the way the witches are conceptualised, the shape-shifting bear) but The Ghost Drum is a very different type of story.

Our narrator is a learned cat on a golden chain (a reference to Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmilla) and we are at once in the world of long dark winters and Slavic myth. The witches’ houses run on chicken legs or cat’s paws but their inhabitants are not as instantly terrifying as the iron- toothed Baba Yaga of Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales. They are old and wise and various. Their magics are the powers of words and music. They must be learned. At the beginning of the story it is the deepest midwinter night and a slave-woman, huddled close to the big communal stove, has given birth to a baby girl. An old witch is nearing the end of her three hundred year life. She needs an apprentice and has come to take the child.

Now the horror of the slave-mother’s situation becomes apparent. She would like her baby to have a better life but she is afraid. “My baby doesn’t belong to me. I am a slave, her father is a slave, and she and we belong to Czar Guidon. If I gave you the baby, we should be whipped for giving away our master’s property. We should be executed for stealing from him.” This modern fairy-story is about power. The witches and shamans have power but theirs is a power that has been worked for and learned and must be exercised within rules – even by the wicked Kuzma. The Czars and Czaritsas, however, are human and ignorant and are finally driven mad by their own absolutism – though not before they have caused untold suffering and death along the way.

The Ghost Drum is beautifully written using a starkly simple vocabulary. “Far overhead the sky-stars glisten white, bright, in their darkness; underfoot the snow-stars glitter white in whiteness. Between the sky-stars and the snow-stars hangs a shivering, milky curtain of twilight.”  Many of the most telling moments use this simplicity to shocking effect. “Swiftly she was brought into the dazzling light of a small courtyard and there – when the soldiers’ eyes had got used to the light – they cut off her head.” When the Czaritsa Margaretta succumbs to paranoia she sees the ghosts of her naked and starving people in every palace mirror. Naturally she has all the mirrors  smashed and then ground into powder. This then is “poured into jars and put away in the palace storerooms for sprinkling on the food of her enemies. Though a Czaritza, she was a thoughtful and thrifty housewife.”

Fairy stories have traditionally given a voice to the oppressed. The Ghost Drum can be read as an exotic and magical story from a faraway land and simultaneously relished as a satire on the madness of dictators. It’s timeless.

(The Ghost Drum is the first of three linked volumes: Ghost Song and Ghost Dance follow.)

Reviewed by Julia Jones