Alison Uttley is well-known in certain circles for her long series of books about Little Grey Rabbit. I don't remember reading any of them but may well have done back before I can remember, given that they're illustrated stories written for younger children. She published the first, 'The Squirrel, the Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit' in 1929 and kept on writing them until 1975, a year before her death, 'Hare and the Rainbow' being the thirty-fifth in the series. They were given a fresh lease on life a quarter of a century later through an animated television show.

If Uttley is still read otherwise, it's because of this pioneering children's fantasy, written for older children but reading more like an adult book now, enough so that it would likely be challenging to many today. That's because, while this is told in friendly language that's so vivid that it feels like it ought to be read aloud, it's a look back in time even before the lead character, Penelope Taberner, travels that way, to the sixteenth century.

The book was published in 1939 but set a little earlier; I don't believe Uttley mentions the year but it's apparently 1934 when Penelope and her siblings, Ian and Alison, visit their Aunt Tissie deep in the Derbyshire countryside, at the historic Thackers Manor. That's a fictionalised version of a real house, Dethick Manor, the country home of the Babington family, who are characters in this book, Master Anthony being Sir Anthony Babington, born there in 1561 but later executed for his part in the Babington Plot, which was an attempt to assassinate the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I to make way for her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.

Given that Penelope is our narrator and she tells this story by looking backwards from later in life, there's a real sense of nostalgia for the past even in what count as the present day scenes in 1934. We're also told in the introduction that Uttley herself grew up around Thackers, so that nostalgia isn't just Penelope's but the author's as well, and that helps make the story truly immersive. Her impeccable attention to detail adds to that, as does the fact that the house and the area around it haven't changed much over the centuries. As Aunt Tissie mentions, "There's many an old thing in this house, and some are forgot and some are in use, just as they have always been." Let's just say there's still a candle cupboard and hip baths and a 12^th-century church next door.

What that means for us is that both the language and the customs are different to what we know, even to me, being an Englishman in my second half century who grew up in the countryside, albeit a little further north in Yorkshire. I recognised some slang, like "nobbut" and "nesh", for "nothing but" and "susceptible to cold weather". However, much of this was new even to me, a fair example being that only two sentences on page 33 of my Puffin edition covering a "casement window with its sprigged curtains", a "grassplat" and a "croft beyond the wicket-gate". Only rarely does Uttley explain a word, reserving that for special ones like "the mooligrubs", which are "the sulks".

Beyond language, Thackers is a working farm in 1934 and so these kids are kept very busy not only feeding the cows, pigs and chickens, but making butter and cheese. This helps Penelope a little in fitting in when she stays in place but slips back in time to the sixteenth century, finding herself an unexpected part of the downstairs staff. Mostly, she finds that she can't do much that the typical servant can do but, unlike them, she can read and write, so gains attention from the Babingtons upstairs, becoming a favourite of Master Anthony's mother-in-law, Mistress Foljambe.

I should mention here that this is a time slip novel, as against a time machine novel, meaning that Penelope travels in time without any control over her actions. The concept seems to have sparked in France with Louis-Sébastien Mercier's 'Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred' from way back in the eighteenth century, published in 1771, but it was later popularised by nineteenth century American tales, like Washington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle' and Mark Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'. In turn, it then became a frequent mechanism in British children's fantasy novels of the twentieth century, not only this one but also 'Tom's Midnight Garden', 'The Children of Green Knowe' and 'Charlotte Sometimes', each of which I ought to cover in this series.

Initially, Penelope literally tumbles backwards into the past, by falling down a staircase, but she's whisked back and forth at different points, though the passage of time in her present appears to mirror the passage of time whenever she goes back in it. That allows the story that we know, or at least that educated children in the thirties would have known, to unfold as it always has, with the young master, Anthony Babington, so captivated by the young queen, who's been kept a prisoner at Sheffield Castle, that he plans to help her escape. Uttley keeps it romantic, in one sense of the word and hinting at the other, rather than explain that the Babington Plot inevitably turned into high treason, because Mary could never become Queen of England until Elizabeth was dead.

Penelope doesn't understand how she's moving between times, commenting that, "It was neither dream nor sleep, this journey I had taken, but a voyage backward through the ether." However, it has to be said that she's notably resilient to the clashes of time and culture, almost feeling just as at-home in the sixteenth century as in the twentieth. One of my favourite aspects of this concept is how the times start to blur together as the novel runs on, to the degree that Penelope starts to be able to see people through the veil of time even without leaving it, to the point where she has difficulty in certain moments telling who in her vision is present and who is past. One neat touch is to have a visiting Irish labourer shiver as if someone has walked over his grave when one of these "ghosts" passes through him, which only Penelope can see.

I'm thoroughly enjoying these classic children's genres novels and have appreciated every one I've read thus far, whether I'd read them before in my childhood or not. This one, though, has to be the most evocative and immersive such book I've read thus far. I felt like I was with the Tabener kids at Thackers even before Penelope time-slips and I felt like I was with her four centuries earlier too. It has to be said that I've never visited Dethick Manor, but it's as real to me now as my own childhood home in Essex, if perhaps not the later one in Yorkshire where I spent my teenage years. Even the food is palpable, enough so that this often made me hungry, even if I have little idea what "soncy cakes" are and how well they go with bacon. Similarly, I could smell the tansy and woodruff used to scare away moths, even though I have no idea what tansy and woodruff smell like.

What I'd like to find now is a timeline of British children's fantasy novels that use the timeslip idea and explore more of them. It's a fantastic way to introduce young readers to historical fiction and many of the authors who used this mechanism, such as Daphne du Maurier, Anya Seton and Mary Stewart, are indeed well-known for their historical novels. One reason I may have missed out on a lot of these is that they seem to be far more frequently written for girls than boys. I didn't think I was a prejudiced reader as a child, as I read every Nancy Drew book I could find on a market stall or in a charity shop just as I did with the Hardy Boys, but apparently I was. I need to fix that. Right now, I wish I'd have read this forty years ago instead of letting it sit on the shelf unread. ~~ Hal C F Astell