A Traveller In Time, Alison Uttley: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Uttley); (https://alisonuttley.co.uk/). I was fascinated by this story when I first met it, long ago, because the frame of this 'pioneering time slip story for children' iitself seemed set in a misty, romantic past almost within my reach. I felt I might open a familiar door, maybe in my gran's house down in the valley, and step through into a world of lamps and darkness, and horse-drawn traffic; where country boys could come knocking on the door of an 'old, little' house in Cheyne Walk, selling honey-scented bunches of cowslips from the fields, and a girl my age (or thereabouts) could rummage in old chests for silk embroidered waistcoats, pearl-handled pistols... Before being sent off to the old Derbyshire farm to get stronger, and save her parents from any more awful doctor's bills, and falling into a glamorous three hundred years old tragedy.



Nothing can be done. Mary Queen of Scots can't be saved, and nor can the Babingtons. This isn't science fiction, it's a ghost story, and Penelope herself is the ghost, invading the past. There's something voyeurish about Penelope's kind of adventure: she's always going to walk away, feeling marvellously moved and sad. But my takeaway (years later, of course) was that this is a rare, cool, dead on the money account of how imaginative stories are created. There's no plan, it's all hints and glimpses, heightened moments, disparate fragments; drifting into each other, clinging like spiderweb. And then, out of this mess of shadows, you draw a fixed form.



And to think, if Alison had been born a generation or so later, she'd have been a boring old physicist. See also The Country Child (no torture, no executions). I never cottoned to Little Grey Rabbit & co.







But if you don't want to take refuge in other people's real, complicated and tragic lives, you could always try allegory. Or parody, or roman a clef, or whatever else you think is going on in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game

(aka Das Glasperlenspiel; or Magister Ludi). This is one of the books that was considered by some a dazzling, truth-about-life, spiritual exercise must-read when I was a university student. I never got caught up. The same people were trying to convince me to read Carlos Castaneda. The copy you see was acquired from 2 Americans we met in Java, in August 1985, and bonded with while sharing a long, hot wait for some boat or other. I don't know what they got in return. A long, slow read, set in an imaginary world within a world, a sort of province, or county, or state-sized ivory tower called Castalia, where the intelligentsia (all male) have settled, and over the ages have slowly forgotten that their calling is to be the light of the world, not just have nice dinners, lovely libraries, and fascinating debates at the general population's expense. The Glass Bead Game is an imaginary