How Many Miles to Babylon?

by Horrified Press

We are at the gates of Babylon now. There’s very little else I can tell you, except that you will hear people talk of your developing your own ‘voice’. That’s shorthand for your own distinctive style of writing. It comes from endless writing, developing itself as you go without you realising it. If I’ve gone the tiniest way toward helping you achieve that, this journey to Babylon and the chats we have had along the way will have been more than worthwhile. See you there. - Dorothy Davies (editor & author)

75 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it in a single sitting without realizing that I was doing this, which generally makes a book four or more stars for me, but this one's plot frustrated me (I think certain people could have tried harder and more sensibly--if I came back to England after being trapped in Switzerland during the war, desperately looking for my daughter, one of the first things I'd try to do was track down old friends especially ones I'd been in love with and yes things were chaotic but she managed to do years later so it should have been possible then), it was very much "of its time" with regards to class and the Roma people, and it increasingly irked me that a lot of the kindness she was shown was because Miranda was lovely, glowing, and altogether special. Un-glowingly special children also deserve nurturing.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miranda tumbled into the lives of Claude and his father almost by accident. The daughter of an alcoholic musical genius, no wonder she couldn’t help but disrupt their household. It would have been hard enough for her to settle down, but Miranda was convinced that if only she could hear the end of her father’s unfinished tune Babylon, magical things would happen...

No-one writes children’s books quite like Violet Needham. This is a book for and about children, but it is also highly realistic in a way unusual for the time about the psychological damage of Miranda’s childhood with an alcoholic parent (no innocent orphan, she swears like a trouper and has all kinds of fears of abandonment), and about some of the aspects of her parents’ marriage. Today the social workers would get involved, but Needham prefers to take Miranda to an idyllic house in the Cotswolds where an architect, a painter, a secret agent and a teenage Etonian all in their different ways care for her and are charmed by her in equal measure, and to a world which trembles on the brink of magic and fantasy, if you want to believe in them.