How Many Miles to Babylon?

by Violet Needham, Joyce Bruce (Illustrator), Gerald Harford (Preface)

"Claude Gilroy lived quietly with his father, an architect, in the country, and it came as an unpleasant surprise to him when he was suddenly told one day that a girl would be coming to live with them. Claude hadn't much use for girls, and though when Miranda arrived (for that was her name) he did his utmost to be kind to her, he was not best pleased by the change in their lives. Gradually Claude, like the rest of the household, became intrigued with Miranda's strange, often willful ways and by her constant harping on the old nursery rhyme,

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten. Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again.

This rhyme was linked in her confused mind with the tragedy of her father, a composer, who had just died and her mother whom she could barely remember. It was also linked to a haunting melody composed by her father that she used to play endlessly on the piano, but whose conclusion had never been written. The story of how the tune ended, and how Miranda eventually arrived at Babylon, forms the plot of Miss Needham's new story, and it will keep many of her devoted readers, particularly the older ones, entranced and captivated till the last page."

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Author of 19 books for children published between 1939 and 1957. Although she came to writing late — she was 63 when her first book, The Black Riders, was published — her books achieved immediate and lasting popularity with young reader

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.