Gaffer Samson's Luck

by Jill Paton Walsh

James's difficulty in adjusting to a new school and life in the Fens is further complicated by the request of an elderly neighbor to find his lucky piece, a task which puts James in some danger.

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 1985

About the author

Jill Paton Walsh was born Gillian Bliss in London on April 29th, 1937. She was educated at St. Michael's Convent, North Finchley, and at St. Anne's College, Oxford. From 1959 to 1962 she taught English at Enfield Girls' Grammar School.

Jill Paton Walsh has won the Book World Festival Award, 1970, for Fireweed; the Whitbread Prize, 1974 (for a Children's novel) for The Emperor's Winding Sheet; The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award 1976 for Unleaving; The Universe Prize, 1984 for A Parcel of Patterns; and the Smarties Grand Prix, 1984, for Gaffer Samson's Luck.

Series:
* Imogen Quy
* Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A re-read of a favourite children’s book. I’m fascinated by a trend in books for children from the late Sixties through to the early Eighties which focuses on a child uprooted from a familiar environment to a new home in a different part of the country; think Andrew in Jan Mark’s Thunder and Lightnings or James in Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. In Gaffer Samson’s Luck it’s another James who finds himself in an alien environment, his family having moved from the hills and dry stone walls of the Yorkshire Dales to the endless flat landscape and drainage dykes of the Fens. There he meets Gaffer Samson, an elderly neighbour who has rarely set foot outside the Fens in all his many years (when he did, to Yorkshire during the War, he didn’t think much of it, mainly because of the hills that blocked his view: ‘cost a lot of sky, they do’). Gaffer is dying and is housebound, but there’s something on his mind from his younger days, and he enlists James to find a lucky charm (his ‘luck’) that he hid under the hearth of the family house many years ago. In just over a hundred pages, Jill Paton Walsh tells a thoroughly engaging, moving and thought-provoking story, enhanced by a tangible sense of place and a real understanding of the distinctive character, philosophy and speech of East Anglian men of the pre-war generation. Gaffer rarely describes himself as anything other than ‘whoolly middling’ however poorly he is, and finally reunited with his luck, feels that he can finally die in peace; without it he has been worrying that ‘every minute will be my next’ to which James replies, ‘You’ve got that wrong, Gaffer…you mean thinking every minute will be your last, I think. That’s what people say.’ But, in a typically East Anglian way, Gaffer means just what he says and dies that night.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked it. Just like other Walsh's books.