Green Grow the Rushes

by Elinor Lyon

A girl from London, vacationing on the rugged Welsh coast with a snippy, spoiled companion, finds three adventurous friends whom she joins in a search for the cliffborne track of an old Roman road.

154 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Elinor Bruce Lyon was an English children’s author whose quietly influential novels combined adventure with emotional intelligence and a strong sense of place. Drawing on her Scottish heritage and wartime experiences, she wrote stories often set on remote coasts in Scotland and Wales, where landscapes shaped character as much as plot. Her books are especially noted for their balanced portrayal of gender, featuring resourceful girls, thoughtful boys, and shared leadership grounded in empathy, justice, and independence. Educated in England and briefly serving as a radar operator during the Second World War, Lyon later devoted herself to writing, producing more than twenty children’s novels between the late 1940s and the mid 1970s. Among her best known works are the Ian and Sovra series, inspired by the Highlands and admired for their realism, moral depth, and understated tension. Though she largely escaped critical attention during her lifetime, her work earned the praise of writers such as Walter de la Mare and has since been rediscovered through reprints and international translations. Today, Lyon is regarded as a distinctive voice in postwar British children’s literature, valued for blending adventure with psychological insight and humane values.

Reviews

[Capn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in coastal Wales (Pen-sarn area near Harlech in Snowdonia, but creatively fictionalized), this is the story of two girls (invading 'Romans' Jenny Ash and Viola Harding) and a girl and two boys (local 'Welsh Savages' Rowena, David and Mark Meredith), and their amateur archaeology along a Roman road.

Jenny is the daughter of a former pupil of Miss Harding, an elderly lady with a heart condition who lives alone at Pensarn house (with Mrs. Baker the housekeeper and Mr. Baker the gardener/general factotum), who is invited to leave her dingy London apartment and come to stay at the coast for a few weeks. Viola, also thirteen years old, is Miss Harding's great niece, a spoiled girl whose parents were all too happy to send her to Wales so they could better enjoy the French Riviera without her. One child was wanted by Miss Harding, and the other invited along to keep her company. Mrs. Baker has very little sympathy for presumed 'after-thought' plain Jenny, and does little to make her comfortable.

The personalities of "I've been to Italy"/"I'm Daddy's Ray of Sunshine!" Viola, a shallow, self-serving creature, and Jenny, daughter of a widowed mother who gives piano lessons in her tiny London flat and can barely make ends meet, could obviously never mesh. Soon Jenny is adopted by the local savages, the trespassing Meredith children, the natural enemies of the Bakers. Viola's subsequent envy of 'dull' Jenny and 'interesting' Rowena's friendship is positively toxic.

The Meredith children are preoccupied with solving the mystery of 'the Roman road' which runs from their ancient cottage to the face of some rather imposing cliffs above the shore. They muse that every half-forgotten old track in the land is automatically referred to as 'the Roman road', and secondary to that, why would the brilliant Roman engineers build a road straight to a cliff-face with no obvious way over? Jenny is roped into their dangerous secret hobby (dangerous because of the loose scree and sheer cliffs, secret cave systems and underground rivers), and Viola decides, naturally, to spoil their fun.

This is a very good book in regards to the archaeological content and concepts at play. The title (from the song) is a reference to the rushes growing in straight lines along the ditches that edged the straight-as-an-arrow Roman roads, and is one of the clues they have as to its course. (There were some snatches of Green Grow the Rushes O sung here and there, but they were mostly used to comic effect, and were not the basis of a mystery. There's a missing book that is based upon the lyrics of the song I'd quite like to read - we suspect The Lilywhite Boys by Josephine Poole, but it's only a hunch: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/.... If you know it, please do tell us! I'd so like to read it!).

I had to bury my disappointment a little in reading this as a result. But it wasn't the most engaging story, really. Extra points for secret passages in the house and the landscape, but otherwise it read primarily as a Schoolgirl's Vacation Story of yesteryear. I definitely paid too much for it, wishing it to be the solution to the Green Grow the Rushes O Nightmare book. ;) Can't win 'em all, I suppose. No fantasy element here - just some toxic pre-teen dynamics, archaeological artifacts, and fundamentals of British Romano archaeology.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite childhood books. A little of everything: exotic locale in Wales, a bit of coming-of-age, a mystery and some cultural clashing. A very neat tale.