Susan Cooper, Margery Gill

In the last few days, in between (and often in place of) bouts of grading, I've been rereading books of my childhood that arrived with all of my other stuff - Puffins that are now loose-leaf after dozens of readings and too many years of having their glue nibbled away by book lice. I've been going back through Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising pentalogy, though missing out The Dark is Rising itself which deserves to be read around Christmas and with full and undivided attention.

I'm reading the last one, Silver on the Tree, now. On this reading, I find I especially like the leitmotif of travel in time on the wave of other people's emotions, memories and desires. It comes up first as Will asks a Roman soldier in rainy Britain about his home, and unleashes a tide of nostalgia and desire:

"... the hills silver with olive trees and terraced for the vines, with the grapes filling out, now..."
The homesickness was a throbbing ache like physical pain, and suddenly Will knew that the answer was here in the air, in this moment of simple unprotected longing with a man's deepest, simplest emotions open and unguarded for a stranger to hear and see. This was the road that would carry him.
Here now, this way!
He let his mind fall into the longing, into the other's pain, as if he were diving into a sea; and like water closing over his head the emotion took him in. The world spun about him, stone and grey sky and green fields, whirling and changing and falling down into place not quite the same as before, and the yearning homesick voice was soft in his ears again; but the voice was a different voice.

There's something particularly effective about the idea of finding passages opening up through such raw desire - empathy given magical potential, yearning made malleable.

None of the books were illustrated except the first, Over Sea, Under Stone. I found in it this picture which I had forgotten was there:

It's a picture of Jane as she stumbles upon an old guidebook which will help in the quest, and hears Mrs Palk coming up to call her to lunch. A vague mental image of it has accompanied me through my life, but merged with illustrations from an entirely different book, Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess.

The picture above is of Sara's first encounter with Ermengarde after her fall in status, when Ermengarde is shocked by her change in looks. When Sara has first been told of her father's death and has been sent to change, she is described as follows:

She had put on, without Mariette's help, the cast-aside black-velvet frock. It was too short and tight, and her slender legs looked long and thin, showing themselves from beneath the brief skirt. As she had not found a piece of black ribbon, her short, thick, black hair tumbled loosely about her face and contrasted strongly with its pallor.

The point of including this is just to say that the illustrator in both cases is Margery Gill, who seems to be responsible for good numbers of the pictures which shaped my childhood imagination (I suspect Meet Mary Kate, from even earlier in my life, was also illustrated by her, though I can't check since I seem to have left that one behind), and that she seems to excel particularly at young girls with long slender legs sticking out from under short skirts. I love the stance she has given Jane in that first illustration.

I tried looking Margery Gill up online, since I was sure lots of other people would have commented on her or posted other pictures - so many of us must feel like she illustrated our childhoods - but there is surprisingly little out there. I did discover, though, that a film of The Dark is Rising has been in the making. An alarming thought, especially if I reread that quotation from A Little Princess and then remember what a travesty has been made of it in the various film adaptations up to now.