In the festive month of December I usually recommend a classic Children’s Fantasy. This year my choice is Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh (1906-1982), a magical story about two children and a witch’s cat who is feline royalty. This novel was first published in 1955 and there were two sequels – The Kingdom of Carbonel (1960) and Carbonel and Calidor (1978). All three are easily available in paperback or as ebooks. These stories work particularly well when read aloud so it is a pity that there don’t seem to be any audiobooks versions.
The Carbonel Trilogy is set in the small English town of Falllowhithe and the surrounding villages and countryside. Ten year-old Rosemary Brown lives in a cheap lodging house with her widowed mother. Mrs Brown only has a small widow’s pension and supports them both by sewing for people. At the beginning of the summer holiday, Rosemary is looking forward to spending time with her mother but Mrs Brown has had to accept a sewing job at a wealthy lady’s house which will keep her busy for the next three weeks. Wanting to help her mother by keeping their rented rooms clean and tidy, Rosemary goes to a market in the oldest part of town to buy a broom. An encounter with a handsome black cat leads her into a quaint shop where a grumpy old woman sells her a tatty broom and throws in the cat for an extra three farthings.
Once Rosemary is holding the broom she finds herself able to hear what the black cat is saying to her. He tells her that she has just bought a magical broom from Mrs Cantrip, a witch who has decided to retire, and shows Rosemary how to fly home on the broom. Later that night, the cat introduces himself as Prince Carbonel and explains that he should be the ruler of all the cats in Fallowhithe but he was stolen as a kitten by Mrs Cantrip and forced to be her obedient minion by a powerful form of Silent Magic. Now the same magic binds him to Rosemary unless they can find a way to reverse the spell. To do this, Rosemary will need to possess the witch’s hat and cauldron as well as her broom, and find out how the silent spell was cast.
Returning to the market, Rosemary manages to find out some details about the people who bought the hat and the cauldron but her search is interrupted when Mrs Brown takes her to spend the day at the home of her wealthy employer, Mrs Pendlebury Parker. The latter thinks that Rosemary will be a suitable companion for her young nephew, John, who has been forced to come and stay with her due to an illness in the family. Neither child is happy about this but once Rosemary has been provoked into boasting about her magic broom and talking cat, John throws himself into the quest to help Carbonel with great enthusiasm. The two children manage to retrieve the cauldron from a teashop and track down the new owner of the hat, who might be willing to lend it to them, but dealing with Mrs Cantrip and her one remaining spell-book proves more difficult. Meanwhile, Carbonel is preparing to fight a brutal usurper cat who has stolen his kingdom…
Barbara Sleigh was an English author who worked as an art teacher before joining the staff of BBC Radio’s popular Children’s Hour programme. After she married and had three children, Sleigh concentrated on writing and illustrating children’s books. I read and adored the first two Carbonel books when I was child but can they appeal to modern children? I think so, once young 21st century readers accept that these stories are set in an era in which there were no mobile phones or internet and children were encouraged to play outside and allowed to wander around on their own. Rosemary and John are plausible ten year-olds who sometimes bicker and sulk. John likes Rosemary because she is adventurous rather than a soppy girl only interested in dolls and clothes. Although naturally shy, Rosemary is consistently shown as brave, smart and imaginative.
Sleigh’s novels have two timeless attractions – the cats and the magic. She clearly loved cats but wasn’t sentimental about them. Carbonel, who insists that when cats look as if they are sleeping they are actually thinking deep thoughts, believes himself superior to humans. He is often quite rude and patronising towards the children but he proves a loyal friend once he has regained his freedom of choice. In the second volume, we get to meet Carbonel’s gracious Persian wife, Queen Blandamour, and their two kittens: naughty Prince Calidor and haughty Princess Pergamond. If you want to know if your own cat might be royal – check to see if it has three white hairs on the tip of its tail. The books are set in an era when many pet cats were let out at night and one of Sleigh’s most distinctive creations is the nocturnal transformation of Fallowhithe’s rooftops into a paradise for cats, with chimney pots becoming trees and rooftiles turning into grass. Some authentically noisy and ferocious battles take place in these Cat Countries.
Long before the Harry Potter or the Worst Witch books were published, Sleigh was writing convincingly about the thrills and dangers of magical flight, whether on a temperamental broomstick (Carbonel) or in an enchanted rocking chair (The Kingdom of Carbonel). In this fictional world, magical commands have to be given in rhyming verse. Rosemary proves good at making up poems in emergencies though, as she complains, it is difficult to find a rhyme for her address – 10, Tottenham Grove. One of the delights of the Carbonel stories is the way in which ordinary things can be used for magical purposes. So when Rosemary has to boil-up a rainbow-coloured mixture for a Wishing spell her ingredients include indigo ink, lemonade powder, a bottle of cochineal dye and a sprinkle of `hundreds and thousands’. I remember trying to recreate this one when I was a child – with very messy results.
In recently written stories, witches tend to be the good guys. That isn’t the case in Sleigh’s books but Mrs Cantrip and the other witches encountered by Rosemary and John are not straightforwardly wicked. Their malice seems to arise from lives dominated by boredom and frustration. In Carbonel there are touching moments when Mrs Cantrip remembers her wild youth flying under the Northern Lights and by the second volume the children realize that she needs rescuing as much as Carbonel did. Sacrifices are made and witches are transformed from embittered loners into successful career women. I wonder now if Sleigh put into these characters some of her own frustration at having to resign from her job with the BBC when she married.
Rereading the Carbonel Trilogy as an adult, I notice some quite sharp social criticism in the way that the lazy and luxurious life of Mrs Pendlebury Parker is contrasted with the poverty of stoical war widow Mrs Brown. Fortunately, helping Carbonel leads to a better job and a nicer home for Mrs Brown. During the course of the trilogy, England is shown as changing rapidly as old buildings are knocked down and the countryside is covered in new housing estates. The latter leads to a territory war between Cat Kingdoms which is the main feature of the plot of The Kingdom of Carbonel. By the third volume, the rigid class distinctions in human and cat society are breaking down. In Carbonel and Calidor, Prince Calidor has become a rebellious teenager who refuses to defer to his parents and wants to marry a working class cat. Can conservative Carbonel accept her into the royal family? Well, here’s a hint – in December I only recommend books with very happy endings. Until next year….
Geraldine
December 2024