I must admit I love the exploits in
The Wouldbegoods (and the other books about the six Bastables). As a child, I positively welcomed being transported to a past era where things were different - and I would certainly not have been pleased with any updating. It was fun to read of children who had a lot more freedom than I did and were able to roam the countryside, befriend tramps and soldiers, play on a moat, explore an old tower and get up to all sorts of (often unintended) mischief, including causing a flood and (on another occasion) building a dam in a stream with the unforeseen consequence of diverting water into a farmer's field, ruining some of his barley. There are frequent literary references too. As a girl, I read Kenneth Grahame's
The Golden Age and
Dream Days as a direct result of their being mentioned by E. Nesbit, and I re-read Rudyard Kipling's
The Jungle Book (which I'd first read at a younger age) because the Bastables were so fond of it.
I love the way the narrator (one of the children as you said, Katharine) tells the story - sometimes in their own conversational style and sometimes as they feel a book ought to be written, in a poetical way - though they soon tire of that. To quote some of my favourite parts:
Children are like jam: all very well in the proper place, but you can't stand them all over the shop - eh, what?
These were the dreadful words of our Indian uncle. They made us feel very young and angry; and yet we could not be comforted by calling him names to ourselves, as you do when nasty grown-ups say nasty things, because he is not nasty, but quite the exact opposite when not irritated. And we could not think it ungentlemanly of him to say we were like jam, because, as Alice says, jam is very nice indeed - only not on furniture and improper places like that.
The girls have come up with the idea of forming a society for the purpose of doing good deeds, which makes Oswald and Dicky nervous:
"It pleases the girls," Oswald said, for he is a kind brother.
"But we're not going to stand jaw, and 'words in season', and 'loving sisterly warnings'. I tell you what it is, Oswald, we'll have to run this thing our way, or it'll be jolly beastly for everybody."
Oswald saw this plainly.
"We must do something," Dicky said; "it's very very hard, though. Still, there must be some interesting things that are not wrong."
"I suppose so," Oswald said, "but being good is so much like being a muff, generally. Anyhow I'm not going to smooth the pillows of the sick, or read to the aged poor, or any rot out of Ministering Children."
"No more am I," Dicky said. He was chewing a straw like the head had in its mouth [a reference to a previous incident]. "But I suppose we must play the game fair. Let's begin by looking out for something useful to do - something like mending things or cleaning them, not just showing off."
"The boys in books chop kindling wood and save their pennies to buy tea and tracts."
"Little beasts!" said Dicky. "I say, let's talk about something else." And Oswald was glad to, for he was beginning to feel jolly uncomfortable.
Thoughts about author S. R. Crockett:
We all drew up in a line outside the churchyard wall and saluted as they [soldiers] went by, though we had not read Toady Lion then. We have since. It is the only decent book I have ever read written by Toady Lion's author. The others are mere piffle. But many people like them.
The narrator trying to write "like the books they give you for a prize at a girls' school":
"Ah, me!" sighed a slender maiden of twelve summers, removing her elegant hat and passing her tapery fingers lightly through her fair tresses, "how sad it is - is it not? - to see able-bodied youths and young ladies wasting the precious summer hours in idleness and luxury."
The maiden frowned reproachingly, but yet with earnest gentleness, at the group of youths and maidens who sat beneath an umbragipeaous beech tree and ate black currants.
"Dear brothers and sisters," the blushing girl went on, "could we not, even now, at the eleventh hour, turn to account these wasted lives of ours, and seek some occupation at once improving and agreeable?"
"I do not quite follow your meaning, dear sister," replied the cleverest of the brothers, on whose brow - "
It's no use. I can't write like these books. I wonder how the books' authors can keep it up.
What really happened was that we were all eating black currants in the orchard, out of a cabbage leaf, and Alice said -
"I say, look here, let's do something. It's simply silly to waste a day like this. It's just on eleven. Come on!"
"And Oswald said, "Where to?"
That was the beginning of it.
Such sparkle, humour and naturalness - though of course there's also sadness and tragedy, which are inescapable elements of life. E. Nesbit was an expert storyteller and I loved her books just as much as Enid Blyton's when I was a youngster.
