Thursday's Child by Noel Streatfeild

Thursday’s Child was the first book I wore out. My original copy was a paperback with a photo from a TV series I never saw. I read it until the spine cracked and the pages came out in chunks and then I carried on reading it until it was a collection of small sections and individual pages that had to be handled with extreme caution. 

I suppose that the larger child here is Margaret who was dressed up as a boy to work on the canal boat, but if you picked up the book unknowing, you'd read the image as two boys. Seems an odd choice for the cover to me.

When my paperback Thursday's Child was finally impossible to read, my mother bought me a hardback copy, the very first hardback I had ever owned apart from a handful of Beatrix Potters. So now I had not only a book I adored for its story, but the first book I fell in love with as an object. Imagine the thrill of owning such a treasure! 

Look how much I loved this book - I covered the dust jacket with stickyback plastic when it started to disintegrate. And stop to appreciate the image of Margaret drawn by Peggy Fortnum who's responsible for the original Paddington Bear illustrations.

A number of books have held top spot for me over the years, but Thursday's Child probably held it for longest and has never been out of my personal top ten. What is it about this particular story? I think, for me, it’s the epitome of what I think of when I think ‘children’s books’. Feisty hero, no parents, thrown into situations where she has to fend for herself, protect others, form a team, while preserving her own identity with determination. Though most of my favourites have elements of fantasy or magic in them, historical novels like this tick the world-building boxes that suit me. And honestly, the things that Noel Streatfeild throws at Margaret Thursday barely give the reader pause for breath: an orphan with a mysterious background, a cruel orphanage, an escape to a canal boat, joining a travelling theatre, the discovery of long-lost aristocrats. And as the author speeds her characters through triumph and disaster, she takes the time to give even the minor players and the baddies real depth. 

I have loved almost every Noel Streatfeild book I’ve ever read – I can even forgive her for the much inferior sequel to this book because of course you have to write a book called Far to Go if you’ve written one called Thursday’s Child. I have a soft spot for Ballet Shoes and my copies of the Gemma stories show evidence of much rereading, but for me, if you could only read one of her books Thursday’s Child should be the one. 

This post is part of a collection of seven about children's books that I love. You can see the original post here, with links to all the books I've written about.

The seven books I'm not posting covers of

I keep being tagged in those social media posts where you're supposed to put up a number of books you love or books that have changed you or just books. With no comment or explanation, they usually say. I suppose this is so that it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. Maybe so that it provokes other people to comment. I've done this before, I always want to shout about books I love, but the tags are coming so thick and fast in the current situation - what else have people got to do but look back at books, movies, music, paintings that they love - that I can't bring myself to join in. And besides, I find I want to comment. I have things to say about books. I want people to hear them.

So I was lying in bed, thinking about what I might choose if I was posting seven books that mean a lot to me/changed my life/I want to share. I thought I'd need to browse through my bookshelves but actually seven books appeared in my head straight away. Of course, as a children's book nerd, all seven are children's books. I do read other things. I love many, many books aimed at adults, but I don't feel nearly as passionate about them as I do about the children's books I love. Why would that be? Is it because the books I loved as a child stood out more because the pool of all the books I had read was smaller when I read them? Is it because I wasn't consciously looking for books that were like books I'd already enjoyed, so that finding these was a joyful happenstance?

I'd be interested to know if adults who don't read children's books have stand-out books from their childhoods that they would consider including in a list of favourites. As us children's writers know, many adults see children's books as less worthy than books aimed at adults. I think if anyone who had been a reader since childhood gave it some thought, they would easily put their finger on a few stand-out books from their childhood.

So here are the seven books that sprang into my mind.

What can I say about them? They seem distinctly 'girly' to me, but that could be to do with the era in which I was a child. There's a clear progression in when I took up each as 'my favourite book'. But somehow even when I championed a new one, all the others still remained 'my favourite'. The order is:

Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare

Thursday's Child by Noel Streatfeild

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Henrietta's House by Elizabeth Gouge

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

Fifteen by Beverley Cleary

So I thought, instead of just showing you covers, I'd tell you why I love these books. I've already written about most of them on this blog. You can click on the titles above to see what I had to say.  The rest I'll write over the course of the next few weeks. There isn't after all anything much pressing to do at the moment.