Reviewed by Frances Maclean
Joan Aiken’s A Necklace of Raindrops and other stories first appeared in our house in the early 1980s and soon earned its place amidst my most treasured childhood belongings, right up there with the butterfly-shaped wind chimes I’d received from my parents on my sixth birthday and the imitation mother of pearl pocketknife I was given later, emblazoned – importantly I felt since it symbolized the great responsibility entrusted to me – with a small green cartoon Robin Hood (as explanation I did grow up on a farm). True, there were other books I loved but these old favourites were generally battered and worn-down by the carelessness of my enthusiasm for them. A Necklace of Raindrops was different. A small elegant paperback – its front cover quite unlike the bright, bold and determinedly solid illustrations of the other children’s books I owned – this one was thickly framed in black, lending it what I considered to be a sophisticated air of mystery, and the image taken from the title story showed three dark silhouettes – a girl, a princess, and an Arabian king set against the warm yellows, pinks and oranges of a searing white hot sun. Swirling through this image was a colourfully transparent and god-like figure – the generous though rather unforgiving North Wind as it turns out. The scene, like the stories themselves I realize now, seemed to offer something of the wind chimes and the pocketknife combined. A sort of magically enhanced elemental beauty on the one hand – in one story a list of wondrous presents include a flower that can sing and a boat made out of a great pink shell. While there is the sense of being entrusted with these magical tales on the other; as a kid living in a world ruled by adults Aiken’s stories are an empowering antidote.
The knowledge that Joan Aiken was not only a children’s writer but a writer of adult stories – and among those and even scarier, a writer of ghost stories – only added to the book’s allure. (Although Aiken died in 2004, on her website she had cited Edgar Allan Poe as an early influence). I suppose there was the hope (and the fear) that Aiken, with all her vast writerly knowledge of the adult world, might accidentally let something slip through to ours. But in her book Way to Write for Children she explained the need to be very clear about her intended readers. While adults read for entertainment, bringing the history of their many years of reading to any book they open, children, she wrote, read “to learn”. Keenly aware of her child readers’ sincerity in their approach to books, Aiken clearly wrote for children with sincerity too. Her stories are simple, concerned with a child’s concerns without being child-centric. There are stories about children here of course, but there are also stories about cats and grandmothers and travelers and bakers – and danger too. For Aiken does not pretend that a child’s world is without fears. In the title story nine year old Laura, gifted a magical necklace by the North Wind when she was a baby and instructed never to take it off lest it bring bad luck, is forced to give up her necklace to the care of the teacher during school hours – only to have the precious necklace stolen by a jealous classmate. In submitting to school rules Laura, it seems, is disobeying the higher laws of nature. And here I will mention that the magic in these stories is not the far off impossible kind but what feels more akin to a near and natural (though no less wondrous) sort of magic. In the same story, Laura’s friends, fish and mice and birds, quickly come to her aid since she has always treated them kindly. In ‘The Baker’s Cat’ a cat with a cold is given warm milk and yeast and left to sleep by the fire – all the while rising like a loaf of bread. There is a simple ordinary logic to the way the magic works in these stories – a magic that might (almost) happen in our everyday lives.
