Breakfast At Libraries

I might as well start this review by pointing out that the book is almost certainly out of print, so the chances of you being able to pick up a copy with any ease are slim. And this is frankly a disgrace, because it's a deeply haunting children's novel that should be lauded as a classic.

I first read Cora Ravenwing when I was about nine or ten years old. I borrowed it from the library, read it once, was deeply affected by it, returned it to the library and never read it again. That was a quarter of a century ago. The fact that it stayed with me all that time, to the point where I eventually sought out a second-hand copy on eBay last week, is pretty indicative of the impression it made upon me.

Becky Stokes, now an adult, tells the story of a single year from her 1950s childhood, the year she moved from Birmingham to the Home Counties village of Okefield. On her family's first day in their new home, she finds Cora Ravenwing, a skinny, pale dark-haired girl hiding in their garden. Odd though Cora clearly is, Becky takes to her immediately. Unfortunately, the rest of the village, adults and children alike, treat Cora, the lonely, nature-loving gravedigger's daughter, as a dangerous outcast. When Becky is introduced to the accomplished, well-off would-be poet Hermione Phillips and invited to be part of her circle of friends, it's clear that Becky will have to make a choice between Cora and the other girls.

From that synopsis, you could be forgiven for thinking that Cora Ravenwing was just another misfits-v-popular-kids coming-of-age story. But it is so much more than that. For a start, the vehemence with which the adults in the village - the parents of Becky's more conventional friends, for example, and the Stokes' cleaner Mrs Briggs - dislike Cora disturbed me deeply as a child. It's one thing for children to turn against other children, but for a young girl to be ostracised by grown men and women with children of their own is quite another. Moreover, Cora's own story is peculiar to say the least: her free-spirited mother died shortly after her birth, and her grieving father gave her up, for a full eight months, to be wet-nursed by a local woman whose own baby had died of a cot death. That woman, it transpires, was Mrs Briggs.

One of the things that makes Cora Ravenwing unusual for a children's book is that the many injustices that occur in the novel are never corrected. Becky, alone among her friends and their parents, can see immediately the psychological reasons behind Mrs Briggs' hatred of Cora, a hatred which is likely at the root of this middle-class village's collective mistrust of an eccentric child, but nobody will listen to her. Nor will they believe her when she tries to tell them about Mrs Briggs' truly horrific actions when Becky and Cora are almost caught in a fire during one of their clandestine meetings. There's no happy ending to this story. Mrs Briggs gets away with something close to attempted murder, Cora remains the 'Devil Child' until the day she and her father disappear, the villagers laugh and thank God that 'the Ravenwings have flown', and Becky never sees her friend again. But even as an adult, Becky remembers Cora, and feels sure that one day, mysteriously, they'll meet again.

What most struck me about this book, both on my first reading as a child and now as an adult, is the ambiguity of the characters. Cora, for instance, is a disconcerting child. To be close to her dead mother, Cora spends hours in the graveyard, and it's only there that she becomes strangely animated, as if drawing strength from her sinister surroundings. The jackdaws in the belfry treat her like one of their own, and she spends most of her nights hiding alone in the woods with the badgers, unmissed by her depressed father and strangely unaffected by the lack of sleep. Even Becky is occasionally frightened by her. But is Cora really the witch that Becky sometimes secretly fears her to be, or are the rumours Becky hears about her subconsciously skewing her perceptions? Moreover, if Cora is not the village witch, could it be possible that someone else, a figure well-known and trusted throughout Okefield, is?

More than just a children's story, Cora Ravenwing is a masterful study of prejudice, small-mindedness and the way harmful rumours can spread through a tight-knit community - it's telling that Cora's teachers, all of whom are from outside the village, seem to find her perfectly likeable. Do class and the social norms of the day also have a part to play? Unlike Cora, Becky's friends have cleaners and au pairs and large, middle-class homes. At the school concert, Becky plays the piano and Hermione recites her self-penned poetry - but it's Cora who outshines them all singing her mother's folk songs, making Hermione's supposedly nature-influenced poems seem artificial and affected. Is strange, wild little Cora, a true child of nature who sees through Hermione's pretensions long before everyone else, perceived as threat to the rigid social conformity of 50s village life?

It's a terrifying though that had Cora been born a few hundred years before, the child would likely have been subjected to the ducking-stool once the wheels of the gossip-mill began turning. This was never far from my mind while I was reading, and perhaps that's partly why it stayed with me all these years.


Cora Ravenwing is an odd, unclassifiable little book. Scratch below the surface of the straightforwardly simple language of the narrative, though, and you'll find layer upon layer of ambiguity, complexity and hidden depth.