ABSTRACT
Few novels begin as beguilingly as The Children of Green Knowe, the first of Lucy Boston’s famous series. The account of the arrival of the seven-year-old Tolly at his unknown great-grandmother’s house where he is to spend Christmas must be one of the best openings of a children’s book ever to have been written. Arrival is the exact word, for this is more than an arrival by train at a railway station, or by boat at an old house entirely surrounded by water. It is – though the lonely, unhappy and rather bewildered little boy does not yet know it – an arrival at a deep and richly satisfying level, a restoration to family and home, the discovery that he has a place in a complex pattern of time and landscape.
