Notes 1 Introduction: That Was Then? 1. ‘Children’s literature’ refers throughout this book to both children’s and young adult texts. 2. For example, in John Stephens’s influential discussion in Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (202–40). 3. Mendlesohn gives an account of the experience of her partner, the his- torian Edward James, at the medieval conference in Kalamazoo. His condemnation by some children’s literature scholars for suggesting that children’s historical books should teach history and inspire children with the desire to learn more is both amusing and a telling example of the incomprehension that can occur when two disciplinary discourses collide (51–2). 4. Note that this restriction refers to subject matter, not authorship. Several of the texts discussed are by non-British writers. 5. A typical example is Alison Prince’s Anne Boleyn and Me: The Diary of Eleanor Valjean 1525–1536 (2004), which tells of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon from the point of view of Catherine’s young lady- in-waiting. This was later repackaged as Anne Boleyn and Me (My Royal Story): A Tudor Girl’s Diary 1524–1536 (2010). 6. At a panel discussion at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, 2005. 2 The Eagle Has Landed: Representing the Roman Invasion of Britain in Texts for Children 1. Ladybird was quite capable of making conscious intertextual references. Later in Shopping with Mother, for example, we see a copy of Peach’s own Alfred the Great in the window of a shop. 2. Despite the similarity in names, the echo of Dan and Una from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) is not deliberate (Browne, personal communica- tion, 2009). 3 Once, Future, Sometime, Never: Arthur in History 1. Sutcliff is explicit about her debt (‘Combined Ops’ 247), and Treece follows Reed in several striking respects, for example in his siting of the Battle of Badon on the north edge of the Marlborough Downs (Treece, The Eagles Have Flown 176). 186 Notes 187 2. The quotation is from Geoffrey Ashe, From Caesar to Arthur (1960), 9. 3. This is at least the most popular identification of Malory, first laid out at length by Edward Hicks in 1928. 4. This is a detail also mentioned by T. H. White in The Queen of Air and Darkness, the second part of The Once and Future King (1958): ‘she was twice his age, so that she had twice the power of his weapons’ (308). 5. The differences between the two versions are extensive and more complex than can be adequately addressed here, but both versions are relevant to this discussion, and we shall draw on both. Unless otherwise indicated, references are to the original text. 6. Both by the presence of Robin Hood/Wood, and by the date of 1216 given in the revised version of the book to Uther Pendragon’s death (194). How- ever, since Uther’s reign is said to have begun in 1066, this dating advertises its own implausibility from the start. 7. The date is 1890 in the revised version. 8. One of the exceptions is Ann Lawrence’s Between the Forest and the Hills (1977). 4 ‘She Be Faking It’: Authenticity and Anachronism 1. This term, coined by Michael Banton, refers to the practice of viewing ‘other historical periods in terms of the concepts, values, and understand- ing of the present time’ (Banton 21). 2. ‘Gentlemen’s sons should be trained to use a horn, hunt cunningly, neatly train and use a hawk. The study of literature should be left to the sons of peasants’, averred a gentleman quoted by the Henrician courtier Richard Pace in his De Fructu Qui ex Doctrina Precipitur (Basel 1517). 3. This is the so-called Peacham drawing (c. 1595), which illustrates a scene from Titus Andronicus and is currently housed in the library of the Marquess of Bath. 5 Dreams of Things That Never Were: Authenticity and Genre 1. Other current terms for this phenomenon are ‘point of departure’ (or ‘POD’), ‘Jonbar point’ and ‘branch point’. 2. In the final chapter of this book we will consider the alliance between history and fiction further, using Hayden White’s concept of ‘emplotment’. 3. Clearly, Lane’s books also fall within the intertextual category discussed later in this chapter; here, however, we address their quasi-historical aspects. 4. In Mary, Queen of Scots: A Scottish Queen’s Diary, France, 1553 (2010). 5. Others include A. S. Byatt (2009), Anthony Beevor (2009) and A. L. Berridge (2011). 188 Notes 6 Ancestral Voices, Prophesying War 1. Dennis Hamley, personal communication. 2. Not all Home Front books published by writers who were children dur- ing the war are quite so autobiographical: Jill Paton Walsh’s The Dolphin Crossing (1967) and Fireweed (1969) and David Rees’s Carnegie-winning The Exeter Blitz (1978) are examples of novels that contain less of the authors’ direct experience, although they are inevitably informed by their wartime childhoods. Rees, for example, lived in Exeter only in later life, but his experience of the bombing in London (and to a lesser extent Bournemouth) gave him plenty of exposure to Blitz conditions (Rees, Not for Your Hands 27–52, 160). 3. For more on lieux de mémoire as they operate within children’s literature, see Valerie Krips, The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain (2000). 4. Victor Watson, personal communication. 7 Patterns of History 1. This is not a phenomenon born with the National Curriculum. More than a decade before the Education Reform Act of 1988 came into force, Robert Leeson was complaining that ‘the genre almost depends for its life on the approval of teachers and librarians, as well as the [ ...] reviewers who act as their reconnaissance corps’ (173). 2. See also Ofsted, The Annual Report (57). 3. This argument is advanced most explicitly in Hall’s ‘ “House and Garden”: The Time-Slip Story in the Aftermath of the Second World War’ (2003), but see also her ‘Aristocratic Houses and Radical Politics’ (1998), ‘ “Time No Longer” – History, Enchantment and the Classic Time-Slip’ (2001) and ‘Ancestral Voices – “Since Time Everlasting and Beyond” ’ (2003). Bibliography Primary Texts Aiken, Joan. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. ———. Black Hearts in Battersea. 1964. London: Red Fox, 2004. ———. Night Birds on Nantucket. 1966. London: Red Fox, 2004. ———. The Cuckoo Tree. 1971. London: Red Fox, 1992. ———. The Stolen Lake. 1981. 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