Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I have not any idea,” her mother said, jabbing at a potato. “Sarah, come in or go out, but either way shut that door.”
This is about two teenagers doing local history research in a corner of south-eastern England in the late 1960s. That may not hook you immediately, but it was a book that had a big impression on me when I was a kid. The two protagonists are Stephen the vicar’s son and an only child, and Sarah, in the middle of a large Catholic family, recently arrived from the North.
Stephen has been quietly transcribing the correspondence of the historical local landlords, whose sixteenth-century forebears were riven by family and religious tensions, and also enduring his parents’ efforts to inflict a social life on him; his friendship with Sarah goes through peaks and quite painful troughs, as they find the physical legacy of the Creed family in the countryside around them.
Some may find the supposed historical documents being recounted at length a bit too much (see spoilery review in Kirkus); I loved them as a younger reader, and I love them now, and perhaps it inspired me a bit in my own long-past historical research and my current project of putting my grandmother’s memoirs online here. But it’s also a good record of the fragility of friendship, as a teenager or at any other time of one’s life.
I also appreciated again the vivid and efficient portrayal of Stephen and Sarah’s very different families. Sometimes you can say a lot with a little; when an ancient tombstone is uncovered, and it turns out to be that of one of the key figures in the sixteenth-century part of the story, the chapter ends with “She [Sarah] looked at Stephen, and then quickly looked away again.”
Jenny Overton, the author, was a children’s books editor for most of her career and published a handful of novels, of which the best known is The Thirteen Days of Christmas, aimed at a younger age bracket than this but available with Shirley Hughes illustrations. There is a sequel to Creed Country, which I think concentrates on Sarah’s younger siblings, and I’ll report on it in due course.
You can get Creed Country here.
