Hob and the Goblins

For as long as I have read children's books I've been in awe of William Mayne. He drives a wedge into my everyday reading, prises it open to air it and make me look at how it works. So I discover that holes have socks, laces are full of shoes, pockets have breeches, whereas, until then, I'd never noticed.

Did you ever meet Hob, in a picture book?

He's back, in Hob and the Goblins, beautifully protected by endpapers and chapter headings composed of a spellbinding alphabet by Norman Messenger. (N.B. Goblins without Hob as prefix are malicious. Everyday life with Mayne for the uninitiated or forgetful needs Katharine Briggs' A Dictionary of Fairies, as well as one for Scrabble, or acquaintance with Alan Garner.) Do you know what a cutch is? Hob lives in one under the stairs (O. E. D. var. of `couch'). He has become the permanent helper of the Grimes family: parents, two Hob-spotting children, a budgie and a baby, all splendid talkers. They have bought, unsuspecting, `the wickedest house in the country'. It sits over a crock of gold a sorcerer once went to steal. Hob knows he will return, bringing with him a host of malevolent fairies. (Hob: `they say fairies but they mean something else'.) Overground the neighbour is a witch; goblin children curtsey to her. There are also other dwarves.

War is threatened. Hob's powers are limited to here and now, so when the witch seduces him with a suit of clothes, he follows the Hobgoblin culture, becomes a swank and a layabout (as prefigured in the first chapter) until events wear them out and he returns to face the forces of darkness.

This is one of the best of the best kind of stories for children, digging deep into the fairy tale hoard, children's own literature, and glittering with its own, modem, treasures as a reading experience for adults and children alike. It may need to be read aloud to the inexperienced, though not often, before the sheer magic of the words takes over. Like Hob, Mayne is a boundary crosser. He shows language to his readers, turning the complexities of thought and feeling into metaphors of unexpected, pellucid simplicity. So children immediately know and feel what FloorShiver, PlasterCrack and LarderMould are, and don't have to wrestle with, `Something had driven out things like Helter scuttling under the floor, and Skelter, jumping in the loft at two in the morning, not there when you look'. For adults, to read Mayne is to rediscover reading; for children, it's a whole new game of discovering ideas as events.

How can we explain to those who want normative levels for children's reading what this is all about?

The picture book referred to in this piece is The Complete Book of Hob Stories, published by Walker (0 7445 1483 5) at £4.99 pbk, with illustrations by Patrick Benson.

A Dictionary of Fairies by Katharine Briggs is published by Penguin (014 017658 6) at £8.99 pbk.