1970s, page 1 of 13

I came across this novel while looking up reviews for another book. It sounded just like the sort of 1970s YA rural fantasy (though the fantasy is very light) with an otherwise realistic air that I’ve been reviewing on this blog for a while. The Ivory Anvil (published 1974 in hardback, 1977 in paperback) was Sylvia Fair’s first novel, and was runner-up in the 1974 Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. It also got a reading on Jackanory in February 1979.

The setting is rural Wales, often a presence in these 1970s YA books, such as The Owl Service and The Earth Witch, but in this case there’s an added authenticity as Fair was born in Wales, and based the main character on herself as a girl.

Sioned Jones is the daughter of a pharmacist in Nantyglyn, the sort of village, nestled in the Welsh mountains, where everyone knows everyone. Artistic but somewhat shy, Sioned has recently befriended the far more outgoing and good-with-words Anna Lind, whose family moved to a nearby farm from somewhere in England. Anna’s father is a sculptor, which fascinates the artistic Sioned. One day, her mother sends her on an errand to buy a new basin from Dinah China’s shop. Dinah (real name Meredith) is known throughout the village for her fractious relationship with her older sister Eva, though the two have lived in the same house all their long lives. Leaving the shop, Sioned is called back inside by the other sister, Eva, who wants to show her something: the treasures their uncle brought back from China. Among them is an ivory cube, a three-dimensional puzzle made up of three hundred and forty three (seven cubed) pieces. “When you see real beautiful things like these,” Eva says, “other things don’t matter. You can sense the power that beautiful things have?” And the ivory cube certainly has that effect on Sioned:

“Of all the treasure strewn about the room this one small glowing piece of ivory held her open-mouthed and blank-eyed, compelling her gaze until everything else around it blurred. As though it were suddenly in command of her soul, forcing her eyes to stare, reaching out towards her in an effort to grasp her mind, giving out signals she knew not how to receive. What does it want of me? she thought desperately.”

Sioned returns to Dinah China’s the next day, to show her a drawing she made of the shop, and is bowled over when Dinah hands her the ivory cube, saying “A little problem for you to solve… I think you’re the one to do it.” Somewhat overawed to be in the care of this surely priceless object, Sioned can think of nothing to do but keep it in her pocket, even when she and her friend Anna go on a bike ride into the mountains. It’s only afterwards that she gets the chance to sit down and examine it — to find one piece, shaped roughly like an anvil, and “no bigger than a baby’s tooth”, is missing. Horrified that she’s lost something of immense value, Sioned vows to search everywhere till she’s found it.

But, heading out with Anna again to look for it — even though it could be anywhere on the “huge, rocky, heather-filled sheep-speckled mountain” — Sioned instead finds herself drawn downwards: “Like a migrating bird she followed some guiding instinct which was pulling, tugging her down the valley so that she flew as though on wings…”

Like two similar books I’ve covered recently — The Grey Dancer and The Walking Stones, both set in Scotland — a valley near to Nantyglyn has been dammed up and turned into a reservoir, though where the damming in those books was seen as a threat to the rural way of life and a potentially exploitative disruption of the environment, Sioned (and, presumably, the rest of the village) see the dam as nothing but a positive. For her, the reservoirs “added so much charm and character to ordinary, everyday valleys.” And the possibility of a new, more modern dam is even a thing to be welcomed:

“The building of a new dam would mean new routines, new people, opportunities for exciting things to happen.”

At this point, after low rainfall, the reservoir is almost empty, and the fabled Drowned House can be seen in the reservoir bed — or its remains, anyway. And it’s here Sioned finds herself being drawn. She’s already been dreaming of a young woman in old-fashioned dress, standing in a triangular room, and now she finds the outline of that room in the levelled brickwork on the reservoir bed. Inspired, she starts digging in the mud, and finds it: the anvil-shaped ivory piece. Returning to Anna’s house, she, Anna, and Anna’s older brother Robert set about the intricate task of disassembling the puzzle so they can replace the missing piece, none of them realising till after it’s done that such a piece couldn’t have come loose on its own. It wasn’t Sioned who lost it. It had, she learns when she returns it to the Meredith sisters, been lost since they were children, and their cousin Lizzie had died trying to retrieve it when the valley was flooded back in 1894.

Aside from the many similarities in setting and its light air of fantasy, there’s a lot that’s different between The Ivory Anvil and, say, The Owl Service, The Earth Witch, or even something less intense like The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy. Usually in a book like this, the main character would be the newcomer to the rural setting. Here, even though Anna would be perfect for that role, it’s Sioned who’s the main character. And this allows her love of Wales, its landscapes, people, and language to provide a warm backdrop throughout the book. (Sioned doesn’t speak Welsh — everyone, she says, stopped speaking Welsh when the dam was built — but she wishes she could, and vows to learn.) Also, in any other 1970s rural fantasy of this type, there would be some sort of class tension, but here, there’s none. Aside from the lost puzzle, in fact, the only tensions are within Sioned herself: her shyness, and her sometimes finding Anna doesn’t appreciate Wales as much as she wants her to (though Anna comes round without any need for a confrontation). Perhaps the only real conflict in the book is between Dinah and her sister Eva, rooted deep in the past.

Overall, it’s an evocatively-written, gentle and sensitive tale, with a touch of the fantastic and an idyllic air of dwelling in the landscape of rural Wales. The book got some positive reviews on its release, as in this from the Birmingham Daily Post:

“Her heroine is intelligent, artistic and passionately fond of her Welsh heritage, and struggles to sort out herself and the mystery of an intricate Chinese puzzle which is somehow linked to the past. The people and emotions are refreshingly real.”

And this, from Sarah Hayes in the Times Literary Supplement:

“…a story which begins slowly but gathers momentum as the pull of the past becomes stronger, and as friendship develops between two very different girls. Wales plays an important supporting role, and the compelling natural descriptions are essential to the story itself.”

Fair was born Sylvia Price in Rhayader, Radnorshire, in 1933. She studied at the Bath Academy of Art and went on to teach art for a while. She married Keith Fair (who would go on to become head of art at Grosseteste College in Lincoln), and had five children. Her next book after The Ivory Anvil was The Penny Tin Whistler (1976), which was followed by two books for younger children, The Bedspread (1982 in the US, 1983 in the UK) and Barney’s Beanstalk (1989). She returned to YA in 1997 with Big Talk. By the 1980s she’d remarried, to poet Bill Turner.

The Penny Tin Whistler is already on my to-read shelf. It’s about telepathic twins!

Roddy McDowall, and a glowing fork! That’s the only thing I remembered about this brief-lived slice of US telefantasy, but it’s a memory that lingered, and every so often I’ve checked to see if I might be able to watch the series again. And a couple of years ago it was issued as a DVD in the UK, all of its short 10-episode run. It was first shown over here by the BBC between 5th March and 15th May 1977. (The pilot went out on a Saturday at 5:25pm — the Doctor Who slot — while the other episodes were shown at 7pm on Fridays.) Amazingly, this overlapped with the actual US run, which started on 3rd February and continued for nine weeks before the show was cancelled, with one last episode being broadcast in June. After that, in the UK anyway, it was only ever repeated once, around Christmas 1978, which seems odd for a science fiction series once Star Wars mania had gripped the world.

The premise, as the show’s title sequence had it:

“Lost in the Devil’s Triangle, trapped in a dimension with beings from the future and from other worlds, a party of adventurers journeys through zones of time, back to their own time.”

The “party of adventurers” (a very D&D phrase, that), was initially a scientist, Dr Jordan, from the show’s present, along with his young son, some colleagues, and the crew of the small boat they’d hired. Entering the region of the Bermuda Triangle, they get swallowed by a glowing green cloud and wake the next day on the beach of an island that is, of course, on no known charts. Journeying inland they encounter wildlife from all over the world, and, soon, a bunch of 16th century pirates. Dr Jordan muses:

“I’ve been asking the wrong question. I’ve been wondering where we are instead of when. We’re in some kind of time-lock. A space-time continuum. Past, present and future exist together. Each on its own terms.”

Things are fully explained (as in, not explained at all) by Varian, a man from the 23rd century who at first poses — for reasons also never adequately explained — as a dumb savage in a dark wig:

“You see, as earth men, we’re each locked in our own time. We’ve had to live by the calendar. But here on this island, you begin to understand that even as the first man walked upright in his Neanderthal cave, man was also taking his first step on the moon, and there’s only a thin tissue of consciousness separating one event from the other.”

(I love this sort of hand-waving nonsense in a 1970s TV show. It recalls Professor Victor Bergman from the first series of Space: 1999, with his bon mots of the “The line between science and mysticism is just a line” sort.)

The show, then, consists of the “adventurers” journeying across this larger-on-the-inside-than-the-outside island, buzzing into a new time zone at the start of each episode then out again by the end. The party changed after the pilot episode, with the studio wanting more variety among the characters. (They also said there should be no historical time-zone episodes: only futuristic stuff.) The two characters from 1977 who remained were the kid, Scott (played by Ike Eisenmann, of Escape to Witch Mountain fame), and a young medical doctor with both cool and muscle, Dr Fred Walters. Joining them was Varian, the man from 2230 and the owner of the aforementioned glowing fork (a device used for both healing and, in extremis, destruction, which “focuses my thought and my energy. It’s kind of a sonic manipulation of matter”); Liana, daughter of an Atlantean father and an extraterrestrial mother, who has the ability to communicate with animals (mostly her cat, Sil-L); and finally, a couple of episodes in, Jonathan Willaway, played by Roddy McDowall — a “rebel scientist” from the 1960s, who is initially met as the villain of one story, but repents and joins the group. (I can’t help wondering why they had him come from the 1960s — only the previous decade — especially as he’s the main technical expert of the group. Was there some subtle cultural difference he was supposed to embody?)

The party are journeying in search of rumoured Evoland, where they hope to find a device that will send each of them back to their own time. Generally, in each episode, they encounter a civilisation in need of correction, fix it, then move on. Atlanteum, for instance, though apparently a futuristic paradise, is ruled by a giant pulsing brain, and that’s never a good idea. A couple of episodes seem to be addressing (with very broad strokes) issues of the day, as with youth culture in “Children of the Gods”, where the party stray into lands controlled by a community of children who execute all “Elders” — presumably anyone over thirty — until of course the party ask the same question the hippies themselves were no doubt pondering now the 60s had turned into the mid-70s: what happens when you grow up? Then there was “Turnabout”, whose main city is ruled entirely by men. The men keep the women as slaves, until the women take control and the men are all banished to prison, then the women realise they’ve just taken things to an equally bad opposite extreme. (I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t a joke — perhaps the series’ one and only hint of satire in its ten-episode run — in the fact that the city was ruled by yet another super-powerful computer, this time called “the Complex”. So, these domineering men and women are in the grip of “the Complex” — Freud would no doubt have agreed.)

If I’m honest, it’s easy to see why the show might have been cancelled. Roddy McDowall and the glowing fork — perhaps with the addition of Liana communicating with her cat by widening and narrowing her eyes — are its only truly memorable aspects. Although it was sprinkled with 70s weirdness, including psychic powers, the “Devil’s Triangle”, crystals, auras and energies, they didn’t result in the show having its own characteristic style of fantasy. Worse, perhaps, was that the main cast were all relentlessly heroic and moral, but otherwise quite bland, with the one exception of Roddy McDowall, who at least had a puckish sense of self-interest, and indulged in the sort of cartoonish over-acting that might have made the series work, if only anyone else had done the same. Even the guest stars — John Saxon, Joan Collins — weren’t given any opportunity to really indulge. There was certainly nothing like the banter and tension between Star Trek’s leading trio. (Though the show had a couple of links with Star Trek: its story-editor was D C Fontana, the story-editor of the first series of Trek; also, it re-used some very recognisable Star Trek sound effects in its last episode.)

Perhaps the best instalment was the tenth — the one that got broadcast after the whole thing had been cancelled, and which was only shown in the UK as part of its 1978 repeat. Certainly, it seems the most post-hippie-ish, with its community of extraterrestrial pacifists who have never encountered lying, theft, or murder before. And, it turns out you can live without those things: if you have psychic powers and your own super-powered Orb.

Not even a glowing fork can make up for your lack of an Orb.

Some more Scottish YA folk-fantasy… First published in the UK in 1970 as The Bodach, and in the US in the same year as The Walking Stones, this was then re-released in paperback in the UK under the more Earth-mysteries-friendly US title in 1976.

“Bodach” is Gaelic for “old man”, and the Bodach of the title lives in a Scottish glen, a storyteller and possessor of the Second Sight. Living close by are the Campbell family — shepherd Ian, his wife Kitty, and their ten-year-old son Donald — and one evening when the Bodach is visiting, the old man foretells that, the next day, three men will come to the valley, one with a forest on his back, one with lightning in his hand, and the third bringing death. Sure enough, the next day, three men — all called Rory — turn up. One has a sack of seeds for planting a forest, the other has the plans for a new hydro-electric dam to be built in the glen, and the third has the responsibility of turning on the dam and flooding the glen (thus bringing death to it). They offer the Campbells and the Bodach modern, new houses in the nearby town (with “electric light, hot and cold running water, an electric stove, a refrigerator and washing-machine — everything, in fact, that a modern house should have”), and while the Campbells accept (Ian is to get a new job, too, working as a forester under the first Rory), the Bodach says, politely but firmly: “you will never flood this glen until I give you leave to do so.”

Work progresses for two years. The day the dam is due to be turned on (by Royalty, no less), the Bodach stands as one of the crowd — but suddenly, he’s there in the glen. Knowing they can’t turn on the dam till he’s safe, men are sent to get him, but every time he’s about to be caught, he reappears somewhere else. Things continue like this till the end of the day, and the dam hasn’t been turned on. That evening, the Bodach tells the now twelve-year-old Donald why he’s using this skill of creating a “Co-Walker”, a double, in this way. There’s a circle of thirteen standing stones in the glen, and:

“Once every hundred years, they say, these stones move from their places. They walk to the river and dip their heads in it, then they go back to their places and stand fast there for another hundred years.”

The Bodach wants to see this wonderful event. But before he can, the two of them encounter a creature from the Otherworld, the Bean nighe, the Washer at the Ford, whose appearance foretells death. The old man saves the boy from becoming its victim, but only at his own expense. Now knowing he’s going to die, and so maybe not to get to see the stones walk, he asks Donald to see them, and passes on his gift of the Second Sight to the boy (which he’d always meant to do anyway). The Bodach falls ill and is taken to hospital, so Donald must use his new abilities (creating his own “Co-Walker”) to keep the dam from opening, then gets to see (I hope this isn’t a plot spoiler, as it’s in the title of the book) the stones move.

There are already connections between this book and two other Scottish YA novels I’ve covered on this blog. The Washer at the Ford appeared in Winifred Finlay’s Beadbonny Ash — though there she didn’t portend death — and The Grey Dancer was also about a glen being flooded due to the creation of a hydro-electric dam (and there was also a cyclical supernatural occurrence, too). The Walking Stones is a lighter book than either, aimed at a slightly younger audience. The threat level is low, and none of the characters is really villainous (one of the Rories is clearly tempted to flood the valley even with the Bodach in it, but is persuaded otherwise). Usually I find books aimed at pre-teens to be too light for my tastes, but The Walking Stones has a bit of an edge (with the death of the old man), plus a genuine scene of wonder and weirdness when Donald gets to see the walking of the stones. It’s an evocative and mystical moment, very nicely written, with strands of wreathing mists gathering about the stones, then becoming the long white hair and flowing beards of old men.

For Donald, the protagonist, it’s basically a tale of initiation, as he’s granted the power of Second Sight. Any modern book of this type (or even The Dark is Rising, from a few years later) would use the idea to be the first in a long series, with Donald going on to fight all sorts of Otherworld perils, but here, there’s no sense that’s going to happen. Donald, we can be sure, is going to live just as quiet a life as the Bodach did, telling tales of wonder and mystery, and providing a little Second Sight and Otherworldly wisdom to his local community. (Will it be a strange and lonely life? We’re not told, though Donald does rather sensibly express some doubts as to whether he wants the gift of the Second Sight.)

Like so many similar books of the era, there’s a sense of old ways — along with both their faerie dangers, and their supernatural sense of wonder — being erased by the encroachment of modern technology — with its greater ease of life, but paucity of wonders. Compared to the Bodach, we’re told, “there was no one on the television who knew stories as strange as the ones he told, or who could tell them half so well”. But Donald is handed the baton, and becomes just such a storyteller for the next generation, ensuring the old ways, wisdom, and stories aren’t quite going to die out just yet.