The nightwatch winter (book review)
The Nightwatch Winter by Jenny Overton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Thirty years ago, when our children were small, we subscribed to the Puffin Book Club, and every month a new book arrived, and was put on the shelves. I don’t know how many of them the children read, but the other day, looking for some light reading, and not having seen anything I hadn’t read on our general fiction shelves, I looked on the old children’s books’ shelf, and found this.
It’s a very ordinary story about some school children in a village in the south of England. In the Christmas holidays they get bored, and go exploring the neighbourhood, in the course of which they encounter a reclusive woman who lives alone with her cat. When the Lent term starts at school they get involved in preparing for a play.
The children are of indeterminate ages, though as the youngest is 11, I assume that most of the others are somewhere in the age range of 11-14.
I think it is the kind of book I would have hated as a child.
The problem is that it is so ordinary. It describes things that children do, like climbing up drains and acting in school plays, and being jealous over who gets the best parts and so on.
It was published 40 years ago, and so describes a vanished generation. There is only one mention of a computer in the whole story, and no one would have had one at home. And the play they produce is an Easter play, and the children seem to be familiar with the plot. Even back then, that might have been quite unusual (though the girls were at a church school, run by nuns). I recall a Church of England bishop of about that period describing how he took his nephew and niece to see Jesus Christ, Superstar, and being somewhat disconcerted to find that they didn’t know the plot.
But in spite of its ordinariness, I found the story quite moving in a way. I wouldn’t buy it for a child to read, though. I’d be afraid that they would have been as horribly bored as I would have been.
Notes from underground 
I think it is the kind of book I would have hated as a child.
The problem is that it is so ordinary. It describes things that children do, like climbing up drains and acting in school plays, and being jealous over who gets the best parts and so on.
Sad that the ordinary, which can be described as safe and wholesome, is of no interest any more.