Brilliant!
Emily, as a total non-sewer and also a relative baby on this thread, I have often been perplexed by the sides-to-middle thing: if the middle of the sheet is becoming so worn, surely the sides can't be in perfect condition, and a seam - even a really skilfully-done one - is surely not going to last much longer than the worn sheet as it was anyway? Did people really get much more use out of an old sheet by doing this?
On the apparent grittiness of ye olden children's lit: I suppose really the CS, for all its cocooned warmth, also actually includes a lot of quite gritty stuff - if usually only in throwaway comments. Thinking about the deaths of babies and children (Marjorie Durrant's daughter, Gisela Mensch's son Florian), frequent reference to the dangers of childbirth (Madge at least twice, Biddy in Reunion). Not that these things are quite on a par with graphic near-rape, but I can kind of see how that might have been normal-ish in children's books.
Does anyone know anything about EJO transcripts floating around on the Internet? I am sure I have read something about this before but no details. I would really like to have a try at EJO but am reluctant to pay much money to do so. (I would, and probably will, pay reasonable money to try Antonia Forest. But that's a much more straightforward matter.) Failing that, can anyone recommend a starting point? The Abbey series seems hugely complicated!
My son woke me from the sleep of the justly weary at 5am. Would he sing the charms of Nell, sweet and kind? Would he sing Hark hark the lark? Would he even bloody well sing happy bloody birthday? No, mummy, I'm not singing til there's candles in the cake. 