What was your favourite Noel Streatfeild book?

[Deminism]

Have been reading some to DD and we’re loving them. I realise however she wrote loads and I had only read a few as a kid. Ballet shoes, White Boots and Thursday’s Child.

Of the others which did you love the most?

Oh the joy of Nicky in Tennis Shoes who practises really hard but lies down on the grass when anyone passes so they think she’s good by luck!

I loved The Vicarage Family and Apple Bough.

Some of my favourite childhood books, I love Gemma and the Painted Garden - the scene when the girl goes to visit the Fossils and dresses up because she thinks they’ll expect it and Pauline says ‘she’s just like us!’. I always envied Lydia’s little boxroom with the barre in Gemma even though I’m very far from a dancer!

I loved the NS books, and Ballet Shoes , White Boots and the Gemma series are the ones that have stayed with me.
There was one, I can't recall the name of the book, maybe someone knows, where the father, John, was in a deep depression because he had been involved in car accident in which a child had been injured/killed. That set of circumstances has stayed in my head - does anyone else remember it?

@DelphiniumBlue that’s the painted garden

Apple Bough. And like @FatLabrador I have always felt drawn to a childhood home.

The circus is coming

The house in Cornwall (not sure anyone else has mentioned this). Totally loved it.

Thursday's Child is wonderful - and I discovered its sequel Far to go as an adult and read that with dd too. They were written decades apart and felt like they were left for a third but she died before she could write that. It is quite dark and scary (for a kid) but also wonderful. I wanted a little boy called Horatio as a result but DH said no.

I'm loving this thread!

White Boots and Ballet shoes still my favourites, though i had many. Apple Bough and Painted Garden, too, and Curtain Up. And several circus ones, and the Gemma series. Caldicott place. Margaret thursday! And the others. But so many I just had from libraries, so have forgotten the details. I lived abroad so it was hard to get hold of some of them.

Also an unusual one called something like the Fearless Treasure, about a group of children who went back in time to different periods of British History, and discovered their ancestors, and lots of them had unexpected discoveries - the rich ones weren't always, or vice versa.

Also liked Rumer Godden - Thursday's Children - also about ballet, at a similar age.

I always wanted to read the sequels to A Vicarage Family, but couldn't get hold of them. MIght have to have another go now or put a search out on second hand sites.

Both the Vicarage sequels are on Abe Books.

The Fearless Treasure sounds brilliant! I'd never heard of it before - found it second hand for a sensible price.

The sequels to A Vicarage Family are quite mixed in quality, but the section about her running a mobile canteen during the Blitz is extraordinary

@Doubleraspberry

Both the Vicarage sequels are on Abe Books.

The Fearless Treasure sounds brilliant! I'd never heard of it before - found it second hand for a sensible price.

I haven't read it in a very long time (and possibly mix details up with some of her others/other time travel books) but I remember enjoying it as a child. I suspect it wouldn't hold up to much scrutiny by adult readers as it presents a very particular view of history that might be more propaganda than accuracy, but I don't really remember. I learned a lot of vaguely historical things from books like that, and then later discovered just how limited a viewpoint it was. I suppose it's the same as the limited view of society shown in her books about families and children, except somehow that was much more obviously fiction, whereas this one seemed to me as a child to be a fictional book (obviously, time travel etc!) about real times, and I assumed without really ever questioning things much that it was 'true'.

I still have my childhood copy of The Fearless Treasure ( 1st edition, 1953, wonder if it’s worth anything?). Flipping through it I think it’s probably quite a liberal view of British history for its time. The people they meet when time travelling come from a variety of (white) backgrounds. There’s a lot of educational stuff mixed in about how people lived, but I don’t remember being put off by this as a child. I’m not sure how it would go down with a modern child though. Would probably seem a bit slow I suspect.

@pollyhemlock

I still have my childhood copy of The Fearless Treasure ( 1st edition, 1953, wonder if it’s worth anything?). Flipping through it I think it’s probably quite a liberal view of British history for its time. The people they meet when time travelling come from a variety of (white) backgrounds. There’s a lot of educational stuff mixed in about how people lived, but I don’t remember being put off by this as a child. I’m not sure how it would go down with a modern child though. Would probably seem a bit slow I suspect.

I've just seen a first edition for £16, although clearly not in great condition.

I loved a book growing up that I'm struggling to remember the name of, about some children who end up meeting characters from Scottish history. I read it repeatedly; it may have been an E Nesbit, although my gut feeling was that it was more modern. My kids would find it turgid though.

It includes a scene in which the children involved all find a statue of Peabody very funny, and crack themselves up laughing about Cabbagebody, Carrotbody etc.

@DelphiniumBlue

I loved the NS books, and Ballet Shoes , White Boots and the Gemma series are the ones that have stayed with me. There was one, I can't recall the name of the book, maybe someone knows, where the father, John, was in a deep depression because he had been involved in car accident in which a child had been injured/killed. That set of circumstances has stayed in my head - does anyone else remember it?

The bits that stay with me from The Painted Garden are that

(1) we're explicitly told that the fault for the accident lies with the dead child 'who had never been taught to cross a road properly', which makes it sound rather as though the child's own death is less inconvenient than John's writer's block!

and

(2) the treatmet of Peaseblossom, who is another one of those unpaid, kindly, strict 'companion'/nanny/mother's help drudges in Streatfeild's novels, usually coupled with a wet, ineffectual mother-figure like Garnie or Bee, the mother in The Painted Garden.

Peaseblossom gives up her career as a PE teacher to help out useless Bee when her eldest is a baby, and stays on through two more children, spends her entire thousand-pound legacy from a dead relative on taking the family to California, shares a cabin with the children on the ship while the parents have a double to themselves, shares a bedroom with the children at Aunt Cora's where she does housework for her board and lodging, as well as educating the children and generally looking after them.

That always blows my mind.

Just saw your post @Cissyandflora - did you meet her? I see she died in 1986

Doubleraspberry - I think you are remembering Knight's Castle by Edward Eager. The children meet characters from Ivanhoe.

(It's a sequel to Half Magic which is probably why you are thinking of it as E Nesbit because the children are all v bookish and think she is the best writer. Fantastic books.)

You're quite right! Thank you. That was going to annoy me for weeks.

Didn’t realise she’d written so many books.

Ballet Shoes, the tv series was a favourite of mine as a child. Probably long overdue for a new version.

I had a story tape of ballet shoes I must have known it word for word.

Dd2 wants to start doing auditions and the first thing I though was she needs a velvet dress and a matching ribbon!!

I loved when they did The Bluebird which is a play thats virtually disappeared altogether.

There's an Audible version of Ballet Shoes read by Noel Streafeild's niece. I'm not sure I'd have gone for blood relative over a slightly more skilled Martin Jarvis type.

Ballet shoes and When the Siren Wailed. Both my copies of those are ragged and still in my bookcase.

The Painted Garden. Harldy anyone I know has read this. It's so lovely

There is a more recent tv version of Ballet Shoes, which has Emma Watson as Pauline. It's okay, though there's the usual problem of the actors remaining the same age throughout, whereas in the book they age by about 5 years I think.