Another half-remembered book from my teens that I would like to track down again, and I’m hoping MN can help.
The book is about a young girl (early teens?) who lives in a house that backs onto the garden of an old ‘manor house’ or large Georgian/ Victorian house. She’s able to get into the garden by a gap in the hedge, and enjoys exploring it. The big house is surrounded by more modern housing and has been empty/ is derelict, and there are plans to knock the house down and cover the garden in houses/ flats. The girl eventually stops this going ahead by proving that bats live in the derelict house, meaning it’s protected and can’t be demolished.
The other things I remember are:
- A distant cousin of her mums comes over to the UK for the summer to research family history, and helps the girl to stop the development going ahead (not sure how)
- The main character has rituals where she has to touch the gate so many times before she leaves the house, etc, and the cousin speaks to her about it and says something like ‘I used to do that and grew out of it, but watch out if it gets too bad and you’re having to do more and more rituals’ or words to that effect.
I read this sometime between 1988-1995 (though probably early in that period), and I think I’d actually bought a copy so it must have been in print at that point. I remember the cover had a stylised design showing the big house and garden from above, with the smaller houses surrounding it.
Dies it ring any bells with anyone?