Slipping through time with Helen Cresswell

This post is part of a series revisiting my favourite childhood reads.

The central walk through the Dutch Garden leads to a limestone sundial in the form of Time with an attendant cherub. This was brought into the garden by Viscount Tyrconnel, and is by the Danish carver Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700), ‘sculptor in ordinary unto His Majesty’ William III.

So reads the slightly dry description in the 2004 edition of the National Trust guidebook to Belton House in Lincolnshire. Except it’s not quite right because, as many a 1980s child could tell you, it’s a moondial.

‘A sundial!’ she exclaimed softly, and then, almost immediately and without knowing why – ‘moondial!’

Helen Cresswell’s book hit the shelves in 1987, quickly followed by a six part television series the following year.[1] ‘Moondial’ tells the story of Minty Cane who is staying with her Aunt Mary in a cottage near Belton House. Whilst there she discovers that the moondial can transport her back in time. Tom, a kitchen boy with clear signs of consumption, is living 100 years ago, and the much bullied Sarah 200 years ago. Minty’s task, as she discovers via Old World, the gatekeeper, is to free them. In the present day Minty’s mother is seriously injured in a car accident and she also has to contend with the sinister Miss Raven, a ghost hunter.

Arthur Ransome’s Lake District books take elements from different places and blend them into one fantasy Lakeland. Helen Cresswell on the other hand sticks very tightly to her chosen setting. The book is explicitly set in and around Belton House, the gardens, orangery and church all feature, and a number of scenes are set in the house. I’ve visited Belton many times, it’s a useful stopping point on long journeys up or down the A1, and the sight of the moondial in the garden never fails to delight. The National Trust in 2024 is rather keener on its ‘Moondial’ credentials than the 2004 guidebook. The website now mentions the book and TV series, and rather charmingly there’s a Moondial Walk through the gardens, taking in the orangery and church. Each stage invites you to follow in Minty’s footsteps and includes brief excerpts from the book. [2]

Despite the strong association in my mind between Belton and the book, it was a long a time since I had reread it. I’d hung on to my battered paperback copy (more battered than is usual for my books because it is an ex-library copy) but never picked it up. There’s always a fear that the magic will be destroyed by going back an an adult.

It’s a much darker and more claustrophobic book than I remembered. There is a chill, rather creepy air that runs through it. This is particularly true with Sarah’s plot strand. The eight year old is relentlessly bullied by a group of masked children and Miss Vole (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the present day Miss Raven) because of a birthmark on her face that they believe marks her out as the ‘devil’s child’.

In her dreams Minty had been pursued by faceless shapes and their whispering chant, ‘Devil’s child, devil’s child, devil’s child!’

It’s made very clear that all three children are not ghosts, but real flesh and blood people with the ability to slip into different time periods. However, Cresswell is good at building a spooky atmosphere into the story through the pockets of cold air that Minty encounters around the church and the moondial. Ultimately it’s a story about how love beats fear though, with happy endings all round. It’s also about the power of storytelling as Minty records her adventures onto cassette for her mother to listen to while she is in a coma after the accident.

I suspect, given that I didn’t really remember it, the spooky element of the story wasn’t what fascinated me as a young reader.

She turned left and could see the silvery-blue slates of the house gleaming, and the entry into the courtyard beyond. ‘I could be walking into the past’, she thought.

What I think grabbed me was the sense of time as fluid, something that you could encounter in places like Belton, where in another period

There was a coach, emblazoned with gold and the now familiar insignia of the Brownlow greyhounds. The courtyard was crammed and criss-crossed – grooms led steaming horses, footmen strutted, porters unloaded boxes and trunks.

We meet Tom who would be saved by modern antibiotics, and Sarah whose life was made miserable by superstition. The air in the church smells ‘centuries old’ but the house is full of servants going about their jobs. There’s actually less of this kind of thing than I expected, the story is propelled along by the friendships between the children and the historical settings are relatively lightly sketched.

I was surprised by ‘Moondial’ in a way that I haven’t been by the other books I’ve reread so far for this series. I found it slightly unsettling and the ending a little rushed. I decided to give myself a bonus reread and turned to ‘Up The Pier’. This is an earlier book by Helen Cresswell, published in 1971. There are some strong similarities – both books turn on travelling through time and both feature children in settings that are unfamiliar to them. The time jump is smaller in ‘Up The Pier’, Carrie is from 1971, Kitchener and his family from 1921. This time, it’s not life in a stately home that is being evoked, but the life of pier folk and magicians.

‘Up The Pier’ is set in fictional Llangolly which bears an extraordinary resemblance to Llandudno on the North Wales coast. The descriptions of the town, pier and Great Strindel (the Great Orme in Llandudno) are familiar, as are the mountain goats. Like Belton, I knew Llandudno well as a child so this may have been part of the appeal. In some ways the plot is much more straightforward, there is only one timeline with Kitchener and his family stranded in 1971. Getting them back to where they should be is a task for the Last Magician, the Great Pontifex, with a bit of help from Carrie.

Cresswell is good on the out of season feel of seaside towns and on the promise of piers. The weather and the sea are evoked throughout the book and the set piece at the end features a storm.

Time, spells and waves all ran together in his head now, so he could hardly separate them. Time, spells, waves. Time, spells, waves… Memory began to stir, moving like weeds on the sea bed.

The magic in this book is of a very different kind to that in ‘Moondial’, there magic – in so far as it exists – is only in the ability of the moondial to act as a portal. Here it becomes part of the characters and the plot

‘I have let things slip’, he told himself. ‘Perhaps I have been dabbling too much, living on summer piers and playing with half magic. Rabbits out of hats and flowers from thin air, just to hear the crowds gasp. Not real magician’s work at all… How long since I made a new spell?’

This actually makes it a more satisfying story. When magic is named it gives a sense of internal logic to the world that has been conjured up. It makes perfect sense that a family of pier magicians would use their magic both to trap and to free. It also adds a sense of fun to proceedings. I found myself enjoying ‘Up The Pier’ much more than I expected, and found the ending more pleasing.

The two books reminded me that the idea that something ordinary – a sundial, the wooden planks of a pier, or the back of a wardrobe – can take you to another place or time is one of the most powerful gifts of children’s fiction.

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[1] I assume I did watch the TV series but I have no concrete memory of it! The series is available on YouTube.

[2] The walk can be downloaded via the National Trust website. Access is via paid entry to the Belton Estate.