Nordy Bank by Sheena Porter

First published: 1964

Type of work: Adventure tale, fantasy

Themes: Animals, friendship, the supernatural, and coming-of-age

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Bromfield, England

Principal Characters:

• Bronwen Owen, an only child, who has formed a friendship with Margery, and is invited to go camping with her during the Easter holiday
• Margery Furness, Bronwen’s friend, who is part of a loving family, whose mother raises dogs
• Peter Furness, Margery’s elder brother, who has organized the camping trip
• Joe Pritchard, a school friend of Peter, who has had camping experience
• Anne Furness, a cousin, who tends to be frightened of things, especially dogs, but who turns out to be a good camp cook
• Robin Furness, the youngest Furness child, who proves he can hold his own with the others
• Corporal Smythe, the handler of the army dog, who is traveling with the dog to Gloucestershire, where the dog will be retrained

The Story

The three Furness children, Peter, Margery, and Robin, invite two school friends, Bronwen and Joe, and a cousin to join them on a camping trip during the Easter holidays. They choose to camp on isolated Brown Clee, because it is unfamiliar and not overrun with tourists, even though only Joe has had any real camping experience. The location is near a small village, which has a grocery, and Dr. Furness has arranged for the children to obtain milk and water from a local farm.

What begins as a traditional camping story quickly takes a twist in the transformation of Bronwen. Usually quiet and polite, she becomes withdrawn and surly. Only Margery knows her well enough to note the change. Bronwen begins to surprise the others with her knowledge of Nordy Bank, the camp’s location. What the others thought to be flint scrap heaps, she explains, are orderly piles of slingshot stones. When the others say that the piles are Roman or Stone Age, she corrects them by pointing out their construction as Iron Age.

When the others propose excursions, Bronwen insists on staying in camp. She has Warrior Scarlet (1958), by Rosemary Sutcliff, to occupy her time. The high dark hill continues to draw her in psychologically. She knows, without being able to explain why, how to build an Iron Age house and a fireplace.

One of the attractions of Bronwen for Margery is her way with animals. Dogs instinctively love her. Margery and Bronwen both love dogs. When a half-starved, muzzled Alsatian tries to approach Bronwen at the camp, her first reaction is to be kind, but then the darker, older side takes over and she drives the dog away with a stick of burning wood. This happens again. The third time, she fights the fearful urge to kill the dog. By defeating the hold the place has on her, she returns to the person she was.

The book’s direction shifts again, this time to the question of whether Bronwen can keep the dog, which has been trained as a killer and has to relearn how to live among people. Secondly, Bronwen’s father’s job requires him to move every two years, and the new posting is announced as Paris. It would be impossible to take the dog, now named Griff. The resolution allows Bronwen to live with the Furnesses, keep Griff, whose retraining has been successful, and see her mother and father on school holidays. Bronwen’s parents have allowed her to make this decision. When she attempts to go against her own desires of keeping the dog and says she will go with her parents, they help her understand that it is time for her to begin thinking of and for herself. She gratefully accepts their encouragement to take on the responsibility of the dog, to remain at the same school, and to stay with the Furnesses.

Context

Nordy Bank’s beginning would lead the reader to expect another holiday camping book along the lines of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930). Yet the shift appears quickly as Bronwen begins to know more than she should about the place where the group will be camping. Her own father calls her Puck, the guide used by Kipling to introduce the children in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) to historical figures in England. Sutcliff attributes her interest in historical fiction to Kipling, and it is Warrior Scarlet (1958) that Bronwen is reading.

From that perspective, it is not difficult to place Nordy Bank in the company of Welsh fantasy books, particularly the kind in which place generates images from the past. Books such as Nancy Bond’s A String in the Harp (1976); Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series (1965); Alan Garner’s Owl Service (1968); and, more recently, Peter Hunt’s The Maps of Time (1983). With all these books, the past is a potential trap clutching at the child, yet the reader learns about the history and mythology of the place of action. Generally fascinating reading, these books remind the reader that life is a continuum. As the themes of darkness and entrapment in Nordy Bank are cleared away by the appearance of the dog, the book then shifts focus to the girl and dog. The resolution is highly satisfactory.

Nordy Bank was the winner of the Carnegie Medal in 1964. The book is taut. The reader knows more about the setting than the characters, yet the setting is defeated. It is a somewhat mysterious coming-of-age novel with a number of questions left unanswered. The author herself, most of whose books appeared in the 1960’s, remains virtually unknown. The brush with the past stands hauntingly real, and it is probably this quality that most attracted the Carnegie Award Committee.