This morning, sensation seekers, I\u2019m going to talk about love and loneliness. I\u2019ve just finished reading The Lion of Sole Bay \u2013 another lost night \u2013 and I realized afterwards that that is what Julia Jones\u2019s books \u2018for children\u2019 are about. This is the fourth one I\u2019ve read, of a project that started as a trilogy, and the subtext is getting ever clearer.<\/p>\n
(Which is not to say, naturally, that I\u2019m right. Anybody, up to and including the author herself, is entitled to disagree. All I\u2019d really like to insist on is that you read them.)<\/p>\n
Julia\u2019s child characters, let\u2019s say, sprang originally from her reading of Arthur Ransome. Like me, she must have been sucked, inveigled, seduced into a world that I (although not necessarily she) certainly didn\u2019t fully understand and certainly had no cultural part in. Without wishing to sound in any way threatened by it, it was a world of unthinking wealth and privilege that I could clearly never enter. A little later I went to grammar school, where I was one of only two working class boys. Weird.<\/p>\n
Also weird in hindsight is the fact that the other boys were almost entirely the sons of naval officers, and therefore spoke an English which I had to emulate asap or get mocked to death \u2013 but it was never a problem. Like the world of John Walker, the Blackett girls, Dick and Dorothea, they just were. Different but the same. Ransome\u2019s lot had boats, I had the Sea Scouts. My school compatriots spoke like something off the BBC, but I learned \u2019em how to sail. Any bullying I suffered came from the older boys, and a couple of the teachers.<\/p>\n
Julia\u2019s characters live in a different world again. Some of them are dirt poor, without the benefit of what our Government so pathetically and offensively insists on calling \u2018hard-working\u2019 parents. Some of them, indeed, are in care, some of them have health problems, some of them have mums and dads (or not) who are on the verge of going under.<\/p>\n
The best sort of trilogy. Roll on Part Five!
\nBut she involves them in situations that are the backbone of the Ransome books. They interact, essentially, with each other. Adults range from the bizarre to the extraneous, but the children are on their own. If not duffers won\u2019t drown. But by God (to quote another favourite author) \u2013 no man is an island.<\/p>\n
Julia\u2019s key characters, unlike Ransome\u2019s, have extremely subtle needs. Above all things they know (whether in words or not) that they need love, and Ms Jones understands from the bottom of her soul that love is help. She turns the story screw to make that need grow greater all the time. Not in a melodramatic way at all, however. Julia\u2019s stories tend to make me actually cry.<\/p>\n
The construct of The Lion of Sole Bay is extraordinary, but achingly simple. A boy called Luke, whom we know of old, is left to have a longed-for holiday alone with his father Bill while his extended and fragmented family go off abroad for their own \u2018trip of a lifetime.\u2019 Bill lives on an old fishing boat, and works in the local boatyard, where on the night he\u2019s due to meet Luke, he actually meets a little girl called Angela. She is an emotional outcast, hanging on to a gang of older boys, with whom she manages to accidentally pull a propped-up boat down on to Bill, which comes very close to killing him.<\/p>\n
The gang run off, but Angela stays. She is one of the school\u2019s hopeless ones; friendless, apparently feckless, probably on the spectrum, a heavily-bullied dimwit, always in trouble, much despised. She is terrified of the police, but when she knows that they are coming, she stays with Bill, and cradles him, and dares to hold his hand.<\/p>\n
She has to run at last, of course. But learns later that Bill, now in intensive care, mistook her for an angel. Angela, known derogatorily as Ants (the other kids like to publicly pull her pants down to check for the insects that must be crawling in them because she is incapable of being still) has found her name at last, a name that she has subconsciously ached for, an identity that can feed her soul. Angel.<\/p>\n
Ants and Luke, however, are not the only damaged ones in this story. Alongside Bill\u2019s boat, for some time, has lain a Dutch motor barge called Dree Vrouwen (Three Women) manned (irony) by a mad fascistic politician called Elsevier, her mentally ill follower Hendrike, and Hendrike\u2019s thirteen year old daughter Helen. These three women have come across the North Sea to liberate the figurehead of a Dutch warship involved in the Battle of Sole Bay, in 1672. It is now the proud sign of a roadside pub at the head of the creek, but to Elsevier it is the material exemplar of an ancient crime.<\/p>\n
Her own planned crime \u2013 in her eyes, the reversal of an ancient wrong \u2013 can only be carried out on a certain tide. And Elsevier, although mad, is a great general (she thinks), and completely ruthless. She controls Hendrike with herbal potions, fungi, and illegal drugs. She controls Helen through blackmail (Helen loves her mother and must protect her). And she carries a gun. A November the Fifth party will be the perfect cover for the heist.<\/p>\n
Luke, Angel, Helen are thus thrown together \u2013 to hate and mistrust each other roundly. Bill lies in hospital, while other adults are helpless and disbelieving. The North Sea, and the late autumn gales, are waiting hungrily. I\u2019m telling you, they will be horrible.<\/p>\n
As well as the sea, Julia Jones understands the horror of the human condition, and how utterly cruel life can be. But she also understands redemption, inside out and backwards. And she is an absolute master (mistress? Ask Elsevier) of dramatic tension. Some scenes are more thriller than children\u2019s story. But to categorise this book as either misses several points.<\/p>\n
The children and the adults in this novel, this trilogy-plus, all need love. Their loneliness is awe-inspiring. With calmness and power, without a jot of sentimentality, Julia Jones gives it to them. All hail.<\/p>\n