We will shortly have something a little different in Wakefield Library. The Stanley Ferry logboat is about a thousand years old and the earliest known logboat with evidence of fitted ribs. (pictured above being assembled) It was discoverd near the River Calder in 1838 during an excavation for the aqueduct and we are thrilled to welcome it back to Wakefield.
To go with it, there is a beautiful map of England at the period when the logboat was in use by local artist John Welding. Do drop in next week to see this fascinating link to Wakefield’s past.
If you would like a Viking novel to enjoy after seeing the boat you could try one of the Warrior Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell, The Whale Road by Robert Low, or Odinn’s Child by Tim Severin. Vikings are popular in Mills and Boon romances (illustrated by lots of muscular torsoes) but I’d go for Anya Seton’s Avalon (sadly out of print) or Joanne Harris’s new fantasy novel The Gospel of Loki. Joanne will be at Wakefield Lit fest this year to talk about this novel. Finally, written for younger readers but enjoyable at any age, Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword Song or Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Bracelet of Bone.
The summer holidays will be with us soon and we are all ready for our biggest reading promotion of the year, the Summer Reading Challenge. Evey year, three quarters of a million children join the Summer Reading Challenge in their local libraries and try to read six books before they go back to school. This year the theme is the Mythical Maze and when they join they will get a wonderful Maze poster designed by this year’s artist Sarah McIntyre. As they read books they will get stickers of creatures like mermaids and unicorns to add to the maze. There are little rewards too and a gold medal and certificate when they complete the challenge. Sometimes the certificates are awards in assemblies when they go back to school so that their teachers know who has taken part. The challenge really helps children keep up their reading skills over the summer break when there is often a dip in reading levels but there is no need to tell them it’s good for them- they will just think it’s fun and will want to hurry back to the library to collect their next stickers. It’s suitable for any child of 4 and over, they can choose any books they like to read, or to share with an adult if they are just learning to read, there’s a website they can explore with games and reading ideas and best of all it’s totally free! Get the family lost in the Mythical Maze this summer!
In honour of the Tour de France, I shall take a bummel through some literary cycling. What is a bummel? It’s a leisurely stroll or trip. Jerome K Jerome takes one through Germany with his friends George and Harris in ‘Three Men on the Bummel’, a sequel to a comic favourite of mine, ‘Three Men in a Boat.’ It was nearly as celebrated as the original when it was published in 1900 but is little read now and I have to confess it is still on my ‘to read one day’ list.
Many bikes in literature come in stories written around the turn of the century when cycling was a new craze. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote two Sherlock Holmes stories involving bikes. In ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’ Sherlock deduces she rides by the wear on her shoes and solves the mystery of why a bearded cyclist is following her every day. . In ‘The Adventure of the Priory School’, a kidnapping tale, Sherlock has to look carefully at the marks left by different tyres to solve the mystery.
H.G Well’s ‘The Wheels of Chance’ came out in 1896. It’s a comic “bicycling idyll” featuring a draper’s assistant called Hoopdriver who undertakes a cycling tour of the south coast and saves a young lady cyclist from a would-be seducer.
Bikes feature in two books from the Queens of Crime: ‘Five Red Herrings’ by Dorothy Sayers where the solution to the murder involves timing a top speed cross country bike ride and Marjorie Allingham’s ‘Dancers in Mourning’ in which an actor who is the president of a cycling club is murdered with an exploding bicycle.
I met this again reading ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ recently (James Hilton, 1934) when the Victorian school-master meets his future wife: ‘He was a quiet, conventional person, and the world, viewed from the haven of Brookfield, seemed to him full of distasteful innovations; there was a fellow named Bernard Shaw who had the strangest and most reprehensible opinions; there was Ibsen, too, with his disturbing plays; and there was this new craze for bicycling which was being taken up by women equally with men. Chips did not hold with all this modern newness and freedom.’ He falls in love and marries this alarming ‘New Woman’ though.
More recently, you could try ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’, by Monique Roffey which tells the story of Sabine Harwood, who in the 1950s travels from Britain to make a new life in Trinidad with her husband George. Always an outsider, she cycles everywhere and becomes famous with the locals as “the white woman who rides everywhere on her green bicycle” or ‘Gold’ by Chris Cleave. This is set at an Olympic Velodrome where Kate and Zoe, who have trained together for years are in competition in their last race. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.
There are lots of children’s books with bikes in because riding your first bike is such a childhood milestone. My favourite is from the wonderful Quentin Blake. In ‘Mrs Armitage on Wheels’ she decides that ‘what this bike needs’ is a horn, a bathroom, a picnic, a seat for her dog, an umbrella, a sail…children will love waiting for the inevitable crash!
Wherever you are heading this weekend, enjoy your bummel!