The Changeling

by William Mayne

Miss Durnthwaite lived by herself in Underscar Lodge, though Peggy Wray used to go in every day to help and to hear about Miss Durnthwaite's memories of life in the old days.

There was a mystery about Miss Durnthwaite. She could remember nothing of her life before she was twenty; no one knew what had made her lose her memory. But the eccentric old lady was always "looking for herself in this house where she had been born and brought up." She sometimes referred to herself as a changeling.

Peggy's brother Colin and his friend Jimmy were more interested in watching Jimmy's great-uncle Arthur Bower, an inventor. Arthur's most exciting invention, the Free Air Platform, was a kind of hovercraft. Arthur had made it forty years ago, but now it lay neglected on the dump behind his workshop.

There had never seemed to be any connection between Arthur and Miss Durnthwaite until Colin first saw the summerhouse, with its table laid for a long-forgotten tea party. But it was another tea party that finally solved the mystery of the summerhouse and Miss Durnthwaite's lost memory, and saw the Free Air Platform in use once more.

William Mayne's unusual books for young readers have won critical acclaim. A Grass Rope and The Blue Boat were chosen by the American Library Association as notable books. The Changeling will most certainly raink with the best of the author's work.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Childrens

153 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

William Mayne was a British writer of children's fiction. Born in Hull, he was educated at the choir school attached to Canterbury Cathedral and his memories of that time contributed to his early books. He lived most of his life in North Yorkshire.

He was described as one of the outstanding children's authors of the 20th Century by the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, and won the Carnegie Medal in 1957 for A Grass Rope and the Guardian Award in 1993 for Low Tide. He has written more than a hundred books, and is best known for his Choir School quartet comprising A Swarm in May, Choristers' Cake, Cathedral Wednesday and Words and Music, and his Earthfasts trilogy comprising Earthfasts, Cradlefasts and Candlefasts, an unusual evocation of the King Arthur legend.

A Swarm in May was filmed by the Children's Film Unit in 1983 and a five-part television series of Earthfasts was broadcast by the BBC in 1994.

William Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years in 2004 after admitting to charges of child sexual abuse and was placed on the British sex offenders' register. His books were largely removed from shelves, and he died in disgrace in 2010.

Reviews

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something flashed downstream. Not the blue flash of a kingfisher, but something stranger, more shining and yet more shadowy. And looking after it, Murna's sight was caught and dazzled by the low sunlight through the budding twig-tangle. And when the sun-dazzle let her go, and she looked round again, there in the hollow of the alder roots, instead of her own red-haired baby, lay a tiny creature with great dark eyes in a little wizened face. [p. 20]

I hadn't previously read this short work by Sutcliff, written for the Antelope imprint of books for primary-school children and illustrated by the splendid Victor Ambrus (whose obituary I read recently in British Archaeologist, realising only then that he was known for Time Team and visualisations of prehistory as well as for his illustrations). As far as I can tell, The Changeling has been out of print since first publication in 1974, and the libraries I frequented in my youth did not possess copies.

It's the tale of Tethra, who is adopted by Conan and Murna of the Epidii after being left in exchange for Murna's own son. The Old One of the tribe predicts doom, dark days, curses et cetera: but Tethra grows up as part of the tribe, until a bad year comes to pass and the Old One reiterates his dire predictions. Tethra walks away before they can exile him, or worse: finds the Little Dark People, and is reunited with his birth-mother; seeks her help when he sees Conan, his adoptive father, badly wounded while hunting; and finally returns, not without regret, to the Epidii. It's not a wholly cheerful book, even when you ignore -- or, like many younger readers, are oblivious to -- the implications of withcraft, child sacrifice and ritual murder. (Tethra, bringing medicine to Conan, tells the other Epidii that he knows they will kill him if Conan dies from that medicine.) But it is full of the beautiful details that Sutcliff did so well: the stockade that's taken root and become a blackthorn hedge, the shimmer of light on water, a necklace of green plover feathers ...

The Changeling came to my attention because there's a new ebook edition from SF Gateway. I cannot recommend that version, as (a) it's £4.99 for 32 pages of text (b) it omits Ambrus's illustrations (c) the blurb includes the line 'Raising a child of the Fae Folk will bring disaster upon the Epidii people.' I cannot stress enough that there are no Fae here, nor (as far as I can recall) in any of Sutcliff's work: just Picts and Celts.

Fulfils the 'middle-grade novel' rubric of the 52 in 2022 challenge.

[Doodles McC · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a young child I liked this very short children's story of Picts & Celts. It's the tale of Tethra, who is adopted by Conan and Murna of the Epidii.

[Laurie D'ghent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Made it 36 pages and gave up. Not a bad book--it's just not for me. The dialogue is almost incomprehensible.