The Saracen maid

by Leon Garfield

After being captured by pirates and sold as a slave, a forgetful young Englishman faces a long imprisonment because he can't remember where the ransom note should be sent.

46 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Leon Garfield FRSL (14 July 1921 – 2 June 1996) was a British writer of fiction. He is best known for children's historical novels, though he also wrote for adults. He wrote more than thirty books and scripted Shakespeare: The Animated Tales for television.

Garfield attended Brighton Grammar School (1932-1938) and went on to study art at Regent Street Polytechnic, but his studies were interrupted first by lack of funds for fees, then by the outbreak of World War II. He married Lena Leah Davies in April, 1941, at Golders Green Synagogue but they separated after only a few months. For his service in the war he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. While posted in Belgium he met Vivien Alcock, then an ambulance driver, who would go on to become his second wife (in 1948) and a well-known children's author. She would also greatly influence Garfield's writing, giving him suggestions for his writing, including the original idea for Smith. After the war Garfield worked as a biochemical laboratory technician at the Whittington Hospital in Islington, writing in his spare time until the 1960s, when he was successful enough to write full-time. In 1964, the couple adopted a baby girl, called Jane after Jane Austen, a favourite writer of both parents.

Garfield wrote his first book, the pirate novel Jack Holborn, for adult readers but a Constable & Co. editor saw its potential as a children's novel and persuaded him to adapt it for a younger audience. In that form it was published by Constable in 1964. His second book, Devil-in-the-Fog (1966), won the first annual Guardian Prize and was serialised for television, as were several later works (below). Devil was the first of several historical adventure novels, typically set late in the eighteenth century and featuring a character of humble origins (in this case a boy from a family of traveling actors) pushed into the midst of a threatening intrigue. Another was Smith (1967), with the eponymous hero a young pickpocket accepted into a wealthy household; it won the Phoenix Award in 1987. Yet another was Black Jack (1968), in which a young apprentice is forced by accident and his conscience to accompany a murderous criminal.

In 1970, Garfield's work started to move in new directions with The God Beneath the Sea, a re-telling of numerous Greek myths in one narrative, written by Garfield and Edward Blishen and illustrated by Charles Keeping. It won the annual Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Garfield, Blishen, and Keeping collaborated again on a sequel, The Golden Shadow (1973). The Drummer Boy (1970) was another adventure story, but concerned more with a central moral problem, and apparently aimed at somewhat older readers, a trend continued in The Prisoners of September (1975) republished in 1989 by Lions Tracks, under the title Revolution!, The Pleasure Garden (1976) and The Confidence Man (1978). The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1972) was a black comedy in which two boys decide to test the plausibility of Romulus and Remus using one of the boys' baby sister. Most notable at the time was a series of linked long short stories about apprentices, published separately between 1976 and 1978, and then as a collection, The Apprentices. The more adult themed books of the mid-1970s met with a mixed reception and Garfield returned to the model of his earlier books with John Diamond, which won a Whitbread Award in 1980, and The December Rose (1986). In 1980 he also wrote an ending for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished at the 1870 death of Dickens, an author who had been a major influence on Garfield's own style.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985. On 2 June 1996 he died of cancer at the Whittington Hospital, where he had once worked.

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is supposed to be a "book for young readers." The font is large and the pages few, but the writing is fairly dense and classical. On the first page, there is one paragraph consisting of one sentence. It reads:

"One April morning long, long ago, in the year eleven hundred and something or other, when London was like a garden with a wall all around, a wall so high that three good-sized Londoners standing on one another's shoulders could only just reach up to rescue a cat, a certain young man in a crimson cloak and yellow stockings, like plums and custard, was getting ready to go to sea."

This young man, Gilbert Becket by name, was very forgetful. When his father sent him to the East to buy goods, his parents queried him to make sure he remembered his destination and his task. He comes across as being a good soul, but not very bright. The Saracen Maid ends up falling in love with the young Londoner.

Okay, I repeated all of this info, because Gilbert and the SM, had a son named Thomas Becket. Being familiar with the name, but not remembering why, I did a brief internet search. Apparently Becket's father was named Gilbert, but all I found about TB's mother was that her name was Matilda (which doesn't sound like the name of a Saracen Maid).

So ... I'd like to know how much of this story is fiction and how much is based on fact.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This,I believe,was one the first books I ever read and I absolutely adored it.I remember reading it constantly and although it was some years ago (10 years,perhaps more) that I read it,I do remember the basic plot.For about three months now ive been trying to find this book with no luck,the problem was I was searching for it under the name 'Gilbert and the Saracen Maid' not 'The Saracen Maid'.But my new copy is on the way and I cant wait to get my hands on it.

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book for younger children, it finds Garfield at his sweetest, most storytelling tone. It feels like this is a book made for reading out loud to children and has a beautiful first paragraph describing London in the twelvth century as ‘like a garden with a wall around’. We are also introduced to out hero, Gilbert Beckett who wears, ‘a crimson cloak and yellow stockings, like plums and custard.’

Gilbert is a forgetful soul and his parents are very worried about him as he makes his trip to ‘the East’, a land where carpets fly and genies are stoppered in bottles. Unfortunately, he is captured by Barbary pirates and is taken for ransom because of his expensive clothes. Unfortunately, not the most intelligent of people, he can say no more than his own name and hometown so is kept in a dungeon. There the fair saracen maid releases him and escapes herself, using Gilbert’s only two words as a guide to lead her to him where they marry and live happily ever after and have ‘a daughter called Agnes and a son called Thomas, who became a saint’.

Apparently, this is quite an old legend, told by a number of people and somehow being attached to the parents of St Thomas Beckett, even though his mother was a Norman woman called Matilda. This story was still being told in the Victorian era and Dickens wrote a version for one of his magazines, probably Garfield’s main source as he was a Dickens nut. I can’t say I had ever heard of it before though.
This was a very short and pleasant read and I might read it to the kids at school one day.