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Nordy Bank

Sheena Porter

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Feb 02, 2023 Manybooks rated it liked it

Shelves: childrens-literature, dogs, historical-fiction, book-reviews, time-travel-time-slip, ending-does-not-connect-well, good-sense-of-time-and-place

A delightfully atmospheric (as well as occasionally mildly creepy and a bit uncanny) middle grade time-slip story, in Sheena Porter's 1964 Carnegie Medal winning Nordy Bank a group of six boys and girls plan a camping trip in the hills of Shropshire, England (a bit similar perhaps with regard to the camping thematics to Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons but fortunately without the latter's mundaneness and with no single and tedious focus either, such as there is with Swallows and Amazons on A delightfully atmospheric (as well as occasionally mildly creepy and a bit uncanny) middle grade time-slip story, in Sheena Porter's 1964 Carnegie Medal winning Nordy Bank a group of six boys and girls plan a camping trip in the hills of Shropshire, England (a bit similar perhaps with regard to the camping thematics to Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons but fortunately without the latter's mundaneness and with no single and tedious focus either, such as there is with Swallows and Amazons on sailing, sailing and ever more sailing). And yes, the hill on which the group ends up camping is indeed the Nordy Bank of the book title, an Iron Age hill-fort (and an area, an endroit that really and actually does exist in Shropshire, and Sheena Porter's landscape descriptions for Nordy Bank, they thus are magically, spectacularly authentic, realistic, and with an absolutely wonderful and lyrical sense of geographic place, and during the time-slip parts of Nordy Bank of historical time).

Now the time-slip elements of Nordy Bank (which happen only to one of the six campers, to Bronwen), they are shown by Porter as absolutely and totally related to the hill-fort in particular (and also to the very specific history of said area, to Shropshire's distant, prehistoric past, with of course a fort experiencing many wars, many battles) and manifesting themselves not really as time travel per se, but rather as Bronwen's personality changing. For indeed, Bronwen does during the camping trip at Nordy Bank suddenly know in detail many things about the ancient hill-fort and the area as if she actually lived there (and in the past). And when Bronwen (who is described in Nordy Bank as someone hugely fond of dogs) suddenly believes that a lost Alsatian seeking shelter and help is in fact an attacking and dangerous wolf to be chased from the camp (and a wolf being an animal species obviously extinct in 20th century Shropshire, but that this would definitely not have been the case during the Iron Age, between 1200 and 600 B.C.E.), this then causes another member of the campers (Bronwen's friend Margaret) to suspect that Bronwen has either slipped into the past or is somehow being possessed by it, and with the textual eeriness of Nordy Bank being that everything is described by Sheena Porter as rather foggy and indistinct. For yes, as soon as Bronwen is in fact away from the fort, her intricate and intimate knowledge of the past also ceases, so that throughout Nordy Bank, we never really do get to actually know for sure exactly how much Bronwen has slipped into the past, but just that she seems to have done so, leaving a sense of neither us as readers nor Bronwen and the other campers knowing what is real and what is fantasy or a dream, which presents a level of mild disturbance and creepiness present in Nordy Bank (although also not ever in any way actually anything truly frightening) but it also presents a lot of wonderful textual atmosphere and wonder regarding both Bronwen and at her words, her actions and of course also regarding the past or rather regarding what she, what Bronwen is recounting and is maybe actually also personally remembering and even in some way experiencing about and in the past.

But for me personally, that the time-slip scenario of Nordy Bank immediately and totally stops once Bronwen and the others are away from the hill-fort, and that for the final section of her story, Sheena Porter suddenly moves Nordy Bank to a thematic of police dog training, rehabilitation and rescue, not only do I find this all rather textually distracting and jarring as this (for me) all does seem to come rather out of the proverbial blue so to speak and with the connections and tie-ins to the camping and time-slip parts at best being a bit tenuous and artificial, well, since I have always found narrational connection issues problematic when reading prose fiction and am also not really all that interested in dogs as themes for my reading anyhow, albeit the first part of Nordy Bank is solidly and delightfully five stars, the dog rescue theme at the end, it does make Sheena Porter's writing kind of fizzle out for me and to render my final rating for Nordy Bank as only three stars (and to definitely say that while I adore the time-slippage, the landscape description and the camping elements, the dog rehabilitation of the end, it leaves me textually cold and also makes me feel as though Porter has penned two very different and rather unconnected accounts in Nordy Bank). ...more

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