Flambards

"Flambards (1967) starts with the fox, from the point of view of the landscape. Christina is an orphan from the city and very much the outsider. The family doesn’t understand her and she doesn’t understand them. Then there is Will, who is the outsider in his own family because he can’t bear the horse riding. There is a whole terrifying piece at the beginning of the book where he cripples himself by walking up and down on a broken leg until it won’t bend so that he won’t have to ride a horse. The beautiful irony of that is that what he really wants to do is fly a plane—a thing which seems much more terrifying to everybody else at that time because it’s set in the early days of flight around the World War I. To his family, horses are the safe and known thing and not scary. “I think kids, especially kids who read a lot, are probably more likely to not quite fit in—but you learn so much about life as a kid from books” Christina is the obvious outsider but her impact and influence are beneficial. She cares for people and she wants to get on with them. In doing so, she normalises them and, simply by being in their midst, she literally changes their eco-system. In a way it’s a coming-of-age book because she is about sixteen. I think kids, especially kids who read a lot, are probably more likely to not quite fit in—but you learn so much about life as a kid from books. I suspect that is the reason all my choices are thirty years old and relate to my own reading and circumstances. All I did as a child was read about people who didn’t fit in in one way or another—this was me making sense of my life. My choices are also, by-and-large, set in the countryside. You can’t really be an outsider in a city in the same way as you can where nothing has changed much in remembered history. As someone coming into a city, you are part of its change, its dynamism. In a small community, a newcomer stands out and can be an agent of change. An outside observer can be an opportunity for seeing the things that are unquestioned and taken for granted a-fresh."