Midnight Blue

by Pauline Fisk

  Bonnie looked at the valley, which she knew so well - the twinkling lights, each one in its right place, and the hills she'd last seen from the gondola.

  'I know what you mean.'

  They climbed on. This was the long, hard bit of the journey, which seemed to carry on for ever. The stars were all out now. The light of the house at last was close. Bonnie shivered and gasped for breath. The yard gate loomed ahead of them and suddenly she couldn't, just couldn't, believe that everything was all right - that something terrible wouldn't happen when they arrived to spoil it all. 'Maybelle will be like Doreen. She will have changed. She will be awful,' she thought.

  Michael reached the gate and opened it. They forced their aching bodies up the yard. It stood empty and abandoned. The big barn door was off its hinge. There was no straw inside. There were no animals any more.

  'Sad, isn't it?' said Michael. ‘It must have been a good farm once, and now it's been left to go to ruin. What a waste.’

  Bonnie looked beyond the barn. The terrace gate had come off. The paint on the scullery door was peeling. An upstairs window-pane – Mum and Dad's bedroom window, she thought - was broken and had been covered with polythene.

  But it was beautiful, all the same. Beautiful and perfect. Bonnie didn't mind its state of disrepair.

  Michael squeezed her arm. 'Come on!' He led her through the creaking gate, onto the terrace. 'This is the way.' He led her to the scullery door, which shuddered as it always had done, as he pushed it open. He directed her through the scullery with its smells of logs and dust and mouse. He banged on the kitchen door and lifted the latch.

  ‘In you go.'

  The kitchen was unlit, but full of moonlight through which Bonnie saw everything clearly. The kettle on the stove hissed at her, just the same as ever, but that was where the similarities ended. There was no fine old table any more, no dresser, no stocked pantry with its laden shelves, no armchair on the rug by the stove. A row of old plates was set up on a shelf by the stairs' door. Some cups hung from hooks beneath it. A small, red, Formica table stood in the middle of the floor with the remains of a single meal on it. A pile of washing-up sat in the sink. On the shelf where Dad's silver cup from the Show had been placed sat Bonnie's raggedy doll.

  A dog lay beneath the window. It rose to its feet and shook itself all over. Its hair was silky and soft, like Jake's used to be. It didn't bark. Bonnie crossed the floor to look at it. It lifted its head. It was the sort of dog you could imagine galloping across hills.

  Someone walked across the living-room next door. Bonnie heard a very distant buzz of television and a far door being shut. She heard footsteps coming closer. 'Oh,' she gasped. She couldn't help herself.

  'Who is it? Who's there?' Maybelle's voice called nervously. Bonnie couldn't bring herself to speak.

  'It's all right, Maybelle,' Michael said.

  'Michael… ' Maybelle’s voice softened. She was surprised and pleased. The door opened and a yellow square of light was thrown across the floor.

  Bonnie stepped forward. No longer could she see the things she’d loved about this place - the sagging beams, the flagstones, the inglenook fireplace in the distance. All she could see - all that mattered - was the unchanged shape of Maybelle in the doorway. Maybelle, with her untidy hair, blobs of make-up, sagging sweater and holey slippers. Maybelle, a teapot slipping between her fingers and crashing to the floor. Maybelle, her face as white as death, her eyes staring, round and wild…

  'Bonnie, dear God, Bonnie! My Bonnie…’

  For a moment, neither of them could move. Maybelle stared at Bonnie, bundled up like a refugee in a rug, her head poking out of the top of it, bright tears in her eyes. Then the two of them fell upon each other like fierce wild animals. Maybelle pulled the rug off and held Bonnie tight. She held her head in her hands. She clung to her daughter. She wept into her hair. She kissed her cheeks, her head, her hands, her eyes, her mouth. She kissed it all.

  'Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie.’

  'Maybelle, oh Maybelle, I love you... '

  Bonnie held Maybelle as if she'd never let her go. She smelt her soap and lipstick. Smelt her skin. She wouldn’t let her go. She shut her eyes tight, and everything was all right.'

  Everything was all right.

  'You wretched, WRETCHED, WRETCHED girl,' Maybelle said. 'I love you so. You've grown. You've changed. Just look at you now. Where have you been? Wherever have you been?’ She looked past Bonnie to Michael standing in the doorway. 'You said she'd come back,' she said. 'You said she would.'

  'I promised she would,' Michael said.

  They sat together on the sofa in front of the little fireplace in what had once been a sewing-room with a special painting on the wall. A small bright rug lay before them on the bare floor and in the corner, in a pot, stood Bonnie’s plant with floppy leaves, which Maybelle had decorated with silver Christmas balls. The fire crackled and blazed, fed with logs piled up in a broken cardboard box. At their feet, a dog looked up at Bonnie as Jake once had done before he knew her and they became friends.

  'He makes me feel safe up here on my own,' Maybelle said. 'What do you think? Do you like my new home? And this little sitting-room? It’s the only place small enough to keep really warm. Do you like my velvet curtains? I bought them at the Christmas sale down in the village. I've only just finished hanging them.'

  Michael sat a little way apart, his head against the fire-breast wall. He smoked and watched them both. When Maybelle looked at him he looked away and said nothing. Maybelle reached for a fresh log and threw it on the fire.

  'I sawed this log,' she said to him. 'You said you didn't think I’d be up to it. I saw logs every morning out on the terrace. And I mend the roof when the slates come off. And I don't mind being on my own. I even made a loaf today. Look…’

  Maybelle reached among the remains of tea for a heavy lump of bread, which she held aloft. Michael laughed at it and she laughed as well. Michael shook his head. Maybelle turned to Bonnie, who was laughing too but swore she was impressed. 'Oh, I'm so happy,’ she said.

  ‘You've changed after all,’ Bonnie thought. ‘And it isn't awful. like I worried it might be. It isn't like Doreen. You can run from hate. Once I didn't think you could, but I know now. We've both done it.’

  'How did you find this place?' she asked, pulling off the end of the loaf and eating it.

  'I don't exactly know.' Maybelle shook her head. 'It has the same name as our block of flats. Certainly I noticed that. But the farmer whose advert I answered doesn’t even make me pay rent. He says he's glad to have someone living here to keep the place warm and stop the roof falling in. He lives in a bungalow in the village. He thinks I'm crazy for staying here. All the village does.

  'I don't know how long I'll stay,' Maybelle said. 'The novelty may wear off, or the farmer may decide he wants the place back. And now you’re here, we’ll have to figure out how to get you down to school without any transport. It's such a long way, and you’ve seen how bumpy the track is.'

  Michael threw his cigarette onto the fire. He got up. 'I'll leave you two,' he said. 'It's time for me to go.' He stretched himself.

  'Go where?' Bonnie said, astonished to see Maybelle disappear only to return with his coat and boots.

  'Back down the hill, of course,' Michael said. 'Back to see if my poor old car will start. Back home.'

  'But Michael…' Bonnie leapt to her feet. He was part of this. He belonged up here. Didn't he know that? 'You can't go,' she said feebly. 'It's… it’s too cold.'

  'I've brought you home,' Michael said, throwing on his coat. 'It's what I promised, and I don't mind the cold. I like the snow. I'll enjoy walking in the dark and, like that woman in the village said, if I keep to the track between the hedges I’ll be all right.'

  Maybelle handed him his boots and he put them on.

  'But you've got to stay,' Bonnie insisted. 'I haven't told you yet about the land beyond...'

  Michael shook his head. 'There'll be another chance for
that.' He dug into his pockets for his gloves. 'This time's for just you two,' he said.

  Maybelle allowed him to walk out the door. Bonnie followed him into the hall, then to the big front door which, judging from the struggle he had opening it, wasn't often used.

  ‘Thank you, Michael,’ Maybelle said, and Bonnie couldn't believe it. Maybelle was showing him out. Michael, who'd made everything happen – she was letting him go.

  'You can't do this, Maybelle,' Bonnie said as Michael passed through the door and started stamping along the terrace.

  'Michael will be back,' Maybelle said. ‘Don't you know that?'

  They stood and waved till Michael had passed down the yard and disappeared through the gate at the bottom. Then Maybelle shut the door, and it was just the two of them and Bonnie understood. Maybelle led Bonnie back towards the warm light of the sitting- room.

  'We're on our own,' she said. 'Like we always planned to be.' She stood in the half-open doorway with a backcloth of velvet curtains and flickering firelight. Bonnie remembered another night, somebody else's mother, questions she couldn't answer then.

  'I think,' said Maybelle - and Bonnie knew it would be different now - 'the time has come for you to tell me where you've been.'

  Author’s Note

  From childhood onwards I’d been writing all my life, but ‘Midnight Blue’ was my first attempt at a novel. With five young children under the age of eleven, I couldn’t have started it at a worse time, but my sense of urgency was overwhelming. This was a story that demanded to be written.

  Getting up early to write every day before the family awoke, I never imagined that my solitary slog would end up winning the prestigious Smarties Grand Prix Award. The writing was its own award, I reckoned. Book prizes didn’t even figure in my thinking. Getting published was enough.

  The Guardian’s Stephanie Nettell called 1991 my anus mirabilis - and indeed it was; my own special year of miracles. I’ve been a published author ever since, and every book is special in its own way but ‘Midnight Blue’ will always be the book which fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming a successful author. Not only that, it’s a celebration of a place I love.

  Shropshire is the unspoken hero of ‘Midnight Blue’. There would be no book without it. Its landscape, people and mythology shine throughout. The hill which Wild Edric and Lady Godda sleep beneath is the south Shropshire range known as the Stiperstones, and there really is a Highholly House - though not by that name. My family and I were privileged to live in it one memorable winter. Whilst there, I read the book which set me imagining a children’s story based on hot-air ballooning, particularly of the smoke-filled sort.

  Everything I know about smoke-filled hot-air ballooning comes from ‘The Flight of Condor I’ by the extraordinary adventurer, Jim Woodman. It tells the story of an experimental flight which he made with Julian Nott, one of the founding figures of modern ballooning, over the Nazca desert in Peru. Adapting a primitive launch method last used by fairground balloonists in the early twentieth century, they set out to prove that, with locally available materials, such flights could have been possible a thousand years ago.

  If you want to know more about that flight, you can read about it on http://www.nott.com/Pages/projects.php. It’s a fascinating story in its own right. If you want to know more about the writing of ‘Midnight Blue’, go to my website, www.paulinefisk.co.uk and follow all the links.

  About the Author

  Pauline Fisk started writing when she was a child, and has produced eleven novels for children and young adults and numerous short stories and poems. Her most recent novel, ‘In the Trees’, saw her heading off to Belize - supported by Faber & Faber, the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation - to trek in the rainforest and research the subject of gap year volunteering.

  Pauline Fisk describes herself as a great believer in the power of imagination. ‘My family motto is to ‘Be Brave and Reach for the Stars,’ she says, ‘and I’ve always tried to live up to it.’ As well as writing, she enjoys visiting schools, libraries and festivals, meeting young people and encouraging them to read and write. She’s proud to be the Chancellor of the Children’s University of Shropshire, and encouraging young people to develop their talents and believe in themselves is an important part of her life. She’s the mother of five grown-up children. In her spare time she weaves, reads and enjoys exploring the hills and valleys of the border country between England and Wales where she has her home.

  More information about Pauline Fisk can be found on http://www.paulinefisk.co.uk, including her writer’s blog and serialized extracts from her jungle adventures in Belize.

  Some Reviews for Midnight Blue

  ‘Midnight Blue’ was first published twenty years ago. It won the Smarties Prize, even trumping Esio Trot, that wonderful love story from Roald Dahl. And it's no wonder. This is a singular book, full of contrasts. Kitchen sink drama sits beside fantasy, and warmth and love sit beside the darkness that comes from both within and without… It's about growing up, about self-knowledge, and about the redeeming power of love. It's imaginative and magical. And just a little bit scary. What more could you want? …It has a gorgeous new cover image and lots of interesting stuff about the various inspirations that led her to write the book. Here's hoping it gives this lovely and unforgettable book a whole new generation of readers.’ Jill Murphy, The Bookbag

  ‘Pauline Fisk’s Midnight Blue is one of the most exciting fantasies I’ve read for a long time. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down. I especially admired the way the book showed the darkness within Bonnie as well as that without. Her awareness of her own potential for evil, and her conquering it, is beautifully conveyed.’ Madeleine L’Engle

  ‘Reading this extraordinary first novel, I found myself recalling my first meeting with the work of Philippa Pearce… The story is, in every sense, marvellous… Pauline Fisk has a poet’s feeling for the importance of words an she uses them with great precision and a sharp awareness of their meaning and music. Literally every page of this novel has an example of great felicity in evoking a scene, a season or a person. Here is an important novel, one in which adults and children will find a shared and profound experience, one that is as moving as it is richly enjoyable.’ Junior Bookshelf

  A hauntingly written fantasy, Midnight Blue tells the story of Bonnie, a girl with a fair share of life’s problems, who is transported via a hot air balloon into a world beyond the sky where she finds the ideal family and new friends…. The skill of the writing is to reflect the escapist longings of an age group where the magic of childhood fades in the face of the demands of everyday life.’ The Daily Mail

  ‘Roald Dahl would have been generous about conceding the Smarties Grand Prix to a first novel of outstanding merit. Midnight Blue, by Pauline Fisk, is haunting, rare, rewarding and wonderfully imagined and executed.’ The Sunday Times

  ‘A lovely book… Pauline Fisk is a fine writer and her story is not only exciting and mysterious, but makes a strong emotional point and is wonderfully rich in every detail.’ The Guardian

  ‘One of the most promising first novels I’ve read in a long time… an exhilarating read.’ Chris Powling, BBC Radio 4

  ‘This is a richly coloured fantasy, whose story grows from the hopes and fears of Bonnie, its central character… The warmth and reassurance that Fisk conveys throughout, even when dealing with the most difficult emotional situations, makes the book suitable for children as young as eight.’ Books for Keeps

  ‘Pauline Fisk’s haunting and beautifully written Midnight Blue stands out as gold among the dross. It’s a deeply satisfying, long read, complex and haunting and one of the year’s best imaginative novels. Midnight Blue is the kind of book that casts a life-long spell over the imagination.’ Susan Hill

  ‘Midnight Blue is impressive. It is a rich, complex story written with a sure hand. There are fairy-tale echoes of George MacDonald and Alan Garner, but one always hears the author’s own distinctive voice. The age-old good/evi
l struggle is presented with total originality, and the narrative never fails to spring surprises. Surely a book to be read and savoured.’ Ann Pilling

  ‘I have just read and reviewed Midnight Blue with equal delight and admiration. During a long life of reading and writing about children’s books I find that just a couple of handsfull of books stand out as utterly memorable among the many thousands that have come my way. I feel confident that Midnight Blue is going to be one of that select and precious few.’ Marcus Crouch

  ‘This is fantasy at its best and is highly recommended to readers of all ages from eleven upwards.’ The School Librarian

  ‘Pauline Fisk throws an emotional knockout punch in this haunting tale, which is worth the price for its originality and style alone.’ Glasgow Sunday Mail

  ‘To my embarrassment, this book made me uncooperative and uncommunicative until I had finished it. It certainly has an appeal far beyond the juvenile fantasy category. It is intriguing, beautifully written and keeps the reader wondering until the very last page. The suspense of disbelief is not merely willing, but eager; the fantasy becomes reality in one’s mind, springing from that rich central core of England that gave us Elidor, Puck, Middle Earth and Watership Down. This is fantasy at its best.’ Fiction Focus