Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh: cats, magic & theatricals

Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh

published 1955

 

On a recent post, blogfriend Jan W put this in the comments:

 

The first book I bought for myself (by Book Token) was Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh. Rosemary and her mother live in a boarding house , the latter is a seamstress who goes to peoples’ houses, sides to middling sheets and other dull sewing, but she gets a tray of the same food as her employer to eat in the sewing room. The Browns lives are transformed when the leader of a theatrical troupe (wearing good but shabby clothes) at a garden fête offers Mrs B work designing and making costumes. There are many insightful comments on clothes, class, economy etc to the point it reads like a early version of a Clothes in Books bingo card. BTW it is a children’s book with a magic cat, too. I may have missed a bit...JanW

 

Sooo – as she says, a book designed for CiB, and one I would have loved if I’d read it when I was a child. Somehow it escaped me.

Rosemary is a little girl on her summer holidays, who acquires a talking cat and a broomstick from a witch – and a jolly new friend John. He is the nephew of the posh employer woman, but the children’s relationship is refreshingly free from the usual difficulties. They just get on with filling their summer and having their adventures. There is a complicated quest to do with the cat and his original witch owner.

And, of course, everything that Jan mentions, all favourite CiB tropes: the visiting sewing woman as we discussed recently – with particular reference to the eating arrangements -  in the comments on this post:

Here:

Rosemary knew that her mother had her [lunch] on a tray in the sewing room

And there is also a good old-fashioned tearoom:

Shopping ladies with parcels were beginning to come in for an early tea, and the chintz-overalled waitress was hurrying past their table with a tray laden with tea things…

The garden fete:

with stalls and hooplas, and tombolas and raffles, and Punch and Judy shows and fortune-tellers… an enclosure reserved for the dancers, a dozen little girls in very pink crinolines and poke bonnets.

We’ve even got vetch, a plant needed for a magic spell – we looked at vetch (I mean, obviously) when we did The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James – the heroine is called Fleda Vetch so we investigated the name thoroughly in the comments, down to spoonerism.

The players are doing ‘the fairy part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and even John, who usually thought of Shakespeare as somebody invented by masters to harass schoolboys, admitted that it was ‘smashing’. They were transported by the fairy part, and they laughed and laughed at Bottom and his friends.’

Rosemary’s mother, ie the sewing woman, helps out with a last-minute costume emergency for the theatrical troupe – she runs up some tunics in no time at all:

‘Perhaps it would be quicker if I could cut out the clothes on the people who are going to wear them. We needn’t bother about such refinements as hems.’

I really do like that the photo of a troupe doing MND reflects this – no offence, but those costumes have a look of items run up in a couple of hours between performances. There’s a Noel Streatfeild theatrical dresser with this fabulous sentence attached to her: “an understudy thrown on in a hurry was the breath of life to her”. I feel that for Mrs Brown, a costume thrown on in a hurry is the breath of life.

There is even the odd joke. Here we have Carbonel – the magic talking cat – explaining the life of he and his brethren:

‘It is on the rooftops that we are our true selves. There we live our secret lives, there we skirmish, we royster, we sing songs. Songs of such beauty that men throw up their windows and shout applause.’

Rosemary was not sure that it was always applause she had heard, but she did not say so.

Carbonel the magic cat ends up having a huge fight with a ginger cat, and I like to think this picture shows them squaring up nicely. (Guess who is going to win?)

Altogether a tremendously entertaining book, and one that would appeal to modern-day children as much as those back when it was written. Thank you to Jan W for introducing me to it.

And one more thing – the book is published by Puffin, and at the back there is a short history of Penguin and Puffin. And it says this:

Many years from now, we hope you’ll look back and remember Puffin with a smile. No matter what your age or what you’re into, there’s a Puffin for everyone.

And that caught me and touched me, because it is so true for me, as I have explained before

Shedunnit, Green Penguins and the Puffin Club

-       I was a founder member of the Puffin Club.

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