Railway worker Mr Leghorn (Ginger) finds a puppy left on a train. No one claims the little fellow and so he becomes a loved member of the family - Dad (Ginger) and Mum - Molly Leghorn, and the children Alfie, Arthur, Beryl, Sissy and Albert. Jim has some great adventures he even stows away on a ship. Eventually Mr Leghorn puts little Jim to work with a charity box around his neck collecting funds for The Railway Widows and Orphans Fund.
A major chain bookstore in my city offered a good discount on purchases last week so naturally I made a visit expecting to buy a few books! I spied this one on their shelf of new releases. Louis de Bernieres is an adult author best known for Captain Corelli's Mandolin. You may already know I adore the art of Emma Chichester Clark so I expected this book would be very special. Then when I opened it up and scanned a few pages I found some delicious words:
- obstreperous
- pestiferous
- rhetorically
- gallivanting
- eccentricity
- inexplicably
- ostensibly
- lugubrious
This story is very, very English but I think that is a good thing. If you are reading this book in Australia, for example, there will be so much to talk about and explore. Steam trains with individual compartments, Christmas puddings with threepence coins, using a mangle to wring washing, piercing chestnuts before putting them on the fire, ink pens and inkwells and an object called a donkey stone. The chapter entitled Raggabone is fascinating. It describes all the tradesmen who worked on the streets. The Muffin Man, Diddicoys (gypsies) who could mend machinery, the Pieman, Any Old Iron Man, and the Rag-and-Bone man.
When you pick up this book try to read the chapter Station Jim's Christmas a few days before Christmas day. I loved this chapter. Making the pudding was especially delicious:
"Molly (Mrs Leghorn) had already made a pound of breadcrumbs, and shelled and chopped the Brazil nuts, and blanched and skinned and chopped the almonds, and grated the cooking apples, and grated a lemon rind and squeezed out the juice, and stoned and chopped the dates, and bought some eggs and demerara sugar and a little bottle of rum, and weighed our some sultanas and currants and a little posset of mixed spices ... "
Perhaps I need to tell you here is some smoking and drinking in this story. Don't let this put you off reading this charming story. The smoking references are always qualified with the warning:
"Like everyone else in those days they had the bad luck of not knowing smoking is a deadly habit."
I recommend this book as a family read aloud or perhaps a book you could read to a class (age 8+) over a couple of weeks - there are fifteen chapters. Preview the first chapter here. You might enjoy the audio book too. You could perhaps follow this book with The Railway children by E Nesbit.
If you read this with a class it would be fun to look closely at the notice Mr Leghorn displays at the post office:
"Enywon want a pupy? Noy suer how old. Very sweet and wel behayvd. Prity much houstraned already. Afrade of cats. Blak and tan. Aply Number 4 Railway cottiges."
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