Wild Robert

Illustrated with line drawings by Chichester Clark, this novel has a slice of some of what Wynne Jones does so well. Heather, bored by the arrival of the tourists to Castlemaine House where her parents are curators, takes herself off to the mound where Wild Robert, accused of witchcraft, had been buried. Her cry to Wild Robert has an instant response and from then on Wild Robert deals out punishment to Heather's oppressors, the teenagers running riot in the gardens, and his own ancestors. There is the Wild Robert streak in the novelist herself and her description of the entry of the fantasy to the everyday can stand for what we see more substantially in the novels she is famous for: 'It was as if the part of the world that was ordinary and possible went slanting away sideways ... For a moment, she was sure she was standing out sideways, somehow, on the slice of ordinariness. Then she found she was on the deeper bit after all.'