The Big House by Naomi Mitchison was first published in 1950 and it’s aimed at children over 9 years old, it’s good no matter how many years you are beyond that age though.

Susan is the daughter of the local landowner, so she lives in The Big House and most of the people living in the area are employed by her family. That makes life difficult for Su in school at Port-na-Sgadan as just about all of the other children hate her. Not only is her family rich, but she can’t even speak Gaelic like the other children.

The story begins on  Halloween and some of the local children take the opportunity to beat Su up. They have their ‘false-faces’ on so they feel safe enough to do it. Only Winkie the fisherman’s son is her friend and he helps her. Of course the fisherman doesn’t have the landowner as his boss, so there’s no resentment there. As Winkie is helping Su back to her home to clean her up they hear a piper in the distance.  It turns out that the piper was captured by evil fairies hundreds of years ago and Halloween is his only chance of escape. He needs the children to help him. Su and Winkie end up in the underworld of the evil fairies, in danger of never being able to get back home.

If you know fairy tales at all you’ll recognise some common themes, such as a stolen baby and someone being changed into a swan but this one does have a very Scottish flavour about it and it brought back some memories for me. I had completely forgotten that when I was wee we called Halloween masks false-faces, but as soon as I read those words it brought back the horrible smell they had, compressed cardboard I suppose,  but we all wore them, at least they were bio-degradable, unlike the plastic ones nowadays.  As the book was written/published in 1950 and food rationing still existed in the UK this tale features quite a lot of feasts and food which would have been unobtainable at the time, like so many books written in this era.

Naomi Mitchison was herself the daughter of a  Big House but she seems to have had a governess before being sent to a boarding school, I’m sure she would have had experience of being despised by the local children when she was growing up. She died when she was 101 and had quite a life, being politically active and a lifelong Socialist.