Alice and Thomas and Jane by Enid Bagnold was published in 1930 and it’s illustrated by Enid Bagnold and Laurian Jones.

Enid Bagnold originally told these tales about three adventurous children to her own children to keep them entertained and quiet as they always wanted to do different things from each other and were often noisy and messy.

Alice, Thomas and Jane get up to all the high jinks that I’m sure Bagnold’s own children would have longed to do – such as flying in the tail of a small aeroplane, hidden from the pilot of course, taking a ferry to France as Thomas did and creeping out at night to explore Smugglers’ Cave.

This is a lovely and fun read involving vicarious and therefore safe adventuring, and the illustrations are charming. You can see a few of the images inside the book here.

Enid Bagnold is of course better known as the writer of National Velvet. I’ve not read anything else by her but it seems she had a fascinating life, although Sam Cameron, wife of ex PM David Cameron is apparently her great-granddaughter – well nobody’s perfect. You can read about Enid Bagnold here.

My copy of this book is a 1930 original and it’s bound in what I think is called buckram, it was fairly dirty when I bought it but otherwise in good condition. I’ve been able to scrub off the dirt in other books bound with buckram very successfully and it was the same with this one. They really come up well, almost like new. Sometimes the binding gets a bit sticky, then you should just allow it to dry out before having another go at it with a damp sponge or wet wipe.