Over the winter holidays, I read Castaway Christmas by Margaret J. Baker, an old Puffin paperback children’s book that I’d been meaning to pick up for ages. I thoroughly enjoyed following the adventures of siblings Lincoln, Miranda and Pinks Ridley, who are accidentally separated from their parents and have to fend for themselves in a country cottage hired for Christmas, as treacherous flood waters rise all around them. How the children don’t lose courage, but deal with flooding, food shortages and a near death-by-drowning makes for an entertaining as well as warm-hearted read.

I was delighted to receive Cut off from Crumpets, the sequel to Castaway Christmas, from my Mum, and I read it at the start of January. It was a fitting time to settle down with the book, as Cut off from Crumpets begins just after Christmas, when the Ridleys are forced to cancel a family holiday to Switzerland and instead decide to visit an old family friend (‘Aunt’ Borage) at her cottage, Moleharbour, in Somerset. Wherever the Ridleys travel, bad weather is never far behind: this time, the family become snowbound at Moleharbour as the terrible winter of 1963 rages outside their door, and they must cope with frozen pipes, a neighbouring family in difficulty and a rather short supply of food (no crumpets for tea!). Fortunately for the Ridleys, however, Aunt Borage’s cottage proves to be a perfect refuge:

Moleharbour had been aptly named. The cottage was a refuge for all living things. They were gathered under its roof like the limbs of a tortoise under its shell. Dahlia tubers lay in a leather hat box on the top of the spare room wardrobe. Bramley cooking apples were stored in the larder. A sack of potatoes stood in the hall. Strings of onions and bags of herbs hung from hooks in the beamed kitchen ceiling. Bowls of lavender and rose petals stood in the sitting-room. In the corners of the bedrooms tortoiseshell butterflies hibernated with their dusty wings shut tight. In the loft field mice scuttled across the rafters, and the wire baskets Miss Burberry had hung outside the bedroom windows were visited by the birds from dawn to dusk. Long afterwards it was the bright feathered bluetits and robins which the children remembered best of all. ~ Margaret J. Baker, Cut off from Crumpets

Despite the adverse weather conditions, the children still manage to have plenty of fun, building an igloo in the garden and even getting a helicopter ride. It’s the realistic portrait of a close-knit family, as well as the period detail related to clothing and food (both books were written in the early 1960s), that make Margaret J. Baker’s Ridley family books so charming, and I’m now keen to collect more of her stories (sadly they are no longer in print, so I’ll have to be patient).