The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. Whether she is describing a young child climbing slippery rock steps from a sea cave or uncovering the glories of a tangled garden in Devon, she is one of the only modern prose writers to capture the spirit of the seventeenth- century mystic Thomas Traherne: It was far otherwise in Goudge territory, twinkling with exquisitely English landscapes, cosy as a quilted sampler. Most summers we trailed round European cities following my father’s lectures at medical conferences, being plunged into high culture while all we longed for was to repeat our one holiday on a British beach. Our parents were fighting all the time, screaming and sulking. That’s how my sister and I spent one summer, lost in the comforting world of Elizabeth Goudge’s children’s books. Did you ever yearn to live in a magical world? One where a unicorn is glimpsed in a wood, monkeys do housework and a big black cat takes messages, and where there is also, reliably, steak and kidney pie for lunch, honey for tea and cocoa for supper?
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