Undersong: the sounds of a landscape
Chapters in The Grimmelings begin with a curious word or two, just to set the scene. ‘Undersong‘, one of the words to introduce Chapter Four, describes the background noise we live with, all the time. Can you hear it? I’ve got traffic drone at the moment. I’d rather the undersong of the lake, which I’ll call ‘Flitsplish’, as I have a bit of the Scottish in me. Rachel King’s book itself has an undersong: it’s the rhythm and poetry of the best children’s stories. I was mesmerised from the first line.
The same evening Josh Underhill went missing, the black horse appeared on the hill above the house.
Classic.
The word Grimmelings, itself, gives a hint of where the story is going. It means, in the dialect of old Scottish grannies, the first and last glimmers of light in the day. And isn’t that when the magic happens? It’s a shimmering, not quite one nor another, a liminal time/space, where a child can slip through to somewhere else. Gone willingly, or taken struggling.
There’s a Scottish grannie in this story, Grizzly, who has a history with a black horse and a handsome man, and a way with words. She tells legends about mythical creatures, kelpies, water creatures who can take the shape of a man or a horse. She believes in ghosts, and collects hagstones for luck and witch wiggin to keep evil spirits away. She tells her kiwi granddaughters to be themselves: ‘You have to dree your own wierd‘. No wonder they love her. The girls, our hero Ellie and little sister Fiona, also love horses. Happily, they live at a riding school (how cool is that? wonders the teenage me…) which is run by their mum and Hana, who has pink hair and is like a fun older sister to the girls. We meet lots of horses, all with their quirks. Magpie, with the funny ears, is a devilish pony, bonded only to Ella. There are no men around the household. The girls’ father is missing, presumed dead. He went fishing one day beside the lake and never came back.
Strange things keep happening. A huge black horse appears in the hills around the village, sheep on the hills have their heads ripped off, and Josh Underhill, the boy Ella cursed when he bullied her sister, can’t be found. A new boy arrives, answering Ella’s prayers for a friend to ride with over the summer. He grows difficult, she resists. The horses don’t like him. Everything intensifies.
This is a terrific piece of storytelling, where children’s everyday lives are put right at the edge of peril, they are caught cragfast in the blirt, and the terrifying unknown comes knocking.
Absolutely, The Grimmelings is going on my bookshelves with my favourite YA classics. Terrific.
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