The Wind on the Moon

WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL

Major Palfrey is leaving for the wars, and he tells his two girls, Dinah and Dorinda, to be good while he is gone. But the sisters aren't sure they can be.As Dorinda explains, "When we think we are behaving well, some grown-up person says we are really quite bad. It's difficult to tell which is which."

Sure enough, the sistersare soon up to their usual mischief. They convince a judge that minds must be changed as often as socks, stage an escape from the local zoo (thanks to a witch's potion which turns them into kangaroos), and--in the company of a golden puma and silver falcon--set off to rescue their father from the wicked tyrant of Bombardy. Penned at the height of World War II, this tale of hilarity and great adventureis also a work of high seriousness; after all, "life without freedom," as the valiant puma makes clear, "is a poor, poor thing."

ERIC LINKLATER (1899-1974) was born in Wales but grew up in the Orkney Islands. He served as a sniper in the First World War, from which he returned to study English at the University of Aberdeen. In the course of a busy life, he worked as a journalist for The Times of India, stood as a candidate for the National Party of Scotland, commanded a wartime fortress in his native Orkneys, searched out lost Italian art after the Second World War, and served as rector of his alma mater. He was also celebrated as a writer. Among his books are Juan in America, a comic picture of Prohibition-era America, Private Angelo, the story of an Italian peasant in the Second World War, several satires, a history of Scotland, a study of the Icelandic Sagas, and another acclaimed book for children, The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea.

The Wind on the Moon began as a story Linklater told his two daughters when they were caught in the rain on a walk. As his son describes it, “It was so good, such a wonderful and entrancing tale, that they begged him to write it down, and so he did.” The book later won the Carnegie Medal and was nominated for best book of 1944. “Those dear children, bellowing their anger,” wrote Linklater about his daughters’ role in inspiring the story. “How grateful I was!”

NICOLAS BENTLEY (1907-1978) was an artist and author, and the art director for the publishing house Andre Deutsch, Ltd. He drew many pictures for magazines and books, including an early edition of T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and was a well-known wit. Humor ran in his family: his father, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, invented the comic verse form known as a “clerihew”:

George the Third

Ought never to have occurred.

One can only wonder

At so grotesque a blunder.