Bedknob and Broomstick - Book 16

I'd been fighting some kind of germ all through Easter.  I remember having too much of a nasty headache on Holy Thursday to go to confession.   We went on Good Friday, when my headaches seemed to subside but now I was losing my voice and my throat felt all scratchy.  I persevered through Passover, not feeling too bad but not feeling great.  However, I skipped the Easter vigil because I started to feel so exhausted.  Easter day I woke up feeling awful  So I had three awful days mostly bedridden, except when I had to drag my sorry you know what out to get something done that nobody could do but me.

I read a lot in bed.  I finished Children of the New Forest and then decided I needed another children's novel to keep me company.  Well, another children's book I'd never read was Bedknob and Broomstick.  I'd only seen (many times) the delightful Disney version.  God bless Kindles, is all I can say.  I ordered the book by Mary Norton, it was a delightful companion while I coughed deep raspy coughs and sneezed umpteen times in a row.

Disney took a lot of liberties with the movie.  The original book is not set during World War II.  And as serendipity would have it, it has time travel back to the very time period that Children of the New Forest ended with, the reign of Charles II!

Carey, Charles and Paul are three siblings who've been sent to stay with their aunt in the countryside.  They discover that the quirky, kind old maid at the end of the lane, Miss Eglantine Price, is studying witchcraft.  The character Angela Lansbury plays in the movie is very close to the same character in the book, but the adventures are different.  They never go down to the bottom of the sea to sing Bobbing Along on the Bottom of it.  They never go to Portobello Road.  There are no Nazis attacking England in the story.  Instead they have three hilarious misadventures with bed travel.  First they go to London to visit their mother and get picked up by the police (I think that's in the movie though), then they go to s South Sea island that supposedly is uninhabited but turns out to have cannibals.  Miss Price's magic saves them.  But the bed comes back sodden with water and the children are sent home by Aunt Beatrice.  A couple years pass before the children get to see Miss Price again.  She's given up magic.  She never was good at it.  She's better at gardening.  But Carey talks her into letting them do one trip into the past, a power the bed has but which they never tried before.  They go back to Restoration England and find the sad failed necromancer, Emelius Jones.

This was a delightful book, cleverly written with lovely little tidbits of description too.  Mary Norton could write!  I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite feeling miserable.

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