A series set in Northern Ireland featuring a magical cat for #ReadingtheMeow2024

Mallika of Literary Potpourri invited us to read and discuss books with cats in them this week.

I recently came across Meta Mayne Reid (1905-1991), who wrote some twenty children's books as well as two novels for adults and one collection of poetry from 1936 through 1980. I was intrigued by the mention on Goodreads of a four-book series set in Ulster about cousins and a magical cat.  According to her biographer, Ruth Baker, Mayne Reid grew up reading Kipling and Nesbit on a Yorkshire farm, listening to stories her mother told about her childhood in County Londonderry in Northern Ireland in the province of Ulster. Meta knew from a young age that she wanted to be a writer and she married an Irish doctor (related to Captain Thomas Mayne Reid, who wrote popular adventure stories for boys that were read by Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mikhail Gorbachev – a pretty disparate group!). The Mayne Reids were from County Down in what is now Northern Ireland, so that is where Meta lived as an adult and brought up her family.  These books were published by Faber & Faber, a great publisher but poorly distributed, if at all, in the United States.

The Carrigmore Castle series:

Carrigmore Castle (1954) and Tiffany and the Swallow Rhyme (1956) are the first two in the series but Interlibrary Loan has not come up with either, or I wouldn’t have skipped to books three and four, which I borrowed from Harvard. Carrigmore Castle was Meta’s first children’s book and was popular enough to be serialized on the radio. The series features cousins, Colin (Colly), his younger brother Kenneth (Kay), and their cousin Charlotte, and the first book focused on the age-old struggle between good and evil. The children are very outdoorsy types who get advice from friendly hares and swans and particularly from the boys’ cat Tiffany. In the books I haven’t read, she taught them how to chew hazel leaves to go back in time or transform into animals. Under the influence of these leaves, they can also understand animals.

The Cuckoo at Coolnean (1956)

To outsiders Tiffany was only a silver-grey cat with orange eyes, but Colly and Kay McKean and their cousin Charlotte had been under her guidance on several adventures and had a proper respect for her powers.

In this third book, set in County Down in Northern Ireland, the three children make friends with newcomers to the area, Richard Galloway, who inherited the Coolnean farm from a cousin, and his niece Rosa from Switzerland, who was recently orphaned. He tells them he used to hunt for treasure when visiting as a child, and the children are determined to find it. They all know money is short: Richard is inexperienced, as well as lame from the war, which is partly why his farm is not very successful, and Charlotte is worried her widowed mother is working too hard as a piano teacher. The children’s’ time travel adventures in this book lead them closer to the treasure. They also grow to value Rosa and stop laughing at her English (which is much better than their nonexistent French; their condescension and her occasional fibs were the only time the series reminded me of Enid Blyton (Blyton's foreigners often lack "British honor"). Rosa is desperate for music lessons and is delighted when Aunt Jane offers to teach her – this also brings the two adults together. However, the real story of this book is the search for treasure: having visited the past, they know it existed long ago (plus the cat told them so) but once hidden, could it have been undisturbed for hundreds of years?

Strangers in Carrigmore (1958)

Charlotte’s mother has now married Rosa’s uncle, and the four children get along well, although Rosa does not believe in magic and thinks the others’ adventures are dreams, which is quite annoying.

This led to many difficulties, for magic simply could not help happening at a farm, which in addition to possessing Tiffany, who was a magic cat, also had a well round which grew the remote descendants of the giant King Finn McCool’s Hazels of Wisdom.

Naturally their leaves could give strange skills and make for strange adventures if they were eaten after having been dipped in well water. When this was done the eater would hear the winds and waters which had blown among and nourished the ancestor hazels, and he would find new courage for the adventure which lay before him. Sometimes too he changed form, and became a bird, or was swept past into a past century. So it is obvious that Rosa missed a great deal of excitement by not believing . . .

However, Tiffany explains that Rosa draws her own sort of wisdom from her music. Carrigmore Castle, which the children love and have had adventures in, has become a Youth Hostel and a Folk Museum. The Museum has a caretaker but needs a Warden for the Hostel to provide meals and housekeeping. When the children are trespassing on Lord Drumlie’s woods for berries, they meet Mrs. Warlock, a friendly woman who feeds them well and tells them her great-grandmother Cassandra lived at Carrigmore Castle years ago. The children are impressed by her and recommend her for the Warden position, although she is noticeably less pleasant once she has secured the job. When treasure is stolen from the Museum, the children have been set up to seem responsible. Rosa, the skeptic, has a time-travel adventure in which she is the daughter of the jeweler who created the treasure and witnesses the treachery of Mrs. Warlock’s ancestress, it helps the children realize who the real present-day thieves are.

Strangers in Carrigmore is book 2/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024. These are pleasant stories: the author clearly loved history and the time travel is well done.  All were illustrated by Richard Kennedy. The challenge is that they are all out of print and I don't know whether they would appeal to today's youth.  If I were repackaging these, I would probably do a volume containing books one and two and, if sales were respectable, another with three and four.  I see there is a fifth book called The Tobermillan Oracle so I am not sure what we'd do with that one.  Mayne Reid also wrote a time travel called The Glen Beyond the Door, which Charlotte has reviewed. 

Baker, R. (1991). The Innocent Eye: Meta Mayne Reid, 1905-1990. The Linen Hall Review, 8(4), 17–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20534217