Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr,
illustrated by Marjorie-Ann Watts.
Faber Children’s Classics, 2006 (1958).

Ten is a transitional age, when a child moves from single to double digits, potentially not achieving triple digits for another nine decades. And – like everyone moving from one stage to another – the first step may take them over the threshold to an exciting adventure, but it also brings with it anxiety; moving from the known to the unknown is likely to be fraught with fear, and that fear can be palpable.

Marianne lives in a comfortable postwar house; although the father is absent she has a younger brother, Thomas, whom we only hear about but never meet. The only individuals she comes in contact with are her mother, a strict but sympathetic tutor called Miss Chesterfield, and the family doctor, the last two introduced because Marianne falls ill on the day of her tenth birthday with what sounds very much like glandular fever. Confined to bed for weeks with this debilitating disease, Marianne is bored and frustrated as well as being easily fatigued.

Eventually she makes an attempt to draw a simple house using what appears to be an ordinary pencil she finds in her grandmother’s box of oddments. But that childish house she draws – four square with a central door, smoke emerging from a chimney, the building separated from the surrounding grassy plain by palings and a garden gate – proves to be an archetypal Gothic residence, one inhabited by a mysterious boy and menaced by megaliths that seem to be besieging the property. And it exists in a world that, every time she draws with the pencil, Marianne is able to access by way of dreams that, too often, verge on nightmare.