It was clear to me then, when I read and re-read it as an escape from the pains of flu, exams or being brutally misunderstood by the world, until the book disintegrated, that Maria – plain and vain, but also good, sensible, practical and brave – was the hero, as she returns to Moonacre, the home of her ancestors, and resolves the conflicts that are tearing apart the perfect little world. I was given the lovely 1963 Puffin edition when I was eight, but imagined myself just as grown up as 13-year-old Maria, "considered plain, with her queer silvery-grey eyes that were so disconcertingly penetrating, her straight reddish hair and thin pale face with its distressing freckles".
I'm quite reasonable about it – obviously I don't expect to find an arched door too small for a grownup, a miniature grate with a fire of pine cones, a white sheepskin rug, a four-poster bed with blue silk curtains embroidered with silver stars and a blue wooden box with sugar biscuits – but I do wonder whether, if I did knock, the owner would instantly identify a fellow reader of Elizabeth Goudge's 1946 book The Little White Horse, and the room where the orphaned Maria finds sanctuary, "as chickens scurry for shelter under their mother's wings … safe for evermore".
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