Jessamy
First edition cover
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| Author | Barbara Sleigh |
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| Illustrator | Philip Gough |
| Country |
United Kingdom United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's novel; Time travel |
| Publisher | Collins, Bobbs Merrill |
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Publication date
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1967 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 159 pp |
United Kingdom
Jessamy (1967) is a children's book by Barbara Sleigh, author of the Carbonel series. It sheds light on English life and childhood during the First World War, through an effectively drawn pre-adolescent female character and a time slip narrative.
The story is about an orphaned girl called Jessamy, age unstated but about nine to eleven, who lived with one aunt during school term and another during school holidays. Both aunts were superficially affectionate, but neither paid heed to her as a person. The book begins with her arrival unaccompanied by train, to find that her holiday aunt's uncongenial children had caught whooping cough. Jessamy had to be farmed out for the summer to Miss Brindle, the childless caretaker of an empty Victorian mansion: Posset Place.
Jessamy was taken aback by the old Miss Brindle, who was wary of children — "I daresay you won't mind being treated like a grown-up person. I don't know any other way," she was told (p. 14). Once Jessamy had reassured her — "I'll try not to be a menace" (p. 13) — she was allowed to explore the house and came across a schoolroom. She opened a large empty cupboard and saw three sets of old pencil marks on the door showing the heights of four children, one of them, appearing only in the first set, named Jessamy, like her. She was exhausted that night and went to bed, only to be woken by moonlight shining through her window. She put on a dressing gown and stole back to the schoolroom with an electric torch. "Her bare feet seemed to take charge of her, almost as if they knew the way themselves" (p. 25).
This time she found clothes hanging in the cupboard and only the first set of pencil marks on the door. Beside them was a date: "July 23rd, 1914" (p. 25), precisely 53 years before, and two weeks before Britain would declare war on Germany. A drip of hot wax on her hand signalled that her torch had turned into a candle.
Sleigh takes great care with the join between the two narratives.
Jessamy herself was puzzled: "'This is a dream, it must be!' she said. 'I'm sound asleep in the camp bed really'" (p. 26). Jessamy had been reading Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) on the train (p. 7) and there was something secret about the way the holiday aunt and Jessamy stepped from a modern street into the walled garden round a house that Jessamy felt looked "half like a church, and half like a castle with those battlements and stained glass windows and things" (p. 14).
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