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Andrew Bowden on Margot Pardoe Bunkle books, SF Issue 72

Bowled Over by Bunkle

Bunkle began it for me. Searching for a gentle, undemanding get-me-to-sleep read, I happened on my wife’s childhood copy of a book called Bunkle Began It by Margot Pardoe. On a quick skim, I discovered that it was set in a seaside town on the edge of Exmoor which was my own home territory during the war. It also took me back to a Children’s Hour play with Bunkle as the lead character which had scared the wits out of me but was compulsive listening.

However, this book wasn’t exactly soporific; in fact I was still deep in it at 2 a.m. It was fun, it was realistic, it was well-written and it was a real page-turner. Its hero is a gloriously anarchic schoolboy, 10 years old when we first meet him, who is unsquashable, unafraid, his own person, a fluent linguist, with a talent for getting himself into and out of trouble. He is attractively unpretentious and has a natural talent for getting on with people. His real name is Billy, but his older siblings call him Bunkle ‘because he talks such bunk’. I can think of only two people I’ve ever met who were remotely like him, but Bunkle is a wholly endearing and believable character.

He is also part of an equally believable family. It is 1940 and his father, Major de Salis, is a wartime James Bond in what would now be called MI6, a quick-reacting operator who thinks outside the box and is sent all over the country to investigate what is going on ‘when funny things start to happen’. He is also a parent who listens to his children, trusts them and expects them to act as sensible adults. Mrs de Salis has to balance following the maverick movements of her husband with looking after three teenagers. She is somewhat given to retiring to bed with a headache, but she trusts her children and believes that they need challenge and adventure.

Jill, the oldest, is 17, and often left in charge. An uncertain teenager, still at the stage of blushing to the roots of her hair when having to ‘ente

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Bunkle began it for me. Searching for a gentle, undemanding get-me-to-sleep read, I happened on my wife’s childhood copy of a book called Bunkle Began It by Margot Pardoe. On a quick skim, I discovered that it was set in a seaside town on the edge of Exmoor which was my own home territory during the war. It also took me back to a Children’s Hour play with Bunkle as the lead character which had scared the wits out of me but was compulsive listening.

However, this book wasn’t exactly soporific; in fact I was still deep in it at 2 a.m. It was fun, it was realistic, it was well-written and it was a real page-turner. Its hero is a gloriously anarchic schoolboy, 10 years old when we first meet him, who is unsquashable, unafraid, his own person, a fluent linguist, with a talent for getting himself into and out of trouble. He is attractively unpretentious and has a natural talent for getting on with people. His real name is Billy, but his older siblings call him Bunkle ‘because he talks such bunk’. I can think of only two people I’ve ever met who were remotely like him, but Bunkle is a wholly endearing and believable character. He is also part of an equally believable family. It is 1940 and his father, Major de Salis, is a wartime James Bond in what would now be called MI6, a quick-reacting operator who thinks outside the box and is sent all over the country to investigate what is going on ‘when funny things start to happen’. He is also a parent who listens to his children, trusts them and expects them to act as sensible adults. Mrs de Salis has to balance following the maverick movements of her husband with looking after three teenagers. She is somewhat given to retiring to bed with a headache, but she trusts her children and believes that they need challenge and adventure. Jill, the oldest, is 17, and often left in charge. An uncertain teenager, still at the stage of blushing to the roots of her hair when having to ‘entertain’ a handsome young Royal Tank Regiment officer, she is weighed down by the burden of responsibility for her brothers. Robin is 14 and leads the ‘Bunkle needs to be squashed’ campaign: but he is still very ready to horse about with his younger brother, and when it comes to ‘adventuring’ they do things together. So, unlike the Browns in Just William, this is a family team. These are not books about ‘the children’ but about young people against the background of their family and their society. Bunkle Began It was published in 1942, and exactly captures the topsy-turvy unsettledness of those early war years. The food is awful, every second person is in uniform, service families are forever on the move, and there are spies everywhere! The de Salises are holed up in a small family hotel in Minehead, and the claustrophobic awfulness of such institutions in those days, alleviated only by the simple kindness of the local staff, is graphically described. Bunkle has discovered a passage to the cisterns under the attic eaves and he and Robin go exploring.
‘Hello,’ said Bunkle, ‘There’s quite a big hole here. It goes down beside one of the pipes. You can see down right into the bedroom below. I wonder whose room it is?’ ‘Here, let me have a look,’ said Robin. ‘You can only see down if you lie absolutely flat and get your eye right against the pipe. It’s just like looking through a hole in a curtain.’ ‘No, you can’t see a lot,’ agreed Robin. ‘I can see the corner of a table, and what looks like a drawing spread out on it. It must be the edge of the dressing table I think, because I can see the strut of a mirror, and there’s something most peculiar hanging on it.’ ‘My turn,’ said Bunkle firmly. ‘Move over. Yes I can see it too now. What on earth can it be?’ Then he began to giggle. ‘Oh glory. I know. It’s a wig!’
The ancient residents resent the appearance in their midst of these exuberant teenagers – and the feeling is mutual. The residents are joined by a character who is even older, more bad-tempered and more unhinged. Mrs Wetherby has red hair and a pug dog, she carries around a suspicious roll of tapestry and she wears gloves which she never takes off. When she catches Bunkle hiding under the table in her room he discovers that she has a startlingly strong grip and terrifying eyes. Even the fearless Bunkle is frightened. There have been ‘funny things going on in the area’ – flashing lights from a deserted house up on the hill, an unidentified German plane that streaks down the Bristol Channel hotly pursued by Spitfires – and there is an information leak. Major de Salis, who arrives for a week’s leave, is determined to do ‘a little quiet snooping’. Hearing that the local Home Guard is planning a live ammunition exercise in the area, he takes the family on a hike over Exmoor to investigate. They are challenged by a suspiciously officious member of the Home Guard; and later, under cover of firing during the ‘Exercise’, someone takes a pot-shot at the Major. Meanwhile, by an ingenious use of mirrors, Bunkle and Robin uncover Mrs Wetherby’s secret. It may sound a bit like an Enid Blyton Famous Five adventure, but it is in a different league. Bunkle Began It is the second book in the Bunkle series and when I’d finished it I was desperate for more, but they were hard to find. After a lengthy search I discovered that Fidra Books has reprinted five of them with the original illustrations by Julie Neild, Mary Smith and others, though the rest are, sadly, out of print. Why are they so good? For a start the characters are human and believable, and as the series develops they grow up. Bunkle starts out as a bumptious 10-year-old in Four Plus Bunkle (1939) and ends in Bunkle Scents a Clue (1953) as a 17-year-old showing distinct signs of maturity. I particularly liked his first boy-girl encounter in Bunkle Breaks Away (1947). Bunkle is doing a holiday job as a waiter in a riverside pub where he works alongside the waitress Carrie, who rather falls for him. She is persuaded to come with him to the nearby woods at dusk, only to find that all he wants to do is to show her the marvellous evening gathering of thousands of starlings. Part of the books’ attraction lies in their accurate picture of unpretentious middle-class life and the political background of the 1940s and 1950s: the period of the Second World War and the Cold War are the instantly recognizable context for the ‘adventures’. And their settings are well researched and skilfully evoked. Even today you can trace the Bunkle Began It Exmoor scenes – the bus journeys and hikes – on a 2½-inch Ordnance Survey map. And I could take you to the Quantock coombs and the disused iron-mining railway behind Watchet, which are the vividly described settings for Bunkle Scents a Clue. Other books are set in France, Scotland and Hampshire, and it is evident that the author has been there herself. In fact the second half of Bunkle Gets Busy (1951) is not a bad travel guide to the area of France around Lourdes. Then there’s the style – not over-adult but not dumbed down either. Here’s a passage from Bunkle Scents a Clue which well illustrates Margot Pardoe’s delight in a countryside she knows and loves.
Nearer at hand the ground fell away in a series of curves towards the wide strip of fertile farmland lying between the ridge of the Brendons and the sea. The slopes and fields and wooded valleys seemed to be spread out like a coloured carpet, for every shade of green was there, with vivid splashes of plough-land brick red in the sun, while to the east the smiling range of the Quantock hills, looking misty blue along their crests, ran southwards toward Taunton.
Once you’ve started a Bunkle book you won’t want to put it down. It’s not that there is a cliff-hanger on every page, but Pardoe knows how to tell a good story. In the early book Bunkle Began It, she uses the obvious trick of ending each chapter with a surprise; but later in the series, in Bunkle Scents a Clue for instance, the design is more sophisticated. The human story lures us in, but always, dropped in quietly and persistently, are questions we want answered, and mysteries that need to be explained. Margot Pardoe produced a new book every year, and would sometimes write one in a fortnight. She rarely revised a manuscript, which does mean that the books can be uneven, and indeed some of the plots peter out. Pat, who is nearly kidnapped because her scientist father is escaping from a laboratory in one of the Iron Curtain countries, is the catalyst for the whole ‘adventure’ in Bunkle Gets Busy. But after the climax, when the Communist agent with his pistol has been floored by a splendid rugby tackle by Robin, we never actually discover what happens to Pat and her family in the future. But it’s still a ‘ripping good yarn’. Vanessa Robertson’s introduction to the Fidra editions tells us that Margot Pardoe was born in London in 1902, that she studied music in Paris but then turned to writing poetry and articles for journals. She married John Swift, a schoolmaster, in 1934 and they had one son. They soon moved to Selworthy on the edge of Exmoor to set up a country-house hotel. Her first children’s novel, The Far Island, was published in 1936, with a good review in the Times Literary Supplement, and this was followed in 1939 by the first of the Bunkle books. The couple kept the hotel going during the difficult war years, but in the 1950s John became ill, and for a time they lived in Switzerland (the setting for Bunkle Gets Busy). During the 1940s the Bunkle books became very popular, and four were serialized on Children’s Hour. Not surprisingly they went out of fashion in the 1960s, and Bunkle Brings It Off , published in 1961, was Margot Pardoe’s last book. But perhaps we are now far enough away from that time for a new generation to enjoy them.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 72 © Andrew Bowden 2021


About the contributor

Andrew Bowden is a retired rural parish priest living in Gloucestershire. He loves rediscovering children’s books and is an avid collector. He has also written a few books about the rural church, which have been well received but are never likely to feature in Slightly Foxed.

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