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Masefield, John

Grace before Ploughing, [33] 7; The Midnight Folk, [73] 87; The Box of Delights, [75] 85

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20220901111045 Brandon Robshaw on John Masefield The Box of Delights, Slightly Foxed 75

Masefield’s Magic

Brandon Robshaw on John Masefield, The Box of Delights

I was 8 when I first read John Masefield’s The Box of Delights – in the late 1960s, in the high-ceilinged classroom of a Victorian-built school in East London. I had not long been reading ‘chapter books’ as we called them, and this was the longest, most challenging and most sophisticated one I had yet encountered – and by far the most rewarding. It’s not easy to convey the peculiar atmosphere of it: scary but funny; fantastical but believable; lyrical yet down-to-earth; grotesque, even nightmarish in parts, yet told in a friendly voice. Years later, when I had forgotten most of the details of the actual story and characters, the feeling of it remained with me, like the lingering memory of a dream.

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