"The Railway Children" Edith Nesbit

"Let me do it," said Peter, thinking he could do it better himself.  Everyone thinks this when he sees another person stirring a fire, or opening a box, or untying a knot in a bit of string.

Nesbit, "The Railway Children"

I don't remember reading this as a child, but I must have seen a movie version of it sometime, because I knew what was going to happen in the story, and I don't think that was because it was predictable.  I'm curious to hunt up some movie version to see what it is like.  From the images I've seen, they have made the children older than they were in the book.

Peter, Phyllis (called Phil) and Roberta (called Bobbie) are the children of a businessman and his wife living a comfortable life in London.  The father is arrested, and the rest of the family has to go live a more modest life in the country.  Phyllis, the youngest, is always falling behind the others to do up her shoe or because she has tripped or broken something.  Peter misses the company of his father and feels hemmed in by a life with only women and girls.  Roberta is the most astute in understanding the feelings of others and how their mother suffers from the absence of her husband.

In good stiff-upper-lip fashion, the mother takes to writing children's stories for pay, and the children are left to make their own entertainment.  They befriend everyone in the town, but they way they do it is by daring deeds such as saving a train from a wreck, noticing when a boy has disappeared and then finding him, and practicing well their noblesse oblige in a way that allows everyone to maintain their own dignity.

Roberta is a little too sweet and good, Peter not boy enough, and Phyllis just a cute little girl.  I'm sure as a child I would have loved this book and their adventures, but now I am concerned about the language about the girls being the weaker sex.  Peter learns from the doctor that not only should he not hit his sisters, something he already understood, but that he should protect them from emotional distress as well.  The doctor claims as a scientific fact that even animal males do not fight with the females, something that is not true at all.  Roberta fights with Peter about girls being just as clever as boys, but if she were a real person I suspect she would have found other combatants on that issue as she grew up.

The book made me nostalgic for a time when we wondered all over town on our bikes with no fears, and saddened when I drive through family neighborhoods now and see no children playing outside.  Things all turn out well in the end, and the children were the change agents in this case.  They recognized a stranger for both a man of power and a man of sympathy who was able to fix all ills.  This fairy tale ending seems appropriate for a book for children, but sometimes I wonder about the lack of realism.

A fun short read for me that made the car ride to Texas go quickly.  The vocabulary is sometimes too specific to Georgian England, and so it may be difficult for a child to read nowadays without some annotation.  But maybe I am overly concerned by that as I'm sure I read books with unfamiliar vocabulary as a child.