That left the third eldest, eleven-year old Corrie in an uncomfortable position. She wanted to spend more time with her school-friends, to try out as a cheer leader, and she began to pull away from her siblings and their game.
Roz, the second eldest began to develop other interests. It was, of course, inevitable that things would change. I also saw that the author so clearly understood, empathised with, everything she was writing about. I saw the wonder, but I also saw the dangers, all beautifully and sensitively portrayed. The game became all-consuming a quite glorious secret. It brought the children together, it made them feel a little more secure in a world that had, with their mother’s death, become horribly uncertain. It was the eldest child, Sebastian, who began the game of Knights of the Round Table. The house was big, the children were aloof, and so in fact there was little supervision at all. His children were supervised first by a much loved aunt and then by a succession of housekeepers. Their father, a Shakespearean scholar who had named each child after a character, coped by retreating into his study, immersing himself in the writing of a book in the hours when he wasn’t sleeping or teaching. In the early fifties the six Bell children lost their mother. Because border terrier people understand. I thought of my lovely Pip, who turned just as white as Kit Pearson’s lovely Poppy, and I told myself that a story of a large family of children who imagined themselves to be Knights of the Round Table was exactly what I needed. There are many things that can tip me towards buying a book when I am on browsing, and on this particular occasion that thing was an picture of an elderly border terrier, sitting on the lap of the author.
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