The River at Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston

To get there, he travels across a rain-drenched England of the imagination, the train labouring through flooded fields the house itself, when he arrives, is marooned by the floods, so he has to be rowed by lamplight across the drowned gardens. His father and stepmother are living overseas, and he has been summoned to live with his great-grandmother at Green Knowe, arriving just before Christmas.

The story begins with Tolly, a child of seven. Green Knowe is a fictionalised Hemingford Manor, the house and gardens with its topiary animals all lovingly described (the latter in real life planted as a labour of love by the author, and still maintained and open to the public). The stories are both a descriptive and inventive children's adventure and a love song to the author's real-life home – The Manor at Hemingford Grey – built in the 1130s and purported to be the longest continually inhabited house in Britain. The Children of Green Knowe was written as the first in a series of six children's books set in and around fictional Green Knowe, an ancient manor house. I will never know if this was a remarkable or even a decent adaptation, as it has never been shown again and the tapes have been lost by the BBC, but the series and the book on which it is based are now both closely associated for me with Christmas, snow and midwinter. W hen I was young the BBC showed an adaptation of The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston, its final episode screened just before Christmas suitably snowy, festive and ghostly.

The River at Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston