JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY reviewed by Penny Dolan

How does one start to hunt for plants? My own love of plants began with Cecily Mary Barker’s picture-and-verse Flower Fairy books, Yet the works are not pure fantasy: Barker’s charming fairies, first appearing in 1923, were based on drawings of real children in her sister’s kindergarten, while the detailed flowers and settings are painted with meticulous, botanically-accurate skill. The Flower Fairies taught me- and no doubt many others – to find and identify common plants, even though some of those flowers are rarer than they used to be.

However, Barker’s pretty fairies - still hovering around today – can surely only charm a very particular young audience. There’s space for bolder books about the history of the plants and stories for older boys and girls who would welcome tales of adventure.

I was very pleased to come across JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY, a novel for 8-12 year olds, written by fellow History Girl Sue Purkiss.

Inspired by the lives of 18th century plant-hunters, Sue has written a fast-moving historical adventure story.  Jack Fortune, the young hero, is energetic and most interestingly naughty. Bored, and not allowed to attend school, he can’t resist devising tricks that shame his stern widowed Aunt Constance and horrify her genteel guests.

As a character, Jack is immediately likeable - and trouble! When he accidentally damages a priceless object, Constance summons her  brother, Uncle Edmund, insisting that he take responsibility for his young nephew.

Uncle Edmund refuses; not only is the scholarly bachelor unused to children but he is about to depart on his first plant-hunting trip to India. Jack, hearing this exciting news, wants to accompany the expedition so Uncle Edmund reluctantly agrees, while Aunt Constance, unable to face any more disobedience, agrees despite the dangers.

From this point on Jack and his uncle  – and the reader – experience a new life full of challenge and interesting people and places. They sail to Calcutta, cross the Great Plain and travel through the jungle before reaching a high mountain kingdom with a hidden valley. All the way, Jack and his uncle face setbacks and dangers: vagabonds, wild animals, “mountain sickness” and, at last, reports of a huge, legendary being who brings death to any intruders in the Hidden Valley. Moreover, Jack soon realises that an unknown traitor is spoiling the expedition’s food supplies and stirring up problems with local villagers.  Who wishes them ill? Is it Sonam, their guide or Thondup, the heir to the throne who accompanies the party, and whom Jack has begun to admire?  

Sue Purkiss’s plot moves along with plenty of pace and action and just enough description to fix the story in its historical time and place without overloading her young reader’s enjoyment. She also touches lightly and skillfully on darker issues such as servants and colonisation, but lets the bold adventure end as happily as it should.

However, I felt the book was about more than the plant-hunting quest: Jack and Uncle Edmund make a wonderfully odd and warm partnership, and the hardships met on the expedition teach them more about the other.

Bookish Uncle Edmund slowly reveals his bravely determined nature and his passion for plant-hunting. Gradually, Jack sees the burning passion that lies behind Uncle Edmund’s search, and his desperate hope that the plant will bring him fame, fortune and the approval of the influential Sir Joseph Banks when - and if -  they ever return to London.

Meanwhile, faced with real demands and responsibilities rather than endless tea-parties and polite manners, Jack becomes the boy-hero he was meant to be and is even able to accept his own inherited artistic gifts and inheritance.

One of the particular reasons I enjoyed JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY was that, despite the difficulties Jack and his Uncle face, the adventure is a positive and hopeful experience and one that might encourage children to look beyond everyday life and issues in school and out into a much wider world with all its interweaving histories.

Penny Dolan

ps. Years after the Flower Fairies, my gardening interests led to a set of children’s stories based on the history of British gardening, written for re-telling at RHS Harlow Carr gardens.

NB. Alma Books have also created some downloadable activities to support of this title:  http://almabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Jack-Fortune-Activity-Book.pdf  as well as an interview with the author Sue Purkiss: http://almabooks.com/interview-sue-purkiss-author-jack-fortune/                                                                  

‘Algernon and Ernest’s Excellent Adventure’ by Lesley Downer

In October 1866 a young man called Algernon Mitford arrived in Japan. ‘I found myself in a world younger by six centuries than that which I had left behind,’ he recalled. Like the eponymous heroes of the 1989 film ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’, he had stepped into a time machine, but in his case, his experiences were real.

The extraordinary world that Mitford found himself in is the setting for The Shogun’s Queen as well as the other Shogun Quartet novels. One of the most exciting parts of my research was reading Mitford’s Memories. His writing is so vivid, fresh and full of life that he brings alive that Japan of a century and a half ago that was even then on the brink of disappearing.

Algernon Freeman Mitford

portrait by 

Samuel Lawrence, 1865

Japan had been largely closed to outsiders for 250 years, until 1853 when the American Commodore Matthew Perry arrived to force open its doors. Just eight years had passed since 1858 when a treaty was negotiated permitting westerners to visit, trade and settle in a few specific ports.

Ernest Satow 1869

Algernon - the grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters - was 29 years old and had been posted to Japan to join the newly established British Legation under Sir Harry Parkes. He had paid his own way. In those days you had to have private means to be a diplomat.

Another of the officials at the legation was the 23 year old Ernest Satow, from Clapton. He’d arrived in Japan in 1862 and was fluent in written and spoken Japanese. The two became firm friends. Satow, too, later wrote his memoirs, a gripping account entitled A Diplomat in Japan.

At the time there were few westerners in Japan and most were confined to the heaving port of Yokohama. In those days Yokohama was like a wild west gold rush town, populated largely by unscrupulous adventurers who’d gravitated there, pretending to be merchants or traders, out to make a quick buck by fair means or foul. The only westerners allowed to live and travel outside the port were diplomats attached to the legation - like Mitford and Satow.

'younger by six centuries' pic from Rutherford Alcock
The Capital of the Tykoon 1863

After several of their small wooden houses had burnt down in the regular fires that took place, the two set up house in Edo, now Tokyo, in a little temple in Shinagawa, near the Legation, in the south east of the city, as far as possible from Edo Castle where the shogun lived. It was the roughest part of town, a ‘sinister and ill-famed quarter’. On a morning ride they sometimes passed a headless body lying at the side of the road, the aftermath of a vendetta execution.

'Like hobgoblins of a nightmare'
Samurai by Felice Beato

‘Edo,’ Mitford writes in his stirring prose, ‘was like the Edinburgh of the olden days with the cries of the clans and the clash of arms ringing in its wynds and alleys, and a Walter Scott is needed to tell the tale.’

Shinagawa was where the execution ground was. The standard mode of execution was crucifixion on a X shaped cross and Mitford writes of seeing the executioners, who were of the outcaste class, sitting peacefully smoking their spindly pipes, having finished their work for the day, with the corpse still hanging on the cross.

In Japan this was a time of enormous and dramatic change with the empire-building British doing their best to interfere in every means possible so as to advance Britain’s influence and power. Mitford and Satow hobnobbed with all the major players on both sides of what was rapidly developing into full scale civil war. They dined with the last shogun, Tokugawa Keiki, who features in The Shogun’s Queen. Mitford describes him as ‘the handsomest man that I saw during all the years that I was in Japan. ... He was a great noble if ever there was one.’ 

Tokugawa Keiki, the Last Shogun, 1867

Mitford also witnessed some of the fighting that brought about the fall of the shogunate and saw troops of samurai in full armour ‘with crested helms and fiercely moustachioed visors’ and streamers of horsehair floating to their waists, ‘like hobgoblins out of a nightmare.’

But the biggest adventure was a trip which the two took overland through territory which no westerner had ever passed through before. They travelled by palanquin with a guard of twenty men. Crowds gathered to see what to their eyes were ‘strange wild beasts.’ 

Whenever the two were out of sight of people they walked though in order to preserve their dignity they had to squeeze back into their cramped and uncomfortable palanquins whenever they passed through a populated area.

They were nearing the end of their journey when they came to a hurdle. Impatient to reach their destination, Osaka, they had decided to take a short cut. But the officials they met up with that night argued incessantly that they should take the regular route, which was longer. The officials dreamt up all sorts of arguments but Mitford and Satow were well aware of the real reason - to keep them away from the sacred city of Kyoto which no westerner had ever been allowed to visit and which would be defiled even by their proximity.

'cramped and uncomfortable' - palanquin

Eventually Mitford, exasperated, demanded that the officials put their arguments in writing and said that if they did so they would comply with their demands. The officials did so and the two men reluctantly took the longer route. 

They reached Osaka two days later, having been on the road for 15 days. Only then did they learn by chance that there had been four hundred samurai lying in wait along the shorter route to ambush them, intending to cut them down to punish them for defiling the neighbourhood of the sacred city. ‘Had we taken the route which we proposed we should have been dead men,’ Mitford wrote.

Unknowingly the Japanese officials had saved their lives.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, set in the world of Mitford’s Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com