Stranger at Green Knowe

This book by Lucy Boston won the Carnegie Medal. It tells of Ping, an orphan refugee who has been in an internment camp and sees Hanno the gorilla at the zoo. Hanno escapes, and lives in the grounds of Green Knowe, where Ping is on holiday. Guess what happens next....

The drawings are by Lucy's son Peter, and show objects that are still in the house. I read the book in the History of Children's Literature course at library school, and thought at the time that we'd been living so very near the house during the years in Cambridge - Hemingford Grey is about a dozen miles away. By then I was living in Nova Scotia. Years after reading all the Green Knowe books I read Lucy Boston's autobiography, Memory in a House, in which she tells of buying and restoring the house - and of the wartime gramophone concerts held in the music room, attended by airmen from the nearby base.
The postcard of the music room has had many of the seats removed, but the 1930s wind-up gramophone is still there and we heard a bit of Mozart played on it.

You can see the lantern from the drawing, still there in the music room. The stairs are at the very right, beside the gramophone, and the door looks out towards the thicket where Hanno hid.

Stranger at Green Knowe culminates in the appearance of Hanno at the house. Here he's at the doors which Lucy Boston added, so she could easily get out to her beloved garden. She spent the summers gardening until she was in her 90s.
Mrs Oldknow and Ping are sitting at the table -- it's still there -- where Lucy Boston wrote her books in winter, during the day. During winter evenings she sat near the fire and made quilts.

She started both writing and quilting when she was in her late 50s.