The Borrowers Afield and Afloat

 My copies of The Borrowers Afield and The Borrowers Afloat are of course contained inside the omnibus volume I bought at the op shop, so I've picked my two favourite covers to share with you instead. Afield picks up exactly where the first story left off, with the three borrowers racing for their lives from the big house towards the dubious sanctuary of the badger's sett where they think their relatives might be living. 

Most of Afield sees the borrowers camping outside, sleeping in an abandoned boot, gathering berries and hiding from owls as well as humans. This book sees the arrival of the enigmatic Spiller, almost a wild borrower, infinitely resourceful and fortunately willing to help Pod, Homily and Arrietty. Afield ends with the reunion between the Clock family and their relatives -- no longer living in the badger's sett but safely in a cottage.

Alas, the happiness is short-lived, as we discover in Afloat -- the cottage, with only two human inhabitants, can't support all these borrowers, and anyway, as Arrietty learns, even those two are leaving. So our family decamp, with the aid of Spiller, for a thrilling adventure down a drain and along a stream, where they are almost caught again by a human from the previous book, but escape in the nick of time.

I'm so torn about these books, because the adventures are exciting and the whole concept of tiny people, living alongside us and repurposing our discards, is wonderful. But, sadly, some elements of these books are, shall we say, of their time (though I think they could be altered with no harm done) -- Mild Eye, the human who tries to capture them, is a gypsy, with all the squalor and 'foreignness' that implies in children's books of this era. Homily protests that she doesn't want to work 'like a black slave' and a head covering is described as having a 'Klu Klux Klan (sic)' appearance. If I was reading this aloud to a child of today, I would have some explaining to do.

And yet the borrowers themselves are so courageous, inventive and resilient, they are great role models for small people who also feel themselves helpless and vulnerable in a large, unfriendly world.