The Adventures of Skew

 The Adventures of Skew and The Foxes Hunt

As a child, I loved this book, and read it several times. It is a fairly short book, with two stories. The Adventures of Skew is about a china horse who longs to be a real horse, and one day hls fairy godmother comes and tells him that he will be allowed to be a real horse one day of the month, at the new moon, and if he is good enough he might be allowed to be real permanently.

The Foxes Hunt is about a family of foxes who are tired of being hunted and make plans so that the next time they are hunted they can turn around and hunt the hounds. 

It seems to be a fairly rare book -- it doesn't seem to appear in the GoodReads catalogue. I inherited it because my father was a chemist, and had a chemist friend, Bill Buchanan, who worked at Klipfonein Organic Products near the Modderfontein dynamite factory. The name sounds rather ironic nowadays, because some people speak as though "organic" products means they have no "chemicals", but the products of Klipfontein Organic Products were mostly poisonous -- insecticides and the like. One of them was Bexadust, which we used for killing ticks on our horses, which is perhaps appropriate in a story sparked off by a story about a horse. 

But, sadly, Bill Buchanan died, and they were living in a company house on the grounds of Klipfontein Organic Products (KOP) and the house was needed for Bill's replacement. So Bill's widow and children came to stay with us until they could find a place to live. 

Alan, the older child was 15 and at boarding school (Michaelhouse in Natal), so I only saw him during school holidays. Rosemary, the younger child, was 13, and rather pretty, I thought, but I was only 8. 

Rosemary brought The Adventures of Skew, and when they left after a few weeks she left some of the books behind, presumably because she was too old for them. I remember one of the others, which has since been lost, which was called Tick Tock and was about a Professor Postlethwaite who had an underground laboratory that controlled the seasons, and woke up the bulbs when it was time for them to flower, and sent spiderlings away on gossamer parachutes when they hatched. This one was even rarer than the Skew book, and no search engine seems to be able to find it. 

Grace Buchanan and her children eventually went to live in Pietermaritzburg, in Jesmond Road, Scottsville, next to the golf course, where we visited them when travelling to Durban. Grace Buchanan was later the lady warden of the women's residence of the Natal Teachers Training College. Rosemary married someone called Sutton.