Rosemary and her mother lived at Number Ten, in three furnished rooms on the top floor, with use of bath on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a share of the kitchen. She lives with her mother in a shabby flat in Tottenham Grove. In Carbonel, The King of the Cats, ten-year-old Rosemary Brown has just gotten out of school for six weeks when her class has broken up at the end of the spring term.

I read the American editions, but there was no mistaking that these were British books first. There were the two (at the time) Carbonel novels by Barbara Sleigh. White, and King Lizard by William Herschell. There were several single children’s fantasies that I enjoyed at the time, but the only two whose titles I remember are Mistress Masham’s Repose by T. Nesbit came back into print Edward Eager began his novels that started with Half Magic Mary Norton had her series of Borrowers books and C. I remember that Five Children and It and most of the late Victorian and early Edwardian children’s fantasies by E. The Carbonel books, “Age Level: 9 and up | Grade Level: 4 and up”, by Barbara Sleigh (1906-1982), are in the tradition of magical adventures for modern children that were popular around the 1950s.

(By the way, do you remember whether you read the British edition, the American edition, or was there a separate South African edition?) Thank you, Rakuen, for reminding me of them. I have enjoyed rereading the first two, and reading the third for the first time, very much. Fortunately, the Los Angeles Public Library and the County of Los Angeles Public Library between them have all three, so I did not have to buy copies.

On investigating, I found that there was a third Carbonel novel that I had not known about and that, after being out of print for decades, all three have been reprinted recently and are again available. I had read them over fifty years ago and remembered enjoying them.