Books

When we heard that Diana Wynne Jones had died, we felt terribly sad. You may have heard of her books – she wrote some great ones like 'Howl’s Moving Castle' and the 'Chronicles of Chrestomanci.' She created a young man who was surprised to discover he was a magician, before J.K. Rowling even imagined Harry Potter.

Her characters wove in and out of extraordinary worlds, but they experienced things that every child does - and that was the secret of Wynne Jones’ great characters. They were ‘real’ kids. Here are three creations we loved, described in her own words:

Butter-pies from ‘A Tale of Time City’:

“Vivian was getting very tired of being called V.S. She would have objected if she had not at that moment bitten into the butter-pie.

Wonderful tastes filled her mouth, everything buttery and creamy she had ever tasted, with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes she had never met before, all of it icy cold.

It was so marvellous that she simply said quietly, ‘You owe me an explanation. What were you trying to do?’ ‘Save Time City, of course,’ Sam said juicily out of the middle of his butter-pie.”

The spells of Casas Petrocchi and Montana from ‘The Magicians of Caprona’:

“The best spells still come from Caprona, in spite of the recent troubles, from the Casa Montana or the Casa Petrocchi. If you are using words that really work, to improve reception on your radio or to grow tomatoes, then the chances are that someone in your family has been on a holiday to Caprona and brought the spell back.

The Old Bridge in Caprona is lined with little stone booths, where long coloured envelopes, scrips and scrolls hang from strings like bunting. You can get spells there from every spell-house in Italy. Each spell is labelled as to its use and stamped with the sign of the house which made it. If you want to find out who made your spell, look among your family papers.

If you find a long cherry-coloured scrip stamped with a black leopard, then it came from the Casa Petrocchi. If you find a leafgreen envelope bearing a winged horse, then the House of Montana made it.

The spells of both houses are so good that ignorant people think that even the envelopes can work magic. This, of course, is nonsense. For, as Paolo and Tonino Montana were told over and over again, a spell is the right words delivered in the right way.”

The Castle in ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’:

“About this time everyone began talking of the Witch of the Waste again. It was said the Witch had threatened the life of the King’s daughter and that the King had commanded his personal magician, Wizard Suliman, to go into the Waste and deal with the Witch. And it seemed that Wizard Stillman had not only failed to deal with the Witch: he had got himself killed by her.

So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night.

What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north.

You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help.”