Jan Mark Quotes

“Unfortunately the holiday turns out rather less lovely than Mum hoped. Marooned in a remote village with Auntie Joan, Uncle Peter and her dreadful cousin Robert (inventor of the patent caterpillar trap) and their garden full of domineering vegetables.”

“She finds Elsie Wainwright and Bunny, Bill Birdcycle and the Gremlin, a cat with false teeth, a plague of frogs and an unlimited supply of motor bikes.”

“The market was almost deserted by now, and among the few people who still lingered there she saw no one whom she knew. That meant that the Crowd was assembling in the multi-storey car park. No one ever arranged beforehand where to meet, but somehow every knew, and eventually everyone arrived.”

“Erica Timperley, city girl and motor-bike buff, is all set to spend her summer holiday messing around with The Crowd in the multi-storey car park -until Mum tells her that she is going to have a lovely holiday in the country. ”

“It was August, and the summer streets of the city had been crowded all day with tourists who could not speak English, or who could speak English but could not read a mar, or who could do neither, nor even recognize a castle when they saw one.”

“Erica could scarcely remember the last time she had been at Calstead, and on that occasion they had arrived in the car. The countryside looked very different from the top of a bus; there was more of it, for a start, and it seemed rather flat after the hills of Norwich.”

“Erica stayed at the window and wondered about the surprise. It was only half a surprise now, because she knew it was coming, but she was glad in a way of the warning.”

″... and that there may be more to a name than she ever though possible, for in Elsie’s Kingdom it isn’t enough to have a name. You have to have a handle, too...”

“Erica fears that she may well die of boredom before the holiday is over, but then chances takes her to Polthorpe and the world’s smallest industrial state, where she finds Elsie Wainwright and Bunny.”

“By the end of August she has discovered that even vegetables can be interesting, if you approach them in the right way.”

“The park was not really a park at all; it was a garden. It did not even pretend to be a park, and the notice by the gate said KING STREET GARDENS, in case anyone tried to use it as a park. The grass was as green and as flat as the front-room carpet.”

“There are two leopards down there. They live in the bushes. One is good leopard and the other’s a bad leopard. The good leopard has black spots. The bad leopard has red spots.”

“Do you want a charm against warts? Would you like to guarantee that the kid next door never bothers you again? Or spend a day at school freaking all of your teachers out?”

″‘Robin won’t give you any trouble,’ said Auntie Lynn. ‘He is very quiet.’ Andrea knew how quiet Robin was. At present he was sitting under the table, and until Auntie Lynn had mentioned his name, she had forgotten that he was there.”

One of his classmates tells him about her worry dolls and he decides to make his own worry monsters to deal with his problems.

It tells the story of a boy called Ciaran that has started to write his worries in a list that is growing by the day. They’re the type of worries that most children could relate to – mainly loosing things!

“Robin stared at her with his flat eyes and went back to sucking his wooly doggy that had flat eyes also, of sewn-on felt, because glass ones might find their way into Robin’s appendix and cause damage.”

“Alice and Lydia Pitt were saving up for a padlock. In the meantime they had to rely on the power of fear to keep people out of the garden shed across the lane. Alice had pinned a notice on the door: Caution Deadly Spirits.”

When his teacher discovers the plasticine going missing it turns out a lot more children have decided to do the same. They join them together and make one giant worry monster to share their worries.

The PItts lived in the garden flat, which was right at the bottom of the house, down the area steps, so the shed was officially theirs, but the lane that ran along the ends of the gardens was a right-of-way. Anybody could walk down it, and the sheds were on the other side.”

‘I wonder if that was the last Lightning of all,’ said Andrew. ‘Well, if that wasn’t, that ought to have been. What a way to go out, eh?’.”

“The change comes about when it becomes clear that the objects of Victor’s passion, the magnificent arrowhead jets that roar across the Norfolk landscape from a nearby RAF airfield, may be withdrawn from service. ”

“it was a field of furry barley. Andrew, having lived all his life in towns, had never seen barley except in a photograph. He was rather pleased to see it alive and growing in a Norfolk field.”

“Their regular bike rides to observe take-offs and landings are now threatened, and also the familiarity they have built up involving a younger brother, shopping trips, and hamsters.”

“Shortly after his family moves to the Norfolk countryside, Andrew is befriended by a local boy with a passion for airplanes.”

“We meet the bright middle-class Andrew whose father’s job takes his laid-back family to a more rural location, and Victor who, playing up to a reputation for being academically backward at school, is patently dyslexic and would probably be diagnosed today as on the autism spectrum. ”

“And yet there is more to either than appears on the surface, and they will have more in common than their social backgrounds and familiar aspirations would suggest.”

“Two schoolboys in 1980s Norfolk are thrown together with nothing to suggest they have anything in common except being outsiders in their school, Andrew whose family are incomers and Victor who would be possibly be identified now as having learning difficulties.”

“Being close neighbours in the village means that, when the summer holidays arrive, they spend time together, and Thunder and Lightnings is mostly an account of those few weeks when a friendship is established, only to be threatened by an immanent change.”

“He laid it out on the living room floor and Ginger stepped down from the settee and sat in the middle of it like a castaway on a raft. Andrew moved his tail which was lying along the coast and concealing a strip of country, two miles wide.”