Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

45 years later and it all comes back like it was yesterday 
OK, stop sniggering, it has the word "Gay" in the title.   Autre temps, and all that.

This is the third of the "Lone Pine" adventures, a series that started in 1943 and was wound up in about 1978.  Frightfully middle-class, frightfully polite, and yet something that working class children soaked up in their millions in the days when to be aspirational was not seen as some sort of betrayal of your roots.   Nowadays it would be condemned out-of-hand as irrelevant, and racist-by-omission - everybody is very white and very English, although the second-string villain does have a foreign sort of lilt to his voice (a dead giveaway when combined with his greased back hair).

Plucky kids attempt to save a faltering family business by searching for buried treasure (as you do), while enjoying midnight excursions, secret passages, ice-creams, and picnics.  But it still, somehow, works - and it isn't just nostalgia on my part, I have seen my own children pick these books up and become ansorbed by the other-worldliness of Britain in the nineteen forties and fifties.

The whole thing is set in a beautifully captured Rye and its immediate environs, and you can still  walk round the area today and recognise many of the locations.

Unputdownability - ten minutes 'til I have have to do something more pressing.