Margaret Ball's books and art

It's always fun when a novelist describes something and you suddenly recognize a place you know. Well, ok, if they're describing Trafalgar Square that's not so exciting. But if they talk about the street of shops selling strange fabrics for the theatrical costumers, or mention the fish and chips shop where the girl doused your chips with vinegar even while asking if you wanted it, there's a little thrill of recognition and the book becomes suddenly more real.

I've just discovered that Lynne Reid Banks wrote two more Cupboard books after the three I knew about (starting with The Indian in the Cupboard) and I'm making up for lost time, currently almost through the 4th book, The Mystery of the Cupboard. (Yes, they're children's books. So? The back cover says "Ages 9 up" and I qualify.) This one is mainly set in the Dorset countryside, with occasional visits to an unnamed small town. And I just read,

Omri and his dad walked out into the village square. There was a sort of little house - just a roof on four stone pillars - where you could sit. This was nicknamed Georgina after the woman whose memorial it was.

Now, we spent a couple of weeks in Dorset in, oh, must have been around 1990, because the girls weren't in school yet. We rented a place in Beaminster and cruised around the area: I have vague memories of long walks in the country, watching enough of a cricket match to send me into a mild coma (cricket can do that to me really fast), taking the girls and my father to a pebbly beach, and experiencing the Great English Traffic Jam of (approximately) 1990, when a truck bashing into the corner of a village store tied up traffic in all of southeast England for several hours. Not much else.

But when I read that paragraph, I said, "Steve!" (He'd hogged the book and read it first.) Did you realize this book is set in Beaminster?" Because all of a sudden I remembered that little shelter.

The internet is a wonderful thing. It took less than five minutes to find pictures of the shelter and the information that it's nicknamed "Julia" after the woman whose memorial it is.